Opinion

The Last Time We Had an Education Commission

Bold ideas, thwarted reforms: the unlearned lessons of the 1988 Sullivan Commission.

By Crawford Kilian, 9 Mar 2011, TheTyee.ca

Young school children in classroom

What if Sullivan's radical proposals for schooling had been enacted?

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In its time, the 1988 Sullivan Commission was the most loudly demanded and eagerly debated issue in B.C. education. Today, it's been almost completely forgotten. But it may still offer a lesson to today's politicians and educators, especially those like NDP leadership candidate Mike Farnworth who are calling for a new commission.

B.C. started the 1980s with raging inflation, a recession, and then the Bill Bennett Socreds' "restraint" policies. As with Wisconsin today, the provincial government blamed overpaid public servants -- especially public-school teachers -- for its economic problems.

Not only that, said the Socreds, those fat cat teachers weren't even teaching very well. The debate soon turned into a screaming match and brought the province to the brink of a general strike.

So when new Socred premier Bill Vander Zalm announced an education commission in 1987, everyone was interested -- and involved. Commissioner Barry Sullivan travelled across B.C., "holding 66 public hearings, 54 meetings with teachers, and taking part in 23 student assemblies." All told, Sullivan wrote in his report, "...the Commission received almost 2,350 written and oral submissions, from individuals and groups all over the province."

As well, Sullivan commissioned research into the way we provide education in the province and tried to articulate "a coherent understanding of the school's role in British Columbia society today."

Tragically, Sullivan died at 49 just as his report was coming out. That meant he could not advocate for its proposals.

An education bombshell

Some of those proposals were bombshells for teachers and parents alike. He recommended placing children in school when they were developmentally ready, not when they reached a particular age. He also suggested ungraded primary, so what we know as grades 1 to 3 would be a single group of kids moving at their own individual speeds.

He recommended a "common curriculum" from grades 1 through 10, including humanities, fine arts, sciences, and practical arts. To deliver this curriculum, teachers would work in teams, in at least two different subject areas. What's more, they'd be trained to do so.

School districts would devote 80 per cent of their time to the common curriculum, and develop their own programs for the remaining 20 per cent.

Successful completion of grade 10 (as defined by their own school) would entitle students to two more years of education drawn from a wide menu of choices, all of which would prepare them for lifelong learning.

And that was just for starters.

Exhilaration and anxiety

Does that seem like a radical overhaul of education? It was. But the Socreds accepted it and prepared a careful implementation of almost all of Sullivan's recommendations. Education minister Tony Brummett's "Mandate for the School System" led to a detailed program called Year 2000, working out what and how students would learn at each stage of their education.

Development of the Year 2000 program was both exhilarating and anxious. Ungraded primary and the common curriculum were very new ideas, and some educators were delighted with the chance to create new courses and curriculum. Others were alarmed at what seemed like radical change.

Meanwhile the Socreds under Vander Zalm (and then under Rita Johnston) imploded. Mike Harcourt's NDP came into power in 1991 with somewhat different priorities. As Harcourt told The Tyee in a recent phone interview, the NDP had inherited a $4 billion deficit from the Socreds. That was one concern.

Another, in Harcourt's view, was that the schools had "written off 80 per cent of our kids," those who wouldn't (or couldn't) go on to post-secondary. Sullivan hadn't said much about that, though he'd been alarmed by the 35-40 per cent of students who dropped out or failed to meet graduation requirements.

Some of the Year 2000 steps were already annoying parents and teachers, not to mention the far right wing. Harcourt recalls "huge complaints" about the new "anecdotal" report cards that didn't quantify students' progress.

He was also hearing from university profs about the woeful unpreparedness of first-year students. In fairness, this couldn't be blamed on Sullivan; faculty have always loved to complain about student ignorance.

So the Harcourt NDP set about doing its own overhaul of the K-12 system plus post-secondary. The government held on to some Year 2000 ideas about primary education and improved teacher-parent communications. But it revised the report cards and looked for ways to expand access to post-secondary -- even for bright kids turned off by "academic" high school courses.

The NDP developed some intriguing new programs like "applied academics," which would in theory qualify kids for post-secondary even if they didn't take college-prep courses like English 12 and Math 12. Such programs met resistance from both high-school teachers and universities alike.

Meanwhile, of course, B.C. education politics raged on. In the past 30 years, B.C. has seen 22 changes of education minister, nine of them in the NDP decade. In all that turmoil it was easy for policies to shift and for programs to be abandoned.

Campbell reinventing the wheel?

Larry Kuehn, who led the BCTF during the restraint years, is now its director of research and technology. He sees some ironic parallels between the Year 2000 policies of the early 90s and the "vision for 21st century education" published in December by the Premier's Council on Technology.

"All the themes are similar," Kuehn said in an email to The Tyee. He noted that the Year 2000 actually had a better chance of being implemented than this new vision: "There was funding for these projects and the BCTF had funding from government to carry out a range of research and professional development programs related to making the system work. That really was a period when significant and sound progressive changes could have been made."

By contrast, said Kuehn, the new vision largely reflects Gordon Campbell's personal interests, and the new Clark government won't likely share those interests. He said it will also need a leading role for teachers that the Liberals would be reluctant to give. And student-designed programs of study, Kuehn argued, will get no more support now than they did when they were part of the Socreds' Year 2000.

Amnesic about education

The late Jane Jacobs famously observed that "during a Dark Age, the mass amnesia of survivors becomes permanent and profound. The previous way of life slides into an abyss of forgetfulness."

We certainly risk such amnesia about education. Having learned more about B.C. education than we'd ever known before, we forgot about the Sullivan Commission and the opportunities it offered. Published before the web, the full report is impossible to find online; a PDF of the summary is available here.

It may even be that Sullivan and the Year 2000 program were not as progressive as we thought. In 2004, Bunni Austin, a communications graduate student at Simon Fraser, wrote a thesis arguing that the language of Year 2000 policy documents showed the reforms were actually intended to create students who would fit comfortably and obediently into a neoliberal global economy.

We'll probably never know the real value of Sullivan's findings. Austin's thesis is one of very few scholarly critiques of Legacy for Learners and the Year 2000 program. Educators, politicians and the public simply lost interest and threw the whole project down the memory hole.

But we also lost a generation of dedicated and idealistic educators who really wanted to make our schools better for the long term. Their research, curriculum development, and training went down the memory hole too. That may be the true tragedy of the Sullivan Commission. [Tyee]

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

11 Comments:

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  • Skywalker

    1 year ago

    Commissions and landmines.

    Commissions are something you set up just before you leave office. The Socreds set up the Sullivan Commission of Education and the Seaton Commission of Health Care just before they got turfed. Everyone expected action on the recommendations from the NDP in the 90's except that the doctors and the teachers were reluctant when it came to implementation. I still remember reading about all the heat that was generated because nobody seemed to want to walk the walk. Anytime there was a transfer of resources from one program to another somebody got pissed and the media, doing what it always does for the right-wing, was all over the turmoil that was created. Where are all those progressive ideas now after Campbell.

    So my advice is to lay the landmines for the next government when you know you are on the way out.

  • ASKBiblitz.com

    1 year ago

    Education reform like quitting smoking, potty training

    The Internet has made most if not all previous commission findings irrelevant. Move on already.

    By now, the Web should have revolutionized the classroom. It hasn't b/c teachers feel threatened by it, and rightly so. Competition from clearly superior online outfits like Kahn Academy can't help upstaging them.

    If educators are truly interested in teaching, they should be posting daily lesson plans, assignment instructions, marking schemes for each and test results - each day, every day - for all the world to see. Sure it would be tough at first - like quitting smoking and potty training - but such transparency would allow us at least to find out how much time kids are wasting on irrelevant, inconvenient field trips and assemblies when they should be learning basic skills!

  • wcullen

    1 year ago

    Thanks Crawford

    I'll be in danger of hero worship here, but bear with me :-)

    I'm still referring often to your "School Wars" to fill in the historical blanks regarding education in BC. Being a transplanted teacher to the wild west requires a guide, to say the least.

    I sincerely wish people like yourself and/or Larry Kuehn would write a book either including or starting where your "School Wars" ended.

    I always seem to find myself, as I'm sure most teachers do, embattled. Everywhere we turn--sometimes even, however inadvertently, in the Tyee--we're either being attacked by the public and/or government for what we're supposedly not doing or having academics speak for--or at--us (their research is, at best, merely a snapshot).

    It almost impossible for new voices to join the current debate because it is so polarized on all sides (and, yes, I include the union here).

    Reading articles like this and books like "School Wars" has allowed me to fill in the gaps so that I can at least try to add my voice to the dialogue; an in-the-trenches teacher's voice .

    Ironically, I have had to take my cue from Bernice Beresh and Suzanne Gordon's "From Silence To Voice." This is a report on how two journalists helped nurses speak for themselves. It is very often seen as being a monumental step in and by nurses to advocating for themselves (Patrica Benner wrote the preface to the 2nd Ed.), because they are the best at doing so: the most knowledge of the field, the experience, what needs to be fixed, and--more often than not--how to go about fixing it.

    This is what we need for teachers, I believe. We DO NOT need those academics or government officials who pontificate upon high about what needs to be done. Like you stated above, "faculty have always loved to complain about student ignorance"--not all are like this, of course. Far too often they'll present their research glibly and offer solutions as to what WE need to do to fix it without realizing that this research, quite often, is a distillation of OUR experiences--sometimes presented at OUR expense!.

    Ironically, I've also heard from quite a few faculty that they've also taught; however, when pressed as to how long they taught, when this was, and where, it turns out to be a woefully lacking experience--especially when placed next to teachers who have a variety of combination's of advanced degrees and long term, in-depth, and engaged experiences.

    Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't want input from the researchers, I do, but I can speak for myself. What would be helpful is if academics and, for example, journalists worked WITH us instead of speaking for us.

    Thanks again for your article...one more piece of the puzzle!

  • wcullen

    1 year ago

    ASKBiblitz--a case study in the disingenuous

    Almost everything that you've posted there is being done, and has been done for some time. Not only that, but teachers have been at the forefront of many innovations in distributed learning.

    Teachers feel threatened by new technology? What planet are you living on!?! Wow....that made me giggle....

    I'd suggest to ANYONE who is actually interested in seeing how technology is being used and advanced and to see what innovation is actually going on in education simply goes to any Pro-D workshop or conference on technology. There you'll see it right before your eyes (you don't have to be a teacher to go--we have many members of the public join us)

    Teacher's Tube, Moodle platforms, pod-asts, websites, E-Luminate, smart-boards, distributed learning, the list goes on and on if you bothered to actually inform yourself--which, clearly, is not what you're interested in doing. Not to mention engaging locally and nationally with forefront issues of creative commons, open source media, and the limits and possibilities in copyright issues. But, heck, you'd have to actually do research then....maybe the internet could help you..?

    And, heck I won't even mention the sheer amount of cutting edge industry folks who actively seek us out for input, or the advanced degrees one can do in just these fields...er...actually, I guess I just did...silly me....

    It is clear that you have no understanding of these things of which you speak. There are many people out there with an agenda in regards to technology and teaching. And, no wonder, it's an incredibly large cash cow, but it is hardly the answer to educational ills as anyone even passingly knowledgeable with technology and education would know (whether you're a teacher or not).

    Simply put any Joe (with no offense to the Joe's out there) and their dog can point to the internet as panacea, but it takes skill, times, evaluation (and re-evaluation) and actual work and engagement to see these things implemented. Something so blatantly obvious to anyone who has ever worked with any new technology that I find myself embarrassed for you to even have to mention it.

    Equally so, any Joe-Schmo can cast stones and find weaknesses. However, the tragic irony to this is twofold: On the one hand, such "sadists in the bushes" (thank you Maya Angelou!) are quick to point out errors, yet are often absent when the actual work of figuring out and implementing solutions (you know, the hard work) comes to pass.

    On the other hand, people like this shill for their own agenda--most often for personal gain (to heck with the actual students: they're now 'clients')--as if they're presenting a solution. This is simply disingenuous.

    Take your own advice, bub and learn some of the basics in regard to this issue before you spout off. My first suggestion: do some research.

  • grapeman

    1 year ago

    Here we go again...

    If the latest battle between education reformers and traditionalists sounds familiar, it's because it has been raging almost from the beginning of mass education, and perhaps earlier from Rousseau's Emile.

    On one hand, you have those who want the individual to follow his or her own path, and learn in a natural way unfettered by outside forces. On the other hand, you have those who seek regularized standards and a common means to instruct, measure and compare students. To put it simply (and admittedly, fairly crudely), the counter-Enlightenment vs. the Enlightenment, and romanticism vs. the scientific and industrial revolutions.

    Here's my point: The latter usually seems to win. Why is that?

  • wcullen

    1 year ago

    Simply put...

    ...IS the problem.

    Whether you mean to or realize it, you're being reductionist ("crudely" isn't an excuse, sorry)--the complexity of the issue isn't reducible to 'follow your path' versus 'traditionalist'.

    There is NO 'reformer' group nor is there a 'traditionalist' group, anymore than there are 'winners' and/or 'losers'.

    And, let me be clear, I'm not trying to dismiss you...

  • Umslopogaas

    1 year ago

    Dear ASKBiblitz

    Give credit where it is due Askbiblitz.

    I can speak with authority about how many teachers put in hours of their own time wiring schools and setting up networks long before the administration/politicians took it all over and claimed that it was their idea.

    Of course you probably don't know that before the digital natives came around there were many teachers that were digital pioneers.

    Small minds seem to think that simple solutions work in complex situations.

    I wonder if you would be happy to have a surgeon, or a pilot, or even a plumber who was trained on the internet? Or maybe your children could learn to swim or drive a car by checking out a swimming app.

    We will always need good teachers and many of them will not work for the crap wages that you seem to think that they should.

  • 1984

    1 year ago

    Why is it...?

    always teaching that everyone presumes to know everything about? I know a lot about certain occupations but generally wouldn't be so arrogant as to offer any "advice" on how to make it better (politicians & "experts" on education like the Fraser Institute excepted).

    As a 30-year veteran in the trenches, I have seen good and just plain awful ideas come and go. The Year 2000 had a lot of good points, especially the un-graded elementary education; however, it had a number of major flaws, the primary one being funding.

    To carry it off appropriately, the government would have had to spend millions, if not billions, to meet all the goals (I knew that wasn't going to happen). And, as a secondary English/ Band/ Socials teacher, I saw colleagues butting their heads against brick walls trying to legitimize Humanities as a combo course of English and Socials; but the course content/ curricula didn't mesh across the grades (Socials is still disorganized).

    And now we have far worse under-funding.

    So, to those of you who think you can do better than we can, please walk a month in a teacher's shoes. I challenge you to job shadow me for that time. This will include the meetings (staff, student, and parent), the prep, the marking (I have practiced Assessment for Learning since I entered this profession), the extra-curricular activities, and then the teaching to classes that contain many students who need individual adaptions, a goodly number of whom are not funded by the government because they fall under the "Grey Area" of learning differences that include Fetal Alcohol Effects.

    You probably wouldn't be able to handle it.

  • Umslopogaas

    1 year ago

    You probably wouldn't be able to handle it.

    The simple minded think that the internet could do it though. What a bunch of maroons.

  • crh

    1 year ago

    Americans are leading the way

    Just peek south of the border and see what will happen next in our education system. Right-wing nuts hate paying for education because it is part of a social system. Their attack on teachers is targeted and deliberate. Witness to union busting....mass firings and charter schools. Why on earth would anyone even want to go into teaching nowadays? My daughter contemplated it and I told her no way will I support her in this. Why do five years at university for a degree when the future is half the pay with no benefits. There is just to many people out there full of hate for them and not enough support behind the scenes. The likes of Biblitz and his ilk can all go to hell.

  • michael maser

    1 year ago

    No! to new Education Commission!

    No! to new Education Commission!

    Hi Crawford, thanks for taking the time to re-visit the Sullivan Commission; I think it was a very significant event, and the subsequent years have clarified to me why another Education Commission would be a waste of time and effort. Here is something I wrote into Janet Steffenhagen's blog when she profiled Farnworth's idea about this:

    I don't believe a Commission on Education in BC will resolve the main competing forces and impediments to implementing an educational vision that will emerge from such a commission, with any more success than what happened 23 years ago after the release of Barry Sullivan's opus and the government's decision to implement "The Year 2000" plan.

    The Y2K plan resulting from Sullivan's commission had a very clear vision shaped by widespread public input and it was subsequently mangled, distorted and unfairly discredited by the competing, minority interests: the NDP executive (that couldn't accept that this popular plan emerged from a Socred government), the BCTF executive, secondary school and university and college teachers (those who loathed to change their rote patterns of teaching), the Fraser Institute (which was [and remains] totally out to sea on educational progress), some power-wielding elements of the oft-siloed education bureaucracy, and a few others.

    As I recall primary teachers as well as the public were very supportive yet in the end ... I well remember the day (1994?) then-premier Mike Harcourt announced, "The Year 2000 is Dead". I regretted its demise; as newly-minted educators, my wife and I relocated to BC from Ontario in 1990 after learning about the Y2K Plan. It was being touted as the most progressive educational blueprint on earth and we wanted to be a part of it.

    So, RIP Y2K Plan - We hardly knew ye, though it deeply influenced my educational career (and developments in the "Virtual High" program I co-founded in Vancouver with Brent Cameron in 1993).

    Fast Forward to 2011. Do I think any other outcome would arise from an education commission, given the near-identical and counter-veiling forces still vying for educational power? No, I don't. I see an illusionary exercise at taxpayers expense. Education needs a Vision that can easily arise from within a governing political party, without the effort and expense of a commission, and a steady hand to implement it.

    - Michael Maser
    SelfDesign Learning

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