A Quick Win: Why Chevron funds public schools.

I’m astounded at the lack of skepticism about Chevron’s initiative to fund schools.

Let me say from the outset that public school children should be kept free from the influence of any corporate ideology.

Corporations by their very nature are exploitive, and their existence depends on their ability to manipulate the public into consuming. It is rare indeed that a corporation would undertake a humanitarian project with nothing to gain. In fact, oil corporations in particular go to great lengths to manipulate public opinion. Witness the enormous efforts of Big Oil to shout down environmental science.

In British Columbia, the Vancouver School Board is getting a lot of press lately for refusing to accept donations from Chevron Corporation. These donations would provide much needed lab equipment to schools that are only too willing to accept because of the shortfalls caused by government underfunding of public education.

Not coincidentally, the gap between school needs and government funding began increasing annually some 12 years ago –immediately after the BC Liberal government reduced the province’s corporate tax rate to the lowest in the country. The amount that corporations like Chevron provide in funding can’t come close to what they would be providing had the tax rate stayed the same. Chevron is well aware of this.

Chevron’s program is really a stroke of genius. The big oil corporation gets to recoup some of its donation money through tax breaks. Nor are the donations anonymous. In fact, short of actually advertising in schools, Chevron scores big feel-good points by showing its “generosity”. The donation gets talked about in the press, and Chevron can claim to fund education initiatives in its corporate manifesto.

And even better, the government looks at Chevron as an “education partner”. And as  a “partner” who contributes much needed money, Chevron become a stakeholder, and as a stakeholder, it has influence on government policy –including policy regarding schools. Once we begin to depend on corporations for funding, the corporations are very much in a position to call the shots.

Corporations haven’t traditionally been great supporters of public education. A recent event in BC lays bare the agenda of business regarding public education. In the recent BC Court of Appeals case in which the government is trying to overturn the Provincial Court’s ruling that acted illegally when it stripped teachers’ contract language through legislation. A coalition of corporate interests applied for intervenor status in the case so as to have the ruling overturned.

How strange! Why wouldn’t BC’s corporations want smaller classes in schools? After all, the vast majority of credible research (not to mention common sense) suggests that this is a good idea. Obviously the answer is that they would be called upon to fund them through higher taxes. They’ve gotten used to the lower rent that they pay for being based in BC.

Chevron is not brazen enough to try to re-write a curriculum, or to force McDonalds-like ads targeted at children (School districts would never allow this.), but it’s well known that the big oil companies are huge government lobbyists. And Chevron is certainly putting its stamp on things.

Here’s how you know that a donor is motivated out of philanthropy: the donor gives anonymously, and the donor does not specify how the money is spent. It’s interesting that Chevron has limited its contributions to science and technology. Nothing for the liberal arts? No musical instruments? How about sponsoring a summit to study the causes of global warming?

Chevron gains much out of its funding of schools. It has found a nice situation that is ripe for exploiting. Schools are desperate. And what does Chevron get? PR on the cheap. It’s a quick win, and it’s dodgy.

Another shot at American schools, and another “solution”.

I have seen many articles decrying the way education is delivered in America, for example this one by David Edwards, entitled,

American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist

Edwards starts off by asking, “Are Americans getting dumber?” He laments the decline in math, reading, and literacy skills in America compared to other countries, and identifies an education “crisis”.

Then he goes on to imply that the traditional school model separates learning from doing. And from here he offers a solution: “Maker” workshops.

Maker workshops are all-day workshops in which a class identifies a large societal issue (for example, difficulties that might be faced by an aging population). The class is then divided into small groups which collaboratively tackle a specific problem related to the overall issue (perhaps the problem of lifting heavy pots on a stove), and then seeks to invent a device that will address the problem.

The group is given a kit with which to construct a prototype model. The kit contains items like pipe cleaner, thumb tacks, paper plates, plasticine, plastic bags, cardboard, bailing wire, and other things. In addition, some construction materials and tools are made available.

I have attended a Maker workshop. And don’t get me wrong, without any qualification I can say that the workshops truly are wonderful exercises in creative thinking, collaboration and skill building. But as much as the experience offered many educational benefits, it could never replace what I learned over 35 years ago in a grade 8 class called “industrial education”, which was a rotation of woodwork, metalwork, and drafting. Nor could it ever come close to being able to match the depth of conceptual learning that took place in science classes in which the supplementary labs ensured that the theories taught had a chance to be played out in hands-on practice. In fact, I dare say that this old liberal arts teacher got much more benefit out of the Maker experience having first attended those science and industrial ed. classes all those years ago.

The real problem in education is not pedagogical; it is, rather, our society’s lack of financial commitment to producing an educated population. The problem has two branches. First, and most critical, is the brutal cycle of poverty that kills both attitudes toward education, and access to it. Poor kids do poorly in school.

The second finance-related problem is our never-ending search for business-model efficiencies, leading us to cut more and more laboratory and practical courses and to promote more online courses and larger class sizes in theoretical subjects.

What’s worse is that while schools reel under this financial strain, headlines like the one announcing Edwards’ article, whether by design or not, is just the kind of language that policymakers like to use as justification for dismantling public education in favour of a private model that leaves the most vulnerable students out in the cold.

Maker workshops have their place. They create scenarios that allow students to “discover”, to share ideas, and to learn how to collaborate in construction, as well as find out what works and what doesn’t work in design. Maker can encourage people to dream up new inventions. But Maker is far from a solution to declining math and reading skills –the problem articulated at the beginning of this article. And in order to integrate any theoretical depth (for example, understanding of electrical current flow), the students need to get to a classroom. We simply can’t afford to integrate concept-teaching into each student’s individual Maker experience.

Meanwhile, if you want to teach a kid to build a house or a car, you’re not going to be able to do it by giving him a bunch of straws, duct tape and plasticine. No doubt our tech courses should reflect changes in technology, but the way education is delivered in these courses is still relevant.

But try to find a school that offers both high level theory courses and technology courses at the same time. The private charter model leads schools to specialize: in sports, in fine arts, in university transfer, OR in technology. Whereas individual public schools used to offer all of those things, now they are not able to. It is the current new thinking about education that separates learning from doing, and not the traditional public school model. What we really have is a funding crisis.

The BC Liberals need to end the teachers dispute – the sooner the better.

I’ll say it again. In the dispute with the BCTF, the BC Liberal government is in trouble. During negotiations, the Liberals’ unceasing public pronouncements front-end loaded the ideas of an “affordability zone” and a settlement “consistent with other public sector unions”. And they repeatedly bargained in the press. This strategy has painted negotiations into a corner. It is now hard for either party to bend without losing face.

And the narrative is bogus anyhow. Negotiations with the teachers can not really be compared to other public sector union negotiations. First of all, the teachers have not had a pay increase for 3 years. And second, the teachers’ situation is complicated by the government’s own twice-repeated charter violation coming back to bite it, as well as the ongoing underfunding of school districts, putting public education into full-on crisis mode. The situation has gotten so bad that the Vancouver School District, in order to be able to continue offering its world class band programs, has had to resort to the temporary measure of spending its contingency fund.

The Liberals want the teachers to give up millions of dollars in court-ordered restitution for charter violations, while getting nothing in return. They feel that they can flex their muscle and grind down the union on this issue. It won’t happen. Having won a stunning court victory, the teachers can claim moral high-ground. They will never give up their quest for compensation. And it’s not greed that motivates them, but a sense of outrage that is revisited every time they look at their class composition. The cuts have gone too deep.

No question, the Liberals can eventually wear the union down financially, and the teachers will have to go to work (though it’s likely that before this were to happen, other unions would weigh in on the Charter violation issue). How many lost school days it will take for this to happen is anyone’s guess. The government has an endless supply taxpayer funds that it can wield on legal appeals and on populist stunts (e.g. a $40 a-day daycare benefit for parents with children under 13). Meanwhile, the union has finite reserves of cash, and can’t last forever.

But to what end would the government do this? Eventually it will have to open schools. Eventually the teachers will have to give up their full walkout and go back to work. But the climate, which has already become acrimonious after 12 years of Liberal de-funding of schools, would become so terrible that it would be very difficult to sustain a vibrant school system. Failing to achieve a deal at the end of a full-scale walkout, the teachers would revert to a slow-burn work-to-rule paradigm which would disrupt school for a long time, and prevent the government from being able to implement systemic change. Without the cooperation of professionals, the government can not run an education system. The students would continue to lose out – big time.

It’s likely that many people would fault teachers for all this disruption, but teachers are well-informed and well-educated, and they have an acute sense of justice. They are not likely to be easily cowed by the opinion of people outside the dispute.

Right now in negotiations, the teachers are willing to compromise on some of the court-ordered compensation. Eventually, the full weight of the court decision will come down on government, and by extension on the citizens of BC. The Liberals would be wise to quietly settle while there is time for people to forget this mess before the next election. To drag it through a low scale job action and court appeals will ensure that the issues follow the Liberals well into the next election campaign.

Furthermore, the casualty count of this battle has already begun. Education workers should be getting paid, and they’re not. Students should be in school, and they’re not. 

 

 

Their Poverty, Their Race

Race and poverty are the two edges of the capitalist sword. Poverty is far over-represented by people of colour. It follows that the problems that are born of poverty: homelessness, education struggles, crime, are also over-represented by people of colour. Because the problems are correlated to colour, it is easy for us Whites to look at the issue from afar and imagine that the cause of all these problems somehow is caused by race. The connection may not be definitively stated (at least not publicly), it is subconsciously accepted.

“If those people could only lift themselves up by their bootstraps like I did, or like my parents did,” is the the common sentiment. And “Why should I pay more taxes to support a social safety net when these people simply refuse to help themselves?”

On a more global scale, we can easily extend this thinking to our “enemies”. We can create labels like “terrorist” and “jihadist” and “Islamicist” and “radicalized” to distract ourselves from the real issues that has made us an enemy of other people. By doing this, we can ignore the reasons for their anger. Having successfully labelled the enemy, we see no issue other than the fact that those people are “just that way”. We don’t actually know them, so it is convenient for us to believe that we have done nothing wrong. We are good people, right. Hell, we even contribute to charity. What more do they want from us?

We privileged people seem to take comfort in this. It’s them. It’s their inherent flaws that make them the way they are, and it’s my good character that propels me to success. I can sleep at night in my little suburban fortress, lulled by the delusion that I deserve what I have, unlike that the seething mass of poor people that far outnumbers me, that has been exploited, often brutally so that I may have what I have. To support my delusion, I have a well-armed law enforcement agency and a weighty justice system on my side protecting my segregation from them. And it’s just a fact. I don’t wander into “certain neighbourhoods”.

We tut-tut about the Warsaw ghetto – how the Nazis rounded up thousands of Jews, interned them in a small sector of the city and stripped them of all rights and dignity, while we ignore our own ghettos. And we keep lowering funding to any public sector agency that can offer any real hope for equity: the most effective being public education.