EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
describes this reform journey and sets it within the
longer history of educational change in the province.
This introductory section provides an overview of
British Columbia and its educational institutions.
Overview of the
system reform
British Columbia lies on the western coast of Canada
and is its third largest province at around 5.1 million
people. Public education in Canada is an entirely
devolved responsibility of the provinces. The school
system is "co-governed" by the Ministry of Education
and the district school boards. Of the 650,000 students,
about 90 percent are in the public school system, with
the rest in a variety of independent schools. All public
schools are part of one of 60 school districts, which
vary considerably in size-from 70,000 students densely
packed into the urban area of Surrey, to around 200 in
the vast area of Stikine. Districts take the majority of
budgetary decisions and manage school accountability
internally. Although districts do collect attendance
and some student test score data (in grades 4 and 7)
and are required to make this available to the ministry,
test results are not used as accountability measures
attached to funding or teacher pay.
In the absence of test-based accountability, the
key aligning factor in the province is the provincial
curriculum, which stipulates what students should
learn across subjects at each grade level. The
curriculum reform process that is central to this case
study began with a multi-year public engagement
resulting in the development of the "B.C. Learning Plan"
in 2011, and subsequently the creation-by teams of
teachers of a new K-9 provincial curriculum between
2012 and 2014. A new grade 10-12 curriculum, known
as the "Grad program," was developed from 2013 and
has been introduced in a gradual way since 2018.
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This extended reform journey was a response to
multiple drivers. As of 2011, the three most widely cited
elements of the "case for change" were:
(1) To respond to a feeling that the purpose of
education was changing in line with technological
change, particularly the way devices were making
information widely available;
(2) To increase student engagement in school;
(3) To address ongoing concerns about the gap in
graduation rates between First Nations and non-
Indigenous students.
Alongside this formal process of policy change, a
social change has taken place in the assumptions
about what schooling should look like and what it is for.
The province of British Columbia can be characterized
by its growing commitment to re-found itself on the
values and practices of its First Peoples. Amongst
these values is a respect for time: The Indigenous
population of B.C. are said to have stewarded the land
since "time immemorial." This long-term view brings
a different orientation to the question of reform and
change. From this perspective, the current reform is
not a 10-year policy initiative but part of a generational
effort to overcome the legacy of colonial schooling
practices and center the education system around
more holistic learning experiences and outcomes. An
alternative view of education was manifested in 2011 in
a set of "First People's Principles of Learning," created
through consultation by the First Nations Steering
Council on Education (FNESC).
With FNESC, ministry officials and the key system
partners-the over-arching union, the B.C. Teachers'
Federation (BCTF), the Principals and Vice-Principals
Association and School Superintendent's Association-
all shared a primary concern about the graduation rates
of Indigenous students. Given the existing investment
into these students, the extent of the achievement
gaps served to delegitimize the existing system-at
least for educators: Despite widespread publication
of graduation data, these concerns rarely featured
in the responses to the initial public consultation on
the curriculum. More recently, however, the horrific
discovery of children's bodies on the sites of former
"residential schools"-where Indigenous children were
taken from their families to be educated in English-
have again raised debate over the culture of schooling.
EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
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