The State of the System

Reviewed by: The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools by Paul W. Bennett Jason Ellis Bennett, Paul W. – The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020. 306 p. There are several different ways to read Paul Bennett's The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools. It can be read as a history of late-twentieth-century school reforms. It can be read as Bennett's memoir as a school reformer. It can also be read as Bennett's personal reflections on a host of educational issues, especially his endorsement of greater local (parent and teacher) control of schools and much less bureaucracy and centralized (provincial government) authority in elementary and secondary (K–12) education. [End Page 182] As a history of school reform, The State of the System re-examines Canadian educational politics in the 1980s and 1990s. In this period, educational spending increased while the public's, parents', and politicians' faith in the system's quality declined. This came to a head in places such as Ontario and British Columbia, among others, when provincial governments introduced legislation and policies to curb spending increases and improve student outcomes. One key way provincial governments accomplished these reforms was by centralizing more of educational authority in their own hands, especially authority over taxation and spending, as well as over curriculum and accountability. Canada's weak municipal government tradition made provincial reform by imposition relatively easy and expedient. Fiscal centralization enabled provinces to place impenetrable ceilings on local district spending for practically the first time in history. Curricular centralization permitted them to impose their provincial curriculum vision—often "back-to-basics"—on districts that since about 1970 had set curriculum locally. New province-wide standardized testing regimens were supposed to hold districts and educators accountable for curricular changes the provinces introduced. Bennett has a lot to say about centralization, nearly all of it negative. For the most part, however, he does not attribute centralization in the 1980s and 1990s to the factors just explained. Instead, he simply credits educational bureaucracy's building momentum since the 1920s for it. As provincial governments consolidated thousands upon thousands of small school boards, over time, they created larger and larger units that bureaucratized and centralized K–12 education. Bennett's definition of bureaucracy is "bigger." As things get bigger, they become bureaucratic, and this is bad. Bad because big bureaucratic school boards, and even bigger and more bureaucratic provincial ministries of education, are unresponsive to parents, pupils, and teachers, and bad because these education authorities have wreaked havoc on small and rural communities by closing their small schools. The second way to read Bennett's book is as a school reformer's memoir. Bennett has had a long and diverse career in K–12 education in several provinces, as a history teacher, principal, and elected school trustee. Despite this, he casts himself as an outsider to the educational establishment. Bennett was elected in 1988 as a trustee on the York Region Board of Education and served until 1997. He advocated back-to-basics curriculum and accountability reforms during his trustee tenure and as part of the Coalition for Education Reform group he helped form during this time. Bennett moved from outsider to insider when Mike Harris's Progressive Conservatives won the 1995 Ontario election and subsequently implemented curriculum and accountability reforms like the ones the Coalition had called for. (Though Bennett correctly credits the previous New Democratic Party [NDP] government, and especially education minister Dave Cooke, for first proposing many of the changes.) This included rolling out a more traditional core curriculum and creating the Education Quality Accountability Office (EQAO) that would test yearly all of the province's students in Grades 3, 6, 9, and 10. After the first five chapters, which look at the history of 1980s and 1990s reforms, and touch more lightly on Bennett's place in them, the book's remaining chapters consist of his ruminations on different issues in the K–12 system. This part [End Page 183] of the book will read like inside-baseball

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