Letter: Debate over curriculum confounding

By Letter to the Editor on April 21, 2021.

Dear editor,

After teaching for 23 years in Southern Alberta and as a school principal for almost 13 years (eight with Edmonton Public Schools), a curriculum consultant for two years and multiple years as a diploma exam developer and marker, I find the current debate over curriculum confounding. I also find our local school board’s position troubling. Perhaps it is because it is not about curriculum. It is about power and politics.

Alberta has had two proposals for curricular changes in three years. Each presents very different sets of bias toward curricular content and construction. It seems our two public boards align more closely with the NDP biases. But perhaps that is because they, like the media, ATA and colleges of education, rely upon advice from the same educational sources.

In the 1990s, disagreement over learning objectives in the classroom reached a similar impasse. Whole Language, Discovery Math and other progressive curricular changes were introduced. Proponents cited research and professional treatises from education gurus as evidence of improved student learning. Except, they ignored the mountain of evidence from equally qualified authorities that contradicted the proposed changes.

As Alberta Schools, pushed by the Curriculum Department of Education and the ATA, and Colleges of Education, began to implement their progressive agenda there was a revolt by large groups of parents who noticed a major decline in their children’s academic abilities.

Result …The government said OK, let’s allow parents some choice of programs and curriculum for their children. And parents voted with their feet. In Calgary private and charter schools siphoned 12,000 students out of the public system. Elsewhere, private school enrolments ballooned. Most notably, other public school boards, deciding per-student funding trumped ideology, introduced alternative programs employing similar curriculums of charters and privates.

Ironically, Alberta enjoyed a decade of notoriety for educational excellence nationally and internationally.

Alas, most of those public school alternative programs have been eroded to become little more than “mainstream public education by any other name.” What would happen today if parents were allowed a choice about which curricular option they could choose for their children? One that was biased toward rigorous knowledge content or one that was biased toward relativistic social skills?

Until then, will we continue to have a propaganda maelstrom from competing interests for every ‘curriculum de-jour’ proposed?

Richard Dietrich

Medicine Hat

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