Education minister hopes a new commission will look at whether all of the province’s school divisions need to be kept
Manitoba is finally moving to begin planning a potentially major overhaul of its kindergarten-to-Grade 12 education system.
Two political heavyweights have been brought in to head a commission that will review the present system and come up with a plan to fix chronic problems, a plan that could include anything from moderate changes to entirely abolishing school divisions.
“Something clearly is not working in the system,” said Manitoba Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen in announcing a panel headed by former provincial finance minister Clayton Manness and former Saskatchewan finance minister Janice MacKinnon.
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“Our results don’t show that we are doing better than other provinces in the core courses that we would hope that young people would be doing better in.… Manitoba has been sliding over the last 15 to 20 years.”
Indeed, Manitoba students have ranked last in a number of annual national surveys of academic achievement and the situation has grown worse.
During the same period, Saskatchewan improved its standing.
While some changes have been introduced in recent years, including reforming the math and literacy curricula and teaching methods, the slide to the bottom of the national pack has not been reversed.
“It’s not because our kids don’t have the ability,” said Goertzen.
The review will file a report in February 2020, after which the government will study it and then release it to the public.
Politically, it will be overseen by Ian Wishart, the Portage La Prairie MLA and former education minister, who is now Goertzen’s legislative assistant.
“Ian is going to be actively engaged with the commission,” said Goertzen.
Wishart is also the former president of Keystone Agricultural Producers and a long-time agriculture and rural policy wonk.
MacKinnon, who served in the Roy Romanow government during a time of intense financial pressure and major re-engineering of government services, said the commission will not deal with financial matters, but will explore all the issues that are causing Manitoba’s education system to stumble.
“There are no pre-determined outcomes here,” said MacKinnon.
“We are initiating this task with a blank slate.”
The largest part of the commission’s work will be to hold public hearings to hear from parents, students, educators and the public.
Manness said the commission will try to work toward consensus with its report, but realizes it will be dealing with contentious issues.
“There is going to be some hard steering along the way. We know that,” he said.
Goertzen said finances and the financing model will not be explored in this review because how and how much to fund the system will rely upon the government knowing “what the system looks like.”
That means the issue of whether school taxes should be applied to farmland, placing a heavy burden on farmers and farmland owners, will not be dealt with for at least another year.
Goertzen did not shy away from discussing the school division issue.
“Do you have less school divisions? Do you have school divisions at all?” said Goertzen.
“We have 290 school trustees involved with running our divisions and our schools. I need to be convinced that this is the right number.”
Nova Scotia eliminated school divisions after reviewing its provincial system. Other provinces have amalgamated school divisions.
Manitoba’s system has often been criticized for being opaque and lacking true democratic accountability because few Manitobans are aware of what their local school divisions are doing, how it’s spending their money, and even who their school trustees are.
For instance, Winnipeg has six public school divisions, as well as Roman Catholic and other non-public school authorities.
Dozens of school divisions govern education in rural Manitoba, even though the population of most rural areas has plunged in recent decades.
While the provincial government has left it up to the commission to find its own solutions to the chronic problems in the present system, Goertzen said the government promised to fix the system.
“I get … frustrated when I meet with school divisions and I ask the question, ‘who’s responsible for improving results?’ and I get the same answer: ‘Well, we’re all responsible.’ Well, if we’re all responsible then really nobody is responsible,” said Goertzen.
“I’m not sure there are really clear lines of responsibility in the system in the ability to drive change and to drive performance because of that.”
