Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange yesterday executed a reluctant partial climbdown from Alberta’s controversial draft kindergarten-to-Grade-6 curriculum, announcing the Kenney Government will delay implementation of changes to how four subjects are taught in elementary schools.
Educators mostly cautiously praised the announcement as a step in the right direction.
Or, as Alberta Teachers Association President Jason Schilling put it, “a step in the right direction toward fixing this disastrous curriculum.” (Emphasis added.)
Mr. Schilling added: “There are still significant issues with the proposed content for the language arts, math, and phys-ed and wellness programs” – all of which will still be implemented next September under Ms. LaGrange’s plan.
The almost universally reviled rewrite of the K-6 social studies curriculum will be among the subjects to be placed on the back burner for the time being, Ms. Lagrange said. The other three are science, fine arts and French immersion.
“We have listened to the valuable insights provided by parents, education stakeholders, teachers and Albertans and are making significant content and implementation changes to reflect this,” Ms. LaGrange said in the government’s press release and repeated at her news conference.
Not that she had much choice. The social studies curriculum in particular has become an international cause célèbre among appalled curriculum experts, almost universally panned as age-inappropriate, outdated, Eurocentric, jargon-riddled, inaccurate and unconcerned with developing critical thinking skills, no to mention rife with plagiarism.
It is, summarized University of Alberta social studies curriculum expert Carla Peck in the January/February 2022 edition of Alberta Views Magazine, ideologically driven and lacking even a basic understanding of how children learn.
The goal of the social studies curriculum draft appeared to be to return Alberta students’ attitudes and critical skills to the 1950s.
It seems to have been heavily influenced by Premier Jason Kenney’s own cranky pedagogical notions – perhaps influenced by ideas of his father, a private school teacher and principal – and those of his like-minded historian friend and former political staffer Christian Champion.
Although he is not a curriculum expert, Dr. Champion was hired by the government to advise the Education Ministry on the social studies curriculum.
Dr. Peck reminded her readers that Dr. Champion is “the editor of a fringe conservative history magazine,” and has published commentary downplaying the deaths of Indigenous children in residential schools and dismissing the teaching of Indigenous perspectives as a “fad” and “agit-prop.”
Of Alberta’s 61 school boards, 56 refused to pilot the draft curriculum, four agreed to try only some subjects, and one said individual teachers could pilot a subject if they felt like it, Dr. Peck reported. None of them would touch the social studies curriculum with the proverbial bargepole!
No teachers and almost no curriculum experts were involved in the curriculum rewrite, she also noted. By contrast, eight working groups made up of more than 350 teachers and experts had worked for several years on the broader K-12 curriculum draft started under the Progressive Conservatives and continued by the NDP. Mr. Kenney tore up that work after baselessly accusing the previous NDP government of infusing it with its ideology.
Facing an avalanche of well-informed criticism, the Kenney Government obviously needed to do some damage control, at least for now.
It was not clear from Ms. LaGrange’s comments during her news conference if the delays announced yesterday constitute a genuine commitment to improve the curriculum or merely a strategic retreat to get past the next election before returning to implementation of what is clearly one of Mr. Kenney’s personal hobbyhorses, purging the educational system of “collectivist” notions taught by “liberal” teachers.
“Never forget that the reason the past draft was so bad is because this government failed to properly and meaningfully involve teachers in its development,” Mr. Schilling said at his own online news conference following Ms. LaGrange’s announcement.
“Despite today’s positive developments, all indicators suggest the government will continue to repeat this fundamental mistake,” he went on. “We released our comprehensive report of teacher feedback on curriculum in September, but still have not been invited to meet with ministry officials to discuss its content.”
“The minister is now announcing an implementation steering committee with no clear indication of how teachers will be represented,” Mr. Schilling added. “How can you realistically discuss implementation while the exact people tasked with implementation are locked out of the room?”
Readers should not imagine that this development marks the beginning of a rapprochement between the Kenney Government and the Alberta Teachers Association, or even successful lobbying by the ATA, as some of the premier’s political allies claim.
Au contraire! It will provoke the Kenney Government to double down on its attacks on the ATA, particularly the government’s plan to introduce legislation to split the ATA into two bodies by removing regulation of the teaching profession from its role as a union.
Mr. Schilling acknowledged this reality in his remarks. “The only reason changes are being announced today is because we stood up,” he said.
“Because we dared to stand up to them, the government is now attacking us on our professional side. But sharing our concerns about this flawed curriculum was driven by that professional side. Which is exactly why they want to de-professionalize the association and exactly why we cannot let them.”
I am not sure if this represents a situation where Kenney has decided that advancing this curriculum is not the hill to die on after all. It seems that with Jean’s expected nomination in Ft. Mac, Kenney has plenty of hill he can die on right now, and no one would mind if it happened.
From the start, the inclusion of advisement from historian and part-time Red Coat Christian Champion established that the curriculum was not about education as much as it was about advancing Kenney’s own partisan and ideological agenda. It’s hard to say if Kenney’s father had any influence on his notions of what a sound curriculum should be. What is known is that Kenney’s father was the headmaster at an Anglican private school in Ontario, before he was recruited to take over the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame. From what is known about the college, it’s well known for promoting a classical education in the humanities and sciences, not to mention excellence in athletics. Based on the record at the college, it’s more likely Kenney was influenced by American evangelicals and their so-called educational institutions. I say so-called because, by and large, American evangelical schools and colleges promote a faith-based educational model as defined by American SoCON values, which can take anyone down the rabbit hole of the weird and conspiratorial. If this is what Kenney thinks is a credible educational model, he’s gone so far off the deep end, it’s best to pull away the lifeline and let him drown.
Kenney went to college in the states, and that’s where his story gets very interesting. Connections into the Reagan administration and the Nazi Pope. I find his past to be extremely suspicious.
Well, Premier Crying & Screaming Midget did go to university, briefly, in the US. He attended the lauded University of San Francisco, a renowned Jesuit university, where he cut his teeth on right-wing activism and making trouble. The university, like many Jesuit universities, tends to have a decidedly left-wing bias and a heightened sense of fairness for their student body, as witnessed by the university’s support of a women’s health centre as part of their student health clinic program. Kenney and other uber-Catholic men (because they are all he-men womyn-haters) opposed the notion that there should even be consideration of the unique health issues that women face, like family planning, birth control, etc. And so began Kenney’s path into right-wing crazed activism and academic probation.
As for Kenney’s fall into the sort of stuff that the GOP obsesses over, it was around the time he became involved in the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, which is little more than a distribution point for dark political money. Kenney, and others among the RPC/CA/CPC cabal, travelled to Seattle, Washington many times to attend many GOP sponsored workshops and networking sessions, where he certainly would have come into contact with a multitude of right-wing evangelical activists. He was no doubt groomed to become one of many Trojan Horses that would break into Canadian politics and assert GOP influence in Canada’s social policy. (AKA. wrecking it)
As for the “Nazi Pope”, that would be Pius XII, who died before Kenney’s birth. As for the connections to Reagan, the GOP has been using him as their seductive bustier for years. Of course, these days they deny up and down that Reagan brought in the first executive action against a climate calamity called ‘acid rain” and the entailing regulations, which today’s End Times GOP has been fighting to repeal ever since.
I’m not going to look up the excellent sprawl piece, but it’s out there if folks want to look for it. “connections” in this case implying connections to folks who were connected to the Nazi pope, before he died. Kenneys anti abortion crusade had high level support. This is also when he became hooked into the GOP. It’s important to note his ties to to Reagan staffers because of who those players are, not necessarily ideology. Ideology doesn’t explain everything, especially his ascendency
It was DOA.
The Minister should resign. But she won’t.
One gets the sense this UCP curriculum revision is a ship listing badly, somewhat like the UCP itself. So, perhaps in an attempt to avoid further damage they are trying to stop, at least temporarily, moving in a certain direction.
I think both for the UCP and its curriculum initiative, it is to late, the damage has already been done. Trust has been lost, confidence has also been lost.
I can understand the Kenney government’s desire to clear the decks of controversial things before the upcoming leadership review, but at this point they will likely not soon be forgotten by anyone.
Albertans stood up and spoke out against this very bad K-6 school curriculum redo by the UCP, but I still don’t think the UCP has listened. They are pretending to listen, or are in a pre election mode, and are trying to redeem themselves. The UCP will likely go back to what they were doing, after they distract Albertans with something else. I’m not buying the schtick from the UCP, if they say they are listening to Albertans. Pretend conservatives and Reformers destroy anything they get their hands on, and we end up paying for it very dearly. The UCP are just pretend conservatives and Reformers and are emulating what their hero, a Liberal turned Reformer, Ralph Klein was doing. There is no sense in any of it.
Wikipedia called and said it wants its curriculum back.
This is some nitty gritty that perhaps only a former teacher would bring up, but here goes.
Part of bringing in a new program often includes the purchase of textbooks, if they plan to support the program with a textbook. This is quite a detailed procedure. The government sends its program to companies that write and publish textbooks. The companies write a textbook to fit the program, then submit it back to the government for approval. If it does not get approved the company is out the money they put into developing the book. This typically results in 3 or 4 approved texts, which schools will choose which one they will purchase. Back in the 1990s the education departments in the four western provinces, as well as Yukon and NWT, agreed on a common curriculum, partly to create a larger market to entice textbook companies to write texts specifically for the curriculum.
With this background, I honestly cannot imagine a textbook company even bothering to prepare a textbook for any of the UCP’s courses that are still planned to go ahead this coming September. In addition to the Alberta market possibly being too small for a new text to economically viable, it is extremely likely a new government, or even a new UCP leader, will toss out the whole thing. If I was a school superintendent I would be telling my teachers they would not be sanctioned for not teaching the new program until after Jason Kenney is reelected in 2023, and I wouldn’t make new text books available until then.
Bob, that’s an interesting point. I can easily imagine sticker shock in the austerity-as-default-mode UCP when the first quote for the K-6 textbooks came in….
Bob, in the words of Leonard Cohen you have become cute. We don’t do textbooks in school anymore; we have keyboards for little fingers.
The virulent dislike against anyone that has any education and critical thinking skills is astonishing.
An obvious contempt for education is so obvious that reminds me of the Taliban in Afghanistan with women
Maybe that is where they deserve to exist – in the Taliban world of the 12th century.
Go BABY Go no need to excuse yourselves just bloody go
Not all purges are great.
Stealing from George Carlin: This “government does not want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. That is against their interests. They want obedient workers [non-union!]; people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept it”.
And they want Alberta colleges and universities to become more than even at present, hives of “busy-work on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale,” with students who graduate as technicians and careerists of the current, or even past, status quo – not agents of transformation.
So this will be like the ” reluctant partial climbdown from Alberta’s controversial ” new coal policy moratorium that once the public caterwauling subsides and random time passes, as the work continues in the dark , will be rescinded in a private club meeting with few notes and little fanfare?
That one was just in time for Christmas, down under, as it were.
How does the blue slime actually justify their actions when they consistently have to circumvent virtually every logical truthful scientific position to implement UCP ideology.
I live with these people and they are reasonable until they vote blue like zombies.
It is all very manchurian candidate in the voting booth.
They do however have some pretty standard tactics to push their agenda of breaking social systems, removing vital programs for the “undeserving” and privatizing gains.
Lungta, why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
This is what happens when you hire outside consultants on the basis of friendship and/or political affiliation. Zero focus on reputation, qualifications ,etc.
Just think for a moment. Is this the same standard of consulting expertise, subject matter expertise that the Kenney Gov’t used to arrive at a decision to promote/recommend an Alberta Provincial Police Force or the migration from CPP to an Alberta Pension Plan???
Brett, it probably is the preferred method for picking Con partners. Influence is the key, and money is the lubricant, that open the doors of power.
Noting in another segment of what I like to call “David Staples Unstaples Himself from Trouble”, David Staples, now, is declaring that the curriculum proposal “needed” to be withdrawn and reconsidered because there was little to no consultation with teachers and other professional educators.
This is funny because was, maybe a year ago, promoting and defending the new curriculum as needed reform. Okay, it’s apparent that Staples has a bad case of ADD and manic behavior where any UCP policy is concerned.
Gosh. There’s something Orwellian about the UCP government. Oh, I dunno, something Covid-19 84-Channimal-Farmish about it, something Pig Napoleon Brotherish to it, but just chaotically-absurdish enough to make neat encapsulation difficult. Comparison with tRump of course leads to a sort of Isaac Asimovish cult of personality, a “Mule” both baffling and crude, blatant and cagey—maybe even like “The Joker,” that “Clown Prince of Crime.” Just hard to put a finger on it.
Take the UCP’s churlishly hackneyed K-6 curriculum, so roundly condemned as to gag ridicule, kinda like the equivalent of Afghani madrassas preparing young boys’ minds for that state’s newly won ‘peace’ of pariah parochialism: while the tRumpublican equivalent might be “critical race theory” and the commonality be “culture wars,” the question remains: why is the UCP’s typical, all-ideology-zero-practicality, pedagogical policy getting chucked over the side like ballast out of a wrinkling balloon but not the equally ridiculous Report on Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns. What’s the difference?
I hazard that while the alleged environmentalist-conspirators were thought remote enough to abuse flexibly and with impunity — like Big Brother could turn Oceania’s unseen enemies off and on as required to keep citizens in perpetual fear— it was never plausible to accuse Rachel Notley’s NDP of campaigning to beggar Big Bitumen, nor strategically wise to paint a main rival as having that much power. Not like Sasquatch.
In contrast, Kenney’s rationale for the K-6 rewrite is simply to bash the NDP as a matter of course. K-Boy’s so focused on the politics of winning he even dismantled a working policy just to use for ammo. If he’s a conservative, he must be a retrogressive one.
One thing he could easily turn off is the environmental groups’ defamation lawsuit against him: all he need do is apologize and recant. Can’t turn off the threat from Alberta’s ‘government-in-waiting,’ though, patiently watching Napoleon root all by himself towards his own Waterloo. Still, the curriculum’s withdrawal (as “temporary” as it might be yet) must be somewhat disappointing for the NDP. Hopefully it’s not a sign that the UCP has stopped digging its own hole. If that were the case, we’d have to wonder how fast it could be filled back in and whether the party end up at the bottom or flat on the ground. How perverse is it that a governing party’s whole first-term accomplishment is to use it for backfill?
Does the curriculum withdrawal mean other voices have been tempering K-Boy’s perpetual political campaigning of late, even as he pulls out whatever stops he still controls as party leader? With tRumpy dismissal of Covid (K-laxing safety protocols during the Holiday Season just when a new variant is tearing across the land), unabashed victim-card playing, and reliably nasty ad hominem toward the Prime Minister (like tRump does toward President Biden), it might not look that way, but what about coal? Remember coal, another of K-Boy’s attempts to provoke partisan controversy with a ‘policy’ so profitless that it’s perversely impolitic (tRump promised to bring it back the paleo-industry, but it never happened; hillbillies now vote for him for other-worldly reasons).
By George! If that mountain-top coal shoe drops I hope things get clearer for all us Wilson “Benjamin” Smiths and we can get back to watching Jason and Brian’s Snowball fight.
Ah yes, good. Ms. LaGrange has listened to all the valuable input from teachers etc. But not, I notice, until AFTER 1) the time limit expired on the non-disclosure agreements that silenced those same teachers who’d reviewed that botch of a curriculum and 2) Brian Jean got a running start in his campaign to push Jason Kenney out of the UCP.
There was supposed to be an announcement from Kenney regarding a further lifting of restrictions at 3:30 PM today, but this event was postponed until 5:00 PM because of a teleconference with PMJT and the other premiers. And then the 5:00 PM event was cancelled until whenever.
So, checking on Twitter, Kenney’s “special-advisor” Ben Harper (Harpo’s son, a Columbia student who management to score a plum $100K gig in Kenney’s office) declares that PMJT is “cancelling Christmas”. Pretty interesting series of posts that follow which pretty much declare the Liberals are utter failures on the pandemic file and the End Times are close at hand. Funny stuff, really.
It looks like Ben Harper is doing the same job that Matt Wolf was doing just a few weeks ago, shiteposting on Twitter and spreading a lot of noisy nonsense. Harper is only costing $100K/yr while Wolf cost $250K/yr. Looks like something’s worked for Kenney after all. He’s found a cheaper troll.
There was supposed to be an announcement from Kenney regarding a further lifting of restrictions at 3:30 PM today, but this event was postponed until 5:00 PM because of a teleconference with PMJT and the other premiers. And then the 5:00 PM event was cancelled until whenever.
So, checking on Twitter, Kenney’s “special-advisor” Ben Harper (Harpo’s son, a Columbia student who managed to score a plum $100K gig in Kenney’s office) declares that PMJT is “cancelling Christmas”. Pretty interesting series of posts that follow which pretty much declare the Liberals are utter failures on the pandemic file and the End Times are close at hand. Funny stuff, really.
It looks like Ben Harper is doing the same job that Matt Wolf was doing just a few weeks ago, shiteposting on Twitter and spreading a lot of noisy nonsense. Harper is only costing $100K/yr while Wolf cost $250K/yr. Looks like something’s worked for Kenney after all. He’s found a cheaper troll.