School choice does not equal intolerance

More than 26,000 Edmonton public students attend alternative school programs for language, the arts, sports and academics. These alternative programs have been available for more than four decades. They are a defining feature of Edmonton Public Schools and people are rightly proud of a system that strains to foster the talents and interests of tens of thousands of students.

But not everyone is happy with the success.

In fact, an influential Alberta education lobby group, Support Our Students Alberta (SOS), sees such school choice in the darkest terms. It links alternative schools to neo-Nazism.

In the wake of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., SOS published the following message on its Facebook page. “Yesterday’s tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, reemphasize for us why we cannot afford to segregate our children. Not by class, not by race, not by culture, religion, not by ability.”

SOS then listed a number of alternative programs which they say represent “segregation disguised as choice.”

Such “segregated” schools include sports, ballet and hockey programs, French, Chinese, Arabic, Ukrainian, Spanish, Hebrew and German bilingual programs, Cogito, Montessori, international baccalaureate, Nellie McClung and Caraway academic programs, Logos and Christian schools, the Victoria performing arts school, and a number of alternative and private schools in Calgary.

I would brush aside such allegations as nonsense if this group wasn’t well-regarded in Alberta education circles. For example, the Alberta Teachers’ Association gave SOS the ATA’s 2016 Public Education Award for its efforts. SOS has also met several times with Education Minister David Eggen.

To clarify SOS’s position here, I interviewed Barbara Silva, SOS communication director.

“We’re saying those (Charlottesville) events are a demonstration of intolerance and of a lack of exposure to diversity,” Silva said. “So when we have schools in the public system based on lines of religions ... we’re dividing kids based on religion. So we’re not providing those children opportunities to interact and that provides an opportunity for intolerance to grow ... We believe they’re creating divisions.”

What about the academic, sports and arts schools? How do they create an atmosphere of intolerance?

“I don’t know they can necessarily help create an atmosphere. What they do is they don’t allow for these children to interact.”

Some schools, such as elite sports programs, have tuition fees as high as $1,500, Silva said, which is an economic barrier to entry for some groups. “We know that people of colour and single mothers are disproportionately represented in poverty.”

Silva wants a school system where children don’t have to choose between a strong music, language or physical education programs, but where all children can access a rich curriculum in all public schools.

My response? Edmonton schools do not demonstrably fail any group of children or neighbourhood. In fact, outside of weak math education, the schools provide some of the best schooling in the world. It’s a fine idea to eliminate as many barriers to entry to alternative public schools as possible, but if the public schools provide an excellent education, that’s mission accomplished. If some parents in the public system choose to pay higher fees for extra programming, such as a class trip to Europe or extra ice time for a hockey program, it’s fair that they bear that cost, not all taxpayers.It’s incorrect that alternative programs necessarily lack diversity. A number of them — including Edmonton public’s most popular one, the Cogito academic program — are packed with immigrant kids, often from low-to-middle income families. And Victoria School has long been a beacon of diversity and inclusion. If children have no choice except to go to their own neighbourhood school, as Silva advocates, rich kids will congregate in schools in wealthy neighbourhoods and poor kids will go to schools in poorer neighbourhoods. Where’s the diversity? Until recent years, Calgary public schools tried to go SOS’s preferred route by frowning on open school boundaries and limiting program choice. This plan resulted in a mass flight from public to more flexible private schools. Nice work, Calgary. Meanwhile Edmonton’s programs of choice all but crushed the private-school movement here. If religious schools breed intolerance — an uncertain proposition — it’s better that such schooling be tempered by public school oversight and curriculum, no? As for the suggestion that programs of choice lead to intolerance, well, Edmonton has been a radical test-tube experiment on what happens to a society with rampant school choice, yet it has become a hotbed of caring, compassion and the belief in government intervention, if you go by the politicians we elect. In the end, SOS’s argument that school choice is linked to white supremacism strikes me as preposterous.