Manitoba educators frustrated they won't see long-awaited K-12 education system review until Monday

Educators in Manitoba are frustrated that the provincial government is waiting until Monday to release a review of the kindergarten to Grade 12 school system that was supposed to be ready nearly a year ago.

In January 2019, the Manitoba government announced a nine-member commission would conduct a comprehensive review of the K-12 system. The review, expected to force school boards to amalgamate, was originally expected to be released in March 2020 but was delayed due to the pandemic.

During a news conference Friday, Education Minister Cliff Cullen announced the review, and the province's response to it, will be released Monday.

"He got the entire education system fired up this morning for the release of the review of K-12 education, and then he didn't do it," said Alan Campbell, president of the Manitoba School Boards Association, a voluntary organization that represents public school boards in the province.

"Now everyone in public education who's been sitting on pins and needles for a year, while also managing to run the system through a global pandemic, gets to let this fester for the weekend. It's extremely perplexing."

If Cullen wanted to give people in the education sector a heads up, a news release would have sufficed, said Campbell.

Cullen sidestepped a number of questions Friday, including when students and staff can expect to see changes implemented. Instead, he told reporters more information will come Monday. 

The review involved consultations with students, parents, educators, school boards, academics, Indigenous organizations, the French-speaking community and municipal councils, among others, he said.

Premier Brian Pallister has said many times he believes the current education system is "very top-heavy" and in need of reforms.

Cullen echoed that Friday, saying school administration costs in Manitoba are 48 per cent higher than in Ontario — though he did not explain how that was calculated — and said the money should be going toward classrooms.

"Manitoba's current education system is not working for students. Manitoba is one of the highest-spending provinces on education and getting among the lowest student achievement results in the country," he said.

The job of the K-12 commission was to find a way to change the current system into "a modern, responsive and ambitious educational system," he added.

James Bedford, president of the Manitoba Teachers' Society, said he would challenge anyone to look at public education in the past year and say it isn't transformative or modernizing.

"We are doing things of public education that we have never, ever done before," said Bedford, whose organization represents over 16,000 public school teachers.

Campbell disagreed with several comments Cullen made, including those regarding administrative costs, because the province has leaned on senior administrators throughout the pandemic to ensure the system functions with public health restrictions in place.

He also disagreed that the school system is not student-focused and that, as Cullen put it, there are 37 Manitoba school divisions "out doing their own thing, and it was difficult to manage that from a government perspective."

Cullen was asked whether there would be a reduction in the number of school divisions in the province. He declined to comment.

Child poverty in Manitoba schools

Bedford was also frustrated by Friday's news conference, but he felt heard by Cullen's responses to questions about child poverty in Manitoba — an issue the teachers' society has pressed the province to address.

Reporters asked Cullen about the topic a couple of times Friday. He said child poverty is an issue the government recognizes, mainly because Manitoba students are "falling behind when it comes to some of the Canadian evaluations" and he wants to ensure the school system can set them up for the best outcomes.

Though he disagrees that learning outcomes are subpar, Bedford is pleased that there is an awareness — now more than ever — that Manitoba has high childhood poverty rates and how that impacts a student's education.

"This pandemic year has absolutely highlighted the inequities," he said.

"We've been heard and I certainly hope that on Monday afternoon we are talking about recommendations that address poverty of children in this province."

Ways to address the issue in schools could include government-led meal programs and finding solutions to make education accessible in a remote-learning situation, he said.

Campbell says the Manitoba government can't have a legitimate conversation about learning outcomes without addressing underlying issues, child poverty being one of them.

"If [Cullen] doesn't want to have those conversations and if he doesn't want to actually tackle those issues, it makes the release of the report on Monday meaningless," he said.

'Don't they deserve to know?'

Manitoba's opposition party leaders were critical of the decision to wait until Monday to release the review findings.

Opposition NDP Leader Wab Kinew believed the report should have been released Friday to give school administrators, educators and families time to digest it over the weekend.

"It's another troubling sign of the Pallister government, that they seem almost giddy to conceal their agenda from the people it will affect," he said.

"Don't they deserve to know?"

Kinew also challenged Cullen's claims about the cost of education in Manitoba, saying it is "severely underfunded" and doesn't keep up with the rate of inflation.

There's not a single student, not a single parent or a single educator in Manitoba who doesn't recognize that the pandemic completely changed K-12 education. And yet the PCs are still intent on dragging out this dusty old review that they wrote before COVID-19 was even on our radar.- Opposition NDP Leader Wab Kinew

Manitoba Liberals Leader Dougald Lamont also attacked the government's spending in schools, noting they are "facing massive shortfalls and cuts" due to added emergency COVID expenditures — and the PCs "still haven't even spent last year's 'safe' back-to-school budget."

"There is every indication that this review will just be more right-wing social engineering by the PCs, following a U.S. model which has nothing to do with education and everything to do with private profits and crushing unions," said Lamont.

The recommendations from the government will reflect both the K-12 report and recent experiences due to the pandemic, Cullen said.

When asked if any of the report's recommendations will be out of date — given it was completed before the pandemic began — Cullen deferred to the upcoming report, but said he believes it balances pre-pandemic with what has been learned since.

Kinew laughed at the assertion the report won't be obsolete.

"There's not a single student, not a single parent or a single educator in Manitoba who doesn't recognize that the pandemic completely changed K-12 education," he said.

"Yet the PCs are still intent on dragging out this dusty old review that they wrote before COVID-19 was even on our radar."

Lamont echoed those sentiments, saying without taking lessons learned from the pandemic, "this review will be even more worthless than we feared."

Manitoba to overhaul education system

4 years ago

Duration 2:07

Educators in Manitoba are frustrated that the provincial government is waiting until Monday to release a review of the kindergarten to Grade 12 school system that was supposed to be ready nearly a year ago.