Episode 16: On Canada

[MUSIC] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by David Hunt from the Air Stoddle Foundation to talk about Canada. [MUSIC] All right, well, here we are with David Hunt. David is the research director at the Air Stoddle Foundation for Public Policy. David, thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me, Eric. So we're going to take a little bit of a different approach today. I'm really interested in the very local contexts, in the ways these schools manifest themselves in different geographic areas. So the schools look different in Florida than they might in Wisconsin or something like that. But I thought we'd start this kind of theme of talking to people in different areas by going really far away and talking to David, who is from Canada. So maybe my first question to you, David, is to kind of help us set the stage a little bit and give us a little background on just how schools work in Canada, right? So in the US, we've got the federal government that makes some laws and put some money into schools, but they're not running schools, right? States do more of both of those things, but in most cases, the local school districts are kind of running the show, right? We have this sort of separate that's a sector of private schooling that's mostly privately funded. And then we've got homeschooling, but set homeschooling aside for a second. I'll ask you about that in a minute. Can you just give us kind of the 10,000 foot or 10,000 meter overview of how the Canadian school system works for conventional looking schools? Yes, no, for sure. I think the first comment I would make is the old cliche demography is destiny. If you look at enrollments over the last 30 years, they've been relatively flat at the kid at 12 level. You've got about 5.3 million students. Canada wide in the 1990s. Today, that number is still less than 6 million. So you've had about 12% growth in 30 years. Almost all of that growth has happened outside of conventional schools, which we can find by the second. So your conventional schools in relatively flat, I'm going to guess one, two, three, four points somewhere in there. And we can argue over those numbers whether we include an all education, a child education, what happened. But the Canadian population has grown by 40%. In that same time, all enrollment has been flat. For most in 30 million to 42 million. So that I'm going to unpack maybe a bit later in terms of immigration, of course, the source of that change and how that all feeds out. But big differences here. Local governance is local in name only with a paper coming out January 5th, a short and sweet paper, but essentially making the point that your elective school trustees, although yes, technically vote for them. And yes, your tax scholars, your property taxes are being allocated, or is your school. It's extraordinarily undemocratic. And the reason for that is that in our country, the province has all the control. Now, there wasn't one point in time when the school boards were very active. And I'll share you with you had over 3000 school boards in their early 1960s. Today, you've spent the two school boards and they're very bureaucratic. And so look at every province, it's still been in Nova Scotia. We're now literally only one school board left in the entire province. And at the crack home board, the reason you have that is because it's constitutionally protected. You don't even have school boards anymore in Nova Scotia. So education and the creature of the province, what you guys would be the state. But even though 90% of enrollment is within the cortical public system, our constitution is by different than yours. And so you have constitutionally protected francophone schools, which are actually a fairly new thing. That's that since the part of 1982. So it's a fairly new thing. They grow like crazy. They're kind of like fancy public schools. They're free private school. And so there are different demographic families. And no, they're not a francophone people that are putting the kids there. It's kind of like our version of charter schools, but not that's not an opposite of those comparisons. So don't come up with that. Those are the details of those types of schools. But it's our version of this thing that for you, charter, are kind of like free private schools. There's kind of that. But one other factor is we have constitutionally protected separate schools. Presently three provinces, back in the day and five provinces. Actually, technically six provinces have more. Oh, yeah. Again, the details too much. In Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, you have fully publicly funded Catholic schools, supposedly for Catholics, although that's also not quite the case. But what that leads to is that 90% of enrollment is what it's called public. In a province like Ontario, 60% go to an American style, a US style public school. When we're 60% enrollment, in Alberta, that's what tourism enrollment. And within that two third, in Alberta, there's tons of choices, but call different ways to school in Alberta. So all that to say, for the average Canadian kid, yes, conventional school is going to be fairly similar to the US experience by and large. But there are tons of, there's tons of new ones and there's tons of difference. Yeah. Well, even those numbers are pretty different, 60% of kids in conventional schools are not there yet in most places. So what about homeschooling then? A lot of these hybrid schools and micro schools are basically built on various state homeschool laws. What's the status of homeschooling in Canada? Okay. So let's answer this in two ways. Let's address homeschooling this briefly talked about the independent school sector. Yeah. Because that is very important in the US. In the homeschool space, if you look at statistics Canada data, presently, the federal government claims that 1.1% of kid at 12 enrollment is homeschooling. That's not correct though, because if you zoom in on the provincial level data in a province like Alberta, for example, almost all homeschoolers have a school that they're technically nested under. Whether that's in the federal private school or whether that's in public school. The homeschool data is varied. So and it has a similar dynamic promises to do so realistically, you, like, well, truthfully, you can't exactly put your finger on it, but it's going to be somewhere between two to three percent of enrollment. Now, importantly, that's a huge difference from previous decades. So if we go back, even as recent as the been 90s, I get using the staff can data, only a third of 1% of kid at 12 enrollment was homeschooling. So probably 3% percent. So almost nobody homeschooled. But again, using just this scan data for me, one homeschooler, you have them in 90s, you have 3.4 homeschoolers today. So incredible growth, more than three full of growth, COVID was a big part of that enrollment doubling through COVID alone. Now there was going to be a dip after the fact, but you had a 70% retention rate. So of those that left the conventional system for homeschooling during COVID, 70% of them stuck with it. Our senior noxious system interested stuck with it. The overall number, after COVID, you had 70% homeschool enrollment of what the peak was. We're now up to 70% of that peak. So the trend is returning, although we haven't quite reached those highs. From a regulation perspective, technically you can homeschool anywhere, but technically is an important word. Because in Quebec, I get calls, I shouldn't say regularly, but stem my regularly. I get calls from those who are having their legit concern, where if, for example, you're an orphanage Jewish family, mostly your kids, you can guarantee that someone from the Quebec government is going to knock on your door at some point and intimidate you in a very unfriendly fashion. So, yeah, and there's currently some stuff happening in the courts there. So you kind of have homeschooling in name only in Quebec. Other provinces are not that bad. It is their problems to problems, but we're really talking to the independent schools for this because hybrid is kind of somewhere between the two. Independent schooling is at least partially funded in half the problems. So if we exclude the problem to Ontario, which is my far out of our province, we exclude Ontario 84% of Canadian kids that go to a critical private school, independent school. 84% of them are funded at least partially. So it's anywhere from 35% to technically 80% depending on the province that you're in, Saskatchewan summers of up 80% to back 60%. I'll burn 70% of the operating grants in BC. It's between 35 to 50. And there's tons of details in terms of why there's that variance. But between 35 to 80% of operating grant given to public school kids, those going to accredited independent schools, so once they have accredited. and the teachers follow half of the provincial curriculum and if you had a requirement, we'll receive that funding. So that's an important distinction. As excluding Ontario, 84% are receiving that funding. So that creates a very different dynamic than what you have in the States. Now, Ontario, there's no funding. And in fact, Ontario legislation refers to Ontario private schools as not schools. It actually says that. They are not schools, they're businesses, even though they're not businesses, they're not a province of charities, but they're referring to the legislation's businesses, which means that their students are not students, or customers, and their teachers are not teachers. So, for example, during COVID, the federal government allocated her student relief that was supposed to go to every kid in the entire country. Well, they didn't go to preschool kids in Ontario because those are not students. Yeah. So, again, it's a provincial matter. So it's going to be very different across provinces. And then, hybrid schools fall somewhere in between there. Yeah. Because in a province like Ontario, no, sorry, a province like Alberta, they most certainly are classified as independent schools, even if they're tiny. And even if you have a true homeschool dynamic, they're going to be classified as independent schools, whereas in a province of Ontario, who knows what the classified abs? Just a few years ago, there was a situation where you had essentially a homeschool co-op, but I think there are 50 kids involved give or take. And so, the province shut them down saying, because you have this many kids together, it is a school, but of course, private schools aren't schools. So, anyways, it's got to get. Yeah. So, we've got this situation where a lot of the schools in the US live in this gray area. So we've had some similar things where in some states, you want to be called a school in some states, you don't. For various reasons, like state laws, just how you want to run your school, things like this. But then you mentioned conventional looking schools, getting state funding in some cases, in other cases not. The provinces acting as kind of more overbearing than you might expect them to be, right? So in some cases with these schools, you want to live in the gray area. In some cases, you don't. But my question to you is, is Canada more okay with gray areas than the US or not? Because it seems like we have both of these things going on at the same time. That's a very good question. And I think I would have to have more intimate knowledge of the US space to be able to speak to that with authority. And I definitely know the American space better than almost any American scholar knows the Canadian space. But that's just-- Probably fair. The little brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. America. But I'm definitely going to be on the American space. In terms of the gray area, again, it's promised by province. In the province of Quebec, because they become such a sectarian secularist regime. And I do think that's the way to describe them, where they're religiously secular. They have very little relevance for gray. Whereas in the past, they've had the most relevance for gray. In the past three or nine decades, today in a province like-- I will end the province-- in one of the prairie problems. I was sitting down with a few of the key leaders in both the homeschool and the infrastructural space. And this is David, please don't do any research on our province, please. Because we really like how things are right now. The government is totally unaware of enrollment numbers, school count numbers. And we have a ton of freedom. And things are really given on any problems. And if there's a change of government in that province, they anticipate there could be problems. So please leave our province alone. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is kind of like the whole space before COVID, right? In the US, you kind of do your thing and call yourself a school, call yourself a home school, or whatever. No one really is looking very hard. COVID-- what COVID did to a lot of trends is either it stopped them dead or accelerated them, right? So what came with that is more people just kind of looking, right? So in the US, a lot of these schools have existed for a long time, but a lot of them are new, too. And that was often due to parental frustration with online schooling during COVID and all this. Is that kind of the same story in Canada? 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Again, everything varies by state and by province. But it seems like that pushed it. Another thing that has come up, though, is this phenomenon of teachers themselves getting into the game, right? So in a lot of places, we're seeing teachers say, you know what? I can leave the classroom, and I can replace my salary, or at least replace my sanity, right, by starting my own thing. Is that a phenomenon that happens in Canada, too? Yeah, and correct me from wrong, Erica. I think it's actually your work that the lineage between-- like if a teacher run has one label, and if that's parent run has another label, like the difference is that between a homeschool co-op, which is parent run versus a microschool, or a learning pod, and then be teacher run. I think that's your work. Well, I've talked about that. You might be thinking of some stuff that's happened in Florida. But-- Yeah. But yeah. So in the Canadian space, yesterday in COVID, tons and tons and tons and tons of tons, a homeschool co-ops emerged where it's parent driven and no, you're not telling the government because it's going to dynamic a little bit, which we need not get it through. But on the learning pod side, the microschool side where it's teacher driven, there's virtually no data on that. And I haven't actually published on it, but I've sat down with a very large number of rules for relieving such pods and microschools. In Alberta, in particular, there's tons of those who are, again, their teachers, who the reason they became teachers is they want to teach. They love learning. They love teaching. They love education. And they want to help kids and see kids learn and grow. And that was not their experience in conventional public schools. It was so frustrating that for some of them, they're only one or two or three years into their career. And they're like, you know, this is not what I signed up for. This is essentially babysitting. But babysitting, we absolutely know authority, no disciplinary measures, can't do anything with chaos. So I've sat down with many teachers that fit that description, have 2030 or 50 students in an organized fashion and a microschool typically, they'll be in their placements, even if they're not religious. Because it's very hard to find real estate, that's affordable and that's typically where that would happen. So in Alberta, it's happening big time. I know that just from more than a little evidence in Ontario, as well, I've sat down and had Zoom meetings with them who would also put the description but elsewhere. Again, there's data. What is this promise? I'm not living here. But other than those three promises, yeah, it's all hearsay anecdotal, but as someone who's in the sector, yeah, is that? Yeah, I mean, they're hard to find here too in some cases, but it sounds like you have a little more reason to kind of fly under the radar in Canada sometimes, depending on what you want to call yourself, right? So we've got in the various states now, we've got these different policies cropping up, education, savings account policies and other kinds of things that are meant to help with the growth of this sector. Are there Canadian versions of these things? Or are people talking about Canadian versions of these things? So I don't want to get any particular province in trouble, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because of the work that I do, yes, I'm aware of more than a few politicians, and more than a few provinces, we're very keen to bring these are ESG equivalents into their respective provinces. The likelihood of that happening, I would say slim with the exception of the province of Alberta, and there are here people in that government that will closely, the school choice tsunami, or whatever you want to call it, that has happened across the states and are keen to bring that into Alberta. Whether or not that will happen, as you know of politics, there's so many stakeholders in groups that, yeah, whatever a leader's intent on, whether that actually happened, is it open to be questioned? But again, the difference here is because, for a long time, we have had funded independent schools and fully funded separate schools. You do have a very different dynamic than down the states. And so in terms of ESG dynamic, there isn't the same thirst or demand for it, and there aren't the same justice arguments necessarily, at least we're not a Celia. Now the one thing I would say is that in Alberta, you do have fairly generous funding for homeschoolers and very generous funding for independent schoolers. In British Columbia, Rylew, it's not generous funding, but there is some funding, even for homeschoolers, so long as you abide by certain curriculum requirements. And then not even curriculum requirements, but they're more learning up. - I was gonna say that, you were making that sound like a throwaway line, but that is a deal killer for a lot of people. - Right. - It was an advocate. - Yeah. - And everyone does have a year, right? Yeah, so, so, so, all that to say, it's a very different dynamic here. But yes, though, two are in politics, the fellow American politics are well aware of the USA's, but then that's also both as a fence. Because, For every person that wants to put an ESA in play, you can bet your bottom dollar to that. They're the teachers union that's ready to fight it and use the same argument. Yeah, well, I was going to say, right, that a lot of times the way these these these get promoted is are they're framed as expanding freedom or expanding choice and that that works in some states and that framing does not work in other states. I assume it's kind of a similar thing in Canada like talking about freedom and choice may not be the frame that people want to hear to get to get these kind of things done. 100 percent and again, the parents problems here in arguments that work in Alberta definitely don't work in Ontario and the first that and everything. Yeah, no, most, most definitely bet one of the comment as you're saying that is just the size of the public sector in Canada is substantially larger than in the US. Now, it's been a number of years since I look at the data, so I'm not going to quote it figures because they're going to be obsolete. But it is absolutely extraordinary how many people work either directly or indirectly for the government in this country. If you do not go up to chair. Yeah, yeah. Which means the public sector unions are that much stronger. That's right. That's right. Because their vote base as a share of the population is substantially larger than even your most pro public sector unions. Yeah, that makes a difference. So I want to change gears a little bit here then you've also done some work on things like free speech issues. Canada has a lot of diversity and immigration like the US does. You mentioned not having growth in kids, but you've had growth in population and then it has to come from somewhere. Or a topic that comes up sometimes in discussions of these of these schools is that because they're so high identity that can cause kind of diminished social trust. So I kind of look at it as a kind of pressure release valve, which maybe you guys already have a little bit of with your independent schools. But you could say, well, maybe this is going to lead to bulkization or something like this within within societies because everybody's going to these. There, you know, maybe the public school experience is bad, but at least it's shared, right? Is one argument, right? So how do you think about that? How can we, do you think this is on balance a source of a positive on net? It's good for civil society or is it bad? It's going to lead to bad outcomes in 20 years when everyone goes to the to the school that that is really tailored to their family's interests. How's it going to shake out? Well, let's let's let let's just start with the data. Yeah. People are voting with their feet. So in Alberta in the last 10 years, what's called clinical distributed learning, so what you would call hybrid schools. In Roman is up 800% in 10 years. If we look at just the Catholic independent schools in Alberta, there's no new school, no new building projects, and yet in Roman is up 10 in 10 years, 10 full without new building without new schools. So again, that's a hybrid school. In Ontario, we're learning in a quarter-prime frame, just the data is available, but it's up 600% in the last seven or eight years, at least 100%. The number of independent schools in Ontario has increased 50% in the last 10 years, and if you look at the number of clinical private schools in Ontario, only 4% of them are what you call elite, which are top school schools. And the Roman and public schools have been completely flat. One percent grew in that time. So people are voting with their feet. This is happening. Now, the argument of walkinization, I think is absolutely nonsense. Absolutely nonsense. I just let's just take a very private vote. If I go to the playground of the process street with my kid, and there's a new family there, and I'm pushing my kids on the flame, it was a death outside me. Now, what do you do for living? And he's the, I'm an engineer, what kind of engineer? He's a civil engineer. Well, guess what? David Hunt is not a civil engineer. I don't know anything about engineering. All of a sudden, there's very interesting conversation. I started asking him, "What projects are you working on?" Oh, you're building the new messy tunnel. Fascinating. And I've got all these full-blown questions. Likewise, he asked me about my work. Of course, he's never met someone who's in the same tank sector. Or, full-time does a good patient research and a few things in addition to that. It's a fascinating conversation. And we've become almost instantly the fact that we live in the same area, but we've got these different experiences. Like, the fact that he has suctioned out all kids have to have that same experience as known as family is different. And even with in a family, you think that our official schools are. When in your life, Eric, are you ever in a room with 30 people who are the exact same agency who live with the exact same neighborhood as you? You never get experience part against it. So in terms of the socialization argument for school, I would argue absolutely not that's because it is in the artificial, it's not preparing the students for the real world. And when someone meets a whole school kid, they stand up in a very good way in terms of socialization. Because like, oh wow, you know how to talk to adults. Wow, you can carry an interlocation. Wow, you're actually more red. You're actually important about what has happened outside of your little immediate bubble. And you think of part of the cultural crisis that we're in. It's that every generation is speaking a different language where the baby boomer cultural norms and cultural reference points are very different from then acts, which are extremely different from millennials, which are even more different from thens and whatever's next out or whatever's called. They don't even have to see reference points. So and why is that? Because all of them went to eight or 12 schools with each other the exact same age and they carried that with them and it doesn't pass on. So there's actually an antispecial dynamic to the way we have structured public schools. It is unnatural. So I don't mind the vocalization argument. Moral. Schools are not neutral on pretty much anything. So we need to get away from the myth that they are. And basically, there's a very narrow range of what acceptable cultural views are on a whole range of topics. And those critical acceptable views are not held by, if not the majority, almost the majority of parents. They have very large pair of parents. Moral. A third of kids by the end of the break. We can look at data in Ontario. We can actually see data in North kosher data in Alberta. If we look at the literature, if a kid can't read by the end of the break, three chances are they will not run to read until they're an adult, if ever, because they'll just get faster the system. And yet we've good data in chances are especially manipulated to make the government look better than what she is. The data says that our third of kids can have a kid not read by the end of the break, three. And the math is even worse. So forget the culture wars for a minute. And let's just look at reading, writing in a ripet tech. Public schools are not doing their job. It's frankly, it'd be hard to do worse than what they're doing. The public schools is failing schools. It's not hyperbolic, at least not in this country. And in our sector, I can drive you down straight here. I introduce you to public schools that are better than they're nearby private schools. But they're the staff can not the rule if you look at the aggregate. They're not performing and they're not performing kids. So yeah, so I don't know how to worse make it be. Yeah, we could probably find some in the US. But I love your point on the generational aspect too, because it's kind of counterintuitive, but you almost if you go to a to a small school, you almost have more of an opportunity to interact with people who are different from you, because that's the entire rest of your day. If everybody goes to a different kind of school, you get more practice dealing with other kinds of people, whereas if you're all shunted into the same institution, yeah, you're sitting next to somebody, but you're not really having that same kind of experience. And even in terms of civic formation, if again, we're pretty evident into these boxes, they're going to reflect the ideal of the regime that was in place at that time. Where is it more organic system, more natural system, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's much more democratic and reflect the values of a free society. But actually, what other point on that? Yeah, in terms of we think of like like social trust and how diverse societies maintain social trust and can they maintain social trust? Like, what are the things that are most important that we hold in common? And we've actually had anyone versus the Spartans. There were very different values in that versus the Sparta, but those values were held in common by Spartans and that opinions respectively. Likewise in our society, there were things that were held in common in terms of what is the vision of Canada, what's the purpose of Canada? As the quality and those really have broken down. And I think that's that's part of it too, is that the fact that we can't agree on what a man is or a woman is. Like, we're going to have a very hard time agreeing on arms anything within the curriculum. So yes, you can make arguments that really high in the greater and without a fertility rate is going to cause problems in terms of social trust. But yet, if we look at the largest oldest institution in the world, that is on question for the most diverse institution in the world, the capital church. You don't have a dynamic. You have very high social trust within that institution and around the world, but it's because there are things held in common and there's clarity of what the more important things, as I got to the point, in the sensuals unity, non-essentials unity and all things clarity. I think that applies to society as well. If we cannot agree on what is essential, there won't be unity. And there also won't be liberty because until we establish the essentials, we don't know what's non-essential, so we don't know what things are ought to be liberty. So in terms of a pluralistic society, you can't have a pluralistic society and less. There's at least something we hold in common that we all believe is extremely important and at the present moment, I don't know if that's the case. Well, that's right. And it can't be everything can't be the hill to die on. We need to have the chance to kind of lower the temperature in most areas, but hold on to the ones, like you're saying, that are the most important. So I have a couple more questions for you, David. One of them is, at our annual conference this spring, a Mark Humar from Kui Pod got up and talked about, we've got a Starbucks in basically every building in America. Why can't we have a million hybrid or micro schools in the next few years? Right? So Canada is smaller, maybe not a million, but what would need to change in Canada? And I'm not talking about votes or anything like that, but just like in mindset or anything like this, what would need to change in Canada to kind of really make a big difference in the market share for these kinds of schools up there? So for focusing on just micro schools, it's simply the will to make it happen. The will of who's will? The parents. Social contingent. Where in the same way when you had the homestead movement back in the day and settling at the west where the Disney Johnny Apples, the movie where the spirit of, you know, and what it would have that painting is where the Zorke and Angel are guarding it at the west. One of your famous paintings, but the US Capitol building. There was like it was in the air, right? We got to settle the west. That dynamic, it's the social cultural dynamic that would lead to an explosion. Because the reality is technically, or should they technically, there's a little stopping that from happening happening if we're talking about very small micro schools. Now, from talking about larger schools, we've been funding this issue and you need flat professors and all the rest of it and building with which I'm not sure if you know real estate prices are here in Canada, but it's crazy. But on the micro level, it just will do it. Yeah, so this is what I was hoping you would say nothing. Nothing is stopping it. People can just do it. Okay, great, great. Well, so then my last question today is, and what's the most interesting thing that you're working on right now that people involved with all these kinds of schools in Canada or the US would be interested to hear about? Okay, very good question. Okay, so in this very specific space, I'm nothing that's gonna come out in the immediate, pretty much nothing that's gonna be very soon. That directly relates, but there's a lot coming out that indirectly. So, the paper coming out January 5th, that will look at the financial system and flipping the system, replacing elected trustees with self-managed autonomous schools and getting there from a public school lens. So, that'll be coming to January 5th. Very shortly after that, we'll have a paper on more choice, more savings looking at how school choice saves a burden billions of dollars every year. Shortly after that, there's quite a few papers in the pipeline exposing the pollution upstream. So, looking at tie-to-red and how source of most of our key to 12 challenges are upstreet quite a way. And there's a poisonous reservoir. And getting to the deep cells of the rotten pie red and how that's affecting the kid at all, quite a bit we've been pipeline, we're becoming overnight a few years on, on that. The challenge that you know on the microscope space, hyper-scope space is it's less more expensive to do research on it because there's so little data, it takes a lot more time, a lot more work between money, and we do not yet have what you have a kind of self-state, university, because we're a tentacized. So, yeah, I would love to be doing much more of the work that you're doing now on the same stuff here, but there's limited resources, limited amount. Yeah, yeah, it's, they're tough to find, but we know they're out there and hopefully people will will get out there and start more of them. So, David Hunt from the Air Start-up Foundation, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project in Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.