By Michael Van Pelt
and Dr. Beth Green
Cardus
Premier Kathleen Wynne, meet Sir Michael Barber. He knows how to fix your education system. He has done it before.
Barber is a professor at London’s Institute for Education and former head of Global Education at the international counselling firm McKinsey & Company. He has helped governments of emerging and high-performing economies push through obstacles and deliver on policy goals. He is so driven by tables, charts and graphs of reliable outcome data that the U.K. media have written him off as boring.
Michael Van Pelt
His modus operandi is to make education work efficiently, to cut out the middle man and partner with those who can deliver innovative curriculum and assessment reforms on the ground. He and his partners are happy to be transparent about the processes and held accountable for the results. He does not believe that school systems, even state monopolies, are sacrosanct. He does not believe high performing systems have nothing left to deliver on.
He is not, however, just another right-wing educational ideologue.
He was head of the Delivery Unit for British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (the unit was established to improve government delivery of public service priorities). He is a longtime member of the Labour Party, and a former union man. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed him as an advisor at January’s federal cabinet retreat. Can you spell impeccable liberal-left credentials?
Yet Barber spells out with great clarity an unexpected solution for problems facing contemporary education systems.
“School systems will have to innovate and innovation will come from the private sector or public-private partnerships, rather than government,” he says.
Beth Green
Those words might not exactly be music to the ears of Wynne, who has tightly sealed off the Ontario education sector from any meaningful conversation about delivery and standards. Key constituents such as students, parents, communities, businesses and employers stand at a distance from major decisions like school board closures and cuts in special education funding.
The arms-length Education Quality and Accountability Office, a Crown agency that manages standardized testing in Ontario, has been hampered by union action and delays in reporting. It’s difficult to get accurate information on Ontario’s enrolment statistics, spending and school performance without turning to independent sources.
What we do know for certain is that during the past decade, the number of kindergarten to Grade 12 students in Ontario public schools has dropped by 100,000. Spending, meanwhile, has increased by $8 billion over the same period. Certain international measures show the quality of Ontario education is declining.
Despite Wynne’s misgivings, then, the need is evident for someone to begin serious upgrading of the province’s public education performance. The argument is compelling for it to be someone such as Barber, who puts confidence in standards rather than structures.
Barber is well known for his habit of commissioning independent, open and practical research (like the Cardus Education Survey, which regularly reports on the educational outcomes of graduates of all school sectors nationally.) He has built significant education reforms on reliable data and effective monitoring. His approach is to set clear targets and enable governments to stick by them. He believes in the importance of performance – not ideological – measurements and partnerships with those better able to innovate in delivery of public sector services.
So, Premier Wynne, meet Sir Michael. Keep his name on speed dial for your next cabinet retreat on education. If need be, call your good friend, the prime minister, for a reference. After all, he brought Barber in for advice on improving efficiency of services for a federal government facing a debt of more than $600 billion. Can the problems besetting Ontario public education be more difficult to fix than that?
Michael Van Pelt is president and Beth Green is education program director for Cardus.
Michael and Beth are Troy Media contributors. Why aren’t you?
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