Beyond Education's Iron Cage

1-contents:1-contents 6/1/10 10:27 AM Page 1 The School as Community Hub Beyond Education’s Iron Cage Hugo Aboites Chris Bigum Rita Bouvier David Clandfield Larry Kuehn Richard Hatcher Elise Houghton Michael LeClaire Leonie Rowan Carol Anne Spreen Salim Vally Editors: David Clandfield and George Martell Our Schools/Our Selves Special Issue in association with Everybody’s Schools: an Education Policy Institute Summer 2010 Our Schools/Our Selves is published four times a year by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 205-75 Albert St., Ottawa, ON K1P 5E7. This is Volume 19, Number 4, Issue #100 of the journal (Summer 2010). Our Schools/Our Selves is a member of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association. It is indexed in the Canadian Magazine Index and the Alternative Press Index. EDITORIAL BOARD Keren Brathwaite, Michael Corbett, Denise Doherty-Delorme, Bernie Froese- Germain, Larry Kuehn, Doug Little, George Martell, Patricia McAdie, Marita Moll, Satu Repo, Heather-jane Robertson, Erika Shaker ADVISORY BOARD Lynn Carlile, Kari Dehli, Sarah Dopp, Ed Finn, David Flower, Karin Jordan, Clare Keating, Kirsten Kozolanka, David Livingstone, Mike Luff, Diane Meaghan, Janice Newson, Aleda O’Connor, Claire Polster, Anne Rodrigue, David Robinson, Mark Rosenfeld, Harry Smaller, Jennifer Sumner, Jim Turk, Sofia Vuorinen, Robert Whiteley EXECUTIVE EDITOR Erika Shaker EDITOR EMERITUS Satu Repo ASSOCIATE EDITOR Larry Kuehn ISSUE EDITORS David Clandfield and George Martell Special thanks to Cassie Bell, Vicky Branco, Sheila Cary-Meagher, Andy Forest, Sunday Harrison, Lesley Johnston, Larry Kuehn, June Larkin, Doug Little, Katie McGovern, Sean Meagher, Dudley Paul, Robert Regnier, Nadine Segal, Bob Spencer EDITORIAL OFFICE/SUBSCRIPTIONS AND ADVERTISING Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Suite 205, 75 Albert Street, Ottawa, ON K1P 5E7 Tel: (613) 563-1341 Fax: (613) 233-1458 ISSN 0840-7339 ISBN 978-1-926888-04-0 PRODUCTION Typesetting and design: Nancy Reid. Printed in Canada by DLR International Printing, 925, boul. de la Carriere, Gatineau, QC. Publications Mail Registration No. 8010. Cover photo and design: Nancy Reid (www.nrgrafix.com) The opinions expressed in Our Schools/Our Selves are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA. 1-contents:1-contents 6/1/10 10:27 AM Page 3 Contents PART I THE SCHOOL AS COMMUNITY HUB: A PUBLIC ALTERNATIVE TO THE NEO-LIBERAL THREAT TO ONTARIO SCHOOLS David Clandfield 5 PART II COMMUNITY AND SCHOOL: SOURCES OF HOPE IN DARK TIMES 75 New lessons from England’s schools: New forms of privatisation and the challenge for local democracy Richard Hatcher 79 British Columbia’s Community Schools: The Return of a Good Idea…But with Contradictions Larry Kuehn 103 Saskatchewan’s SchoolPLUS An Empowerment Journey, Not a Destination Michael LeClaire 109 The School-Community Nexus in South Africa Salim Vally and Carol Anne Spreen 125 1-contents:1-contents 6/1/10 10:27 AM Page 4 Autonomy and Education: The Contribution of Aboriginal Peoples to Education in Mexico in the 21st Century Hugo Aboites 145 Good Community Schools are Sites of Educational Activism Rita Bouvier 169 At The Hub Of It All: Knowledge Producing Schools as Sites For Educational and Social Innovation Leonie Rowan and Chris Bigum 185 Green School Hubs for a Transition to Sustainability Elise Houghton 205 Contributors 237 2-Clandfield:Chapter 1 6/1/10 10:28 AM Page 5 PART I THE SCHOOL AS COMMUNITY HUB: A PUBLIC ALTERNATIVE TO THE NEO-LIBERAL THREAT TO ONTARIO SCHOOLS DAVID CLANDFIELD 2-Clandfield:Chapter 1 6/1/10 10:28 AM Page 7 The School As Community Hub: A Public Alternative To The Neo-Liberal Threat To Ontario Schools DAVID CLANDFIELD The first time I walked into Humberwood Centre I had a strange feel- ing. It was one of those cold blue-sky November days when everything breathes an air of unreality. Opposites meet and collide. What looked like a bleached summer’s day felt like a crisp, windless winter’s day. Humberwood Centre on the outer western reaches of Toronto is a large complex, built of banded sandy-coloured brick and concrete. Its ground-hugging architecture breathes a contemporary corporate assur- 7 2-Clandfield:Chapter 1 6/1/10 10:28 AM Page 8 David Clandfield ance on the one hand, but gives off a sense of medieval community on the other. The main entrance is reached by crossing a moat-like stream on something akin to a drawbridge. This entrance is dominated by the shallow arc of a hugely protruding canopy, welcoming and protective, yet equally menacing and trap-like. Higher up behind it is another shallow arc acting as the roof of a large hall area, lit by a seemingly contin- uous row of glass windows visible under the eaves. Entering a large rectangular atrium, I once again had the sense of two worlds colliding to form something different but unfathomable. Light poured in and there were no dark corners. Ten-foot high square brick columns in two rows held up grey-blue iron posts, tree-like in the way they rose up and sprayed out into four struts holding up the roof over its glazed upper wall. My first thought was of an abbey church with its nave and aisles, lit by a clerestory. And yet as my eyes tracked round, the abbey turned into a shopping mall. There were notices advertising things, large windows beside doors looking like storefronts, and a sense of sheltered circulation. For a Torontonian, it might well seem like a miniature BCE Place, say, a site of commercial exchange, retail activity, corporate headquarters. 8 2-Clandfield:Chapter 1 6/1/10 10:28 AM Page 9 The School As Community Hub All the same, this building is dedicated neither to God nor Mammon; it is neither wholly religious nor commercial. It is a complex of public services grouped into one setting. In place of the side chapels or shops and office suites around the central hall, there are, in clockwork sequence, a public library, a community centre, a joint school gymnasium, a public elementary school (with over 1,000 pupils from Junior Kindergarten to Grade Eight), a public Catholic elementary school (with some 350 pupils of its own), a joint school library visible on an upper level, and a daycare centre. Part of what made it seem strange to me on this Friday afternoon was the fact that the place was almost deserted. I had arrived on a Professional Development Day. The public library, community centre and childcare centre were open but seemed dormant. Nobody was cir- culating in this atrium. Its chief function was evidently to serve as a con- duit and gathering place for schoolchildren, and it was not in use. I had come because this site had been held up to me as a shining example of the school of the future, the school rethought, the alternative to the old way of conceiving and designing school sites, an end to the specialized silo of the single service. This was a version of the community hub: the focus of activity for neighbourhood families finding diverse needs catered to in one public site. And what’s more, the plan contained what was, for Ontario, an almost visionary innovation. The two publicly funded school boards (public and catholic), constitutional- ly entrenched as distinct systems, were sharing the same site, the same gymnasium, the same school library and other facilities. They even held joint school assemblies. The old separate established orders of education in Ontario, the legacy of a Victorian confederation compromise, had apparently found a new plane of co-existence. I later revisited the site when the pupils were there. Both sets of pupils from the catholic and public schools, it turned out, wore distinct school uniforms. There was no danger of confusing the two school populations. The atrium seemed to work well as the concourse fun- neled neat regimented lines of pupils into their distinct destinations at the far end. A security guard sat at the school end of the atrium, “to dis- courage loitering”, as he told us. If this had been my first visit, I doubt if I would have had the same somewhat eerie impression. But the detachment offered by the earlier ghostlike visit provided a point of 9 2-Clandfield:Chapter 1 6/1/10 10:28 AM Page 10 David Clandfield departure for a reflection about the the threats facing Ontario’s public schools today. For some time, the public school system has been under siege from stresses imposed upon it by the neo-liberal ascendancy. The influence of market thinking on public policy has favoured consumerized com- petition among schools. The siren calls of private education, independ- ent of local government, are luring away those who flee diversity and inclusion. Some seek advantage, privilege and exclusiveness in high fee-paying establishments. Some seek religious distinctness in faith- based schools, whose fees are substantially lower. So faith-based isola- tion and consumer choice, contemporary versions of God and Mammon, are hovering over the dream of the community school for all, the dream of one school preparing our country’s future citizens together in all their diversity. And so, ironically, the architecture of Humberwood Centre encloses these hopes for educational integration in a vision that equally alludes to their dissolution.1 So where does the neighbourhood school, struggling to focus its sur- rounding community’s needs and aspirations in one place, integrating services and learning, fit into all of this? Does a school hub model offer a serious alternative framework to neo-liberal public policy, which favours choice and advantage? And will there ever be a better time to find out as we confront a critical moment in the onslaught on public schools? I SCHOOLS AS COMMUNITY HUBS IN A CRITICAL MOMENT FLUCTUATING ENROLMENTS AND THE VULNERABILITY OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD SCHOOL What we are experiencing as a critical moment in public education is another ebb tide of declining enrolment in our publicly funded schools.

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