For decades the Northwest Territories (NWT) used a slightly modified version of the Alberta curriculum in its schools. It was recently announced this tradition is no more, and NWT schools will soon adopt the BC curriculum. .This is an unsurprising development for anyone who has been at all involved in K-12 schools throughout the last two decades. An education system with a once renowned curriculum that was held up worldwide as a gold standard, has degraded into another mismanaged, over-politicized, government-run disaster. .In 2013 Jeff Johnson, the Progressive Conservative minister of Education, commissioned a task force to examine how the ministry could work to develop teacher excellence. Predictably, it’s known excellent teachers have a measurably positive influence on students, and poor-quality teachers have a measurably negative influence. .The report from the task force contains excellent suggestions, common sense, and necessary steps that need to be taken to improve the state of K-12 education in this province. However, few of these recommendations have ever been implemented. Why? Well shortly after this report came out, the NDP assumed power. .The NDP’s union beholden, collectivist ideology was at complete odds with the notion there should be tighter requirements for the teachers and administrators who work with our most vulnerable and most valuable citizens. Instead, the NDP initiated a rewrite of the entire K-12 curriculum, and completely discarded a well-tested and established system. Was there room to modernize the curriculum at the time? Absolutely. Yet purely political motivations led to all the extremely positive aspects of a world-renowned curriculum, as well, being discarded. Since the twilight years of the Progressive Conservatives, our K-12 education system has been repeatedly damaged by politically motivated policies, initiatives, and plain inaction, and the UCP are just as much to blame..The political right protested loudly from the second then-NDP Education minister, David Eggen, announced the NDP’s plan. Many Wildrose and PC MLA’s claimed the curriculum was developed in secret, was a departure from the tried and true curriculum of the past, and was embedded with progressive political ideology. While there was some political exaggeration to these criticisms, they had definite elements of truth as well. There were probably some positives to this refreshed curriculum as well, but when the UCP took power it again scrapped all of the previous government’s work on the subject in a very firm and public statement about their party’s stance on the NDP legacy. Yet again, the education system was used as a political football without any genuine concern for what is best for the students in this province..After teaching in Alberta for nearly eight years it continually frustrates me to see these partisan games taking a negative toll on students’ learning. I can tell you first hand we’re now at a point where a new curriculum is necessary, where we need to take a different approach to how we evaluate teachers and other school officials and where we return to some of the practices that generated top-level students for so many years in the past. Unfortunately, the UCP government isn’t demonstrating the will to generate any worthwhile initiatives..The UCP’s own attempt at a curriculum rollout was itself a disaster. Committed to defying every aspect of the NDP’s process, they formally excluded the Alberta Teacher’s Association from participation. A move I would commend them for if they would have then also done the work to seek out the hundreds of excellent educators throughout this province who could positively contribute to a new curriculum. Instead, career bureaucrats, stuck-up academics, and irrelevant out-of-province influencers produced a set of documents that were totally disconnected from education in Alberta. There were numerous instances of language completely plagiarized from other provinces and states, it was developmentally inappropriate for young children, and it did no real work to restore education to a system with high standards and excellent results. In short, it took more than a year and untold amounts of taxpayer money to produce a document that was nowhere near as well put together as something that myself and a few dedicated colleagues and parents could put together in a week. .After this embarrassment, Alberta Education listed job postings online for three positions in the ministry related to curriculum development and learning resources. I figured this must be an attempt to return to something similar to the spirit of the fabulous 2014 report on teaching excellence, so I applied for one of the positions myself and when I didn’t get a reply, I assumed that someone with a lot of experience had been hired to fill the role. However, after some research, I learned all three positions seem to have been filled by bureaucrats from other government offices who have bounced from one ministry to another over 10 or more years. Precisely what people refer to when they talk about the swamp. Now, if these individuals have the right vision to fix a crumbling system, I wish them well. However, I don’t have particularly high hopes. It seems our current government is much more concerned with useless political gestures and performative posturing for the mainstream media than making important, lasting, and worthwhile changes that adhere to conservative values. .Albertans sent an overwhelming message at the polls in 2019. We wanted nothing to do with the disastrous, socialist policies of the NDP or the out-of-touch and elitist values the PCs represented in their twilight years. But the UCP has continuously failed to deliver on its promise of returning to a grassroots conservative government. Instead, it swims in the same political swamp as their corrupt predecessors, giving six-figure salaries to whichever government bureaucrat is next on the list to move up, and allowing big government departments to be ineffective wastes of time and money. It’s time voters tell Minister LaGrange, and the rest of our UCP representatives, they need to act like true conservatives and make meaningful changes to our children’s education system, or Albertans will look for different political leaders who will..Matt Blahun is a high school math and science teacher in rural Alberta
