Shifting Meanings: The Struggle Over Private Funding of Public Schools in Alberta, Canada

• In Event: Accepting Responsibility for (In)Equity in Education? Critical Policy Analysis Across Contexts

Abstract

Does public funding of private schools create more choices for parents or does it further advantage affluent students at the public’s expense? The purposes of this proposed paper are: to present findings from our Critical Policy Analysis (CPA) of debates over the meaning of public funding of private schools in Alberta, Canada; and to advance theoretical understanding of how policy advocates and meanings shift in response to changing contexts.
Our CPA was grounded argumentative discourse theory (Hajer, 1997). This theory explains that people use various discourses to give meaning to social and physical phenomena. They mobilize their understandings through storylines: concise statements that simplify complex narratives about what the world is and should be like. Actors engaging the same storylines in policy debates form discourse coalitions (Hajer, 1993) even if they do not know one another, share interests, or act in coordination. Argumentative discourse theory acknowledges that socio-historical structures and discourses constrain and enable actors.
We used argumentative discourse analysis (ADA: Hajer, 2006) to answer two research questions: 1) What are the storylines mobilized in debates over public funding of private schools in Alberta (1967-2020) and who are the actors that mobilized them?; and 2) What storylines are dominant and how have they retained their dominance over time? Our data sources included over 300 news media and academic articles, legislation, government documents, and texts produced by advocacy organizations in Alberta. To conduct the ADA we used an open-coding approach to identify and group arguments in support of and opposed to public funding of private schools and determine how they fit together to create storylines. We also grouped actors mobilizing similar or complementary storylines into discourse coalitions.
Our findings reveal two storylines with shifting meanings mobilized by discourse coalitions with variable membership. Prior to 1966, the first storyline, private schools should be publicly funded, was mobilized by private religious schools and some politicians who argued
for the right of minorities to act independently of state-run secular education. Later, religious groups, neoconservatives, and corporate-funded think tanks joined this coalition, emphasizing parent-choice, austerity, and a distrust of public institutions. The second storyline, public funds are for public schools, has been consistently mobilized by teacher unions, socially democratic political parties, and public education advocates. The dominance of the private schools should be publicly funded storyline is evidenced by the adoption of legislation to partially fund private schools with public funds in 1967, growth in the amounts private schools receive, and the unwillingness of even a social democratic government to change the policy when elected. Its continued dominance is attributable to a provincial culture that embraces markets and distrusts experts, politicians’ courting of rural voters who tend to be members of faith-based groups (Banack, 2015), and societal discourses of austerity.

Authors

• Sue Winton, York University

• Steven Staples