There is plenty of blame to go around relative to this issue and not limited only to the Minister of Education.
The forgotten group that does most of the bitching are the families and the actual students themselves. It's not uncommon for a segment of the parents to treat the education system as a state-sponsored day care system of which they expect everything and play no role whatsoever. This is not to say that no one else is without blame, both the gvt authority and groups like the ATA are also deeply at fault in this debacle as well.
In the end, as per the Alberta experience, the best thing that has developed from the education system is the evolution of the Charter and private school systems
Actually you are not very far off the mark regarding your comment on the schools as daycare centres. One of my colleagues was fond of stating that teachers should "Never underestimate the importance of their custodial role."
You are accurate in assessing what many parents and students value about the educational system. A case in point was a strike by a large number of Alberta teachers in the 1990s. I won't go into the details of the dispute as that is not what I am addressing here. Suffice to say that the teachers were ordered back to work by the government with the dispute unresolved. The teachers retaliated by withdrawing all voluntary services. In other words they showed up for work at 8:15 am and departed at 03:45 pm. They refused to participate in any extracurricular activities, including coaching, drama, and many other after-school activities. The response from the public was so strong that teachers were left wondering why they had bothered to go on strike in the first place. Refusing to coach basketball turned out to be far more effective. The government caved in within three weeks.
However, you are overstating the importance of so called Charter Schools and private schools. First of all any school can nominate itself as a Charter School. It simply has to state a goal and then work toward that goal. An example would be a school that declares itself a Charter School and adopts "academic excellence" as its goal. Since that is something all schools do anyway it really does not have to change a thing about the way it operates. In the United States the attempt to replace public schools with schools run under private contract have been disastrous with the quality of education plummeting for the students involved.
Private schools in Alberta have very little impact on the system as there so few of them. In fact private schools are a drain on the system to some extent in that they receive full pupil funding from the government and can still demand fees from the children sent to them. This gives such schools an advantage in the purchase of equipment and also gives the parents of these children a nice tax deduction. This means, of course, that other taxpayers have to make up the shortfall in taxes not paid by these parents.
The fact that so few students in Alberta (and Canada in general) send their children to private schools is also interesting. In the USA private schools account for about 25% of all schools; in Canada only about 6%. It is generally acknowledged that the existence of private schools is an indicator of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the public system. It would seem that in Canada public schools are held in higher regard than in the United States and there is a good reason for that in that Canadian students generally outpoint American students in international testing.
