Past issues of Our Schools/Our Selves highlight paths and variations of education privatization across the country. Research on past emergencies, such as the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans, shows that crises can create the conditions for education privatization to accelerate and expand.
The articles in the current issue help us understand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected this process.
This collection, edited by Sue Winton and Sonia Martin, is part of the CCPA’s collaboration with the Public Education Exchange (PEX), a formal partnership between the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, York University, the University of Windsor, and the University of Manitoba (supported in part by funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council). One of the PEX’s main goals is to enable people to access and share knowledge about how public education is being privatized across Canada.
It is important to remember that privatization exacerbates existing inequities in educational systems. Funded by political states, public education is a “site of continuous cultural struggle.” In Canada, it has always been part of the colonial enterprise and cannot be divorced from genocidal acts toward Indigenous peoples and racial capitalism. The study of privatization can focus our attention on policies and practices that undermine the pursuit of democratic and socially just public schools and the need to double down our efforts to achieve them.
