Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics: the selected works of Ivor F. Goodson
Long Waves of Educational Reform
At Talisman Park, an ‘age of retrenchment and intransigence’ begins in 1995. Following the massive reforms introduced by the Progressive Conservative Government, the range and rapidity of the reform initiatives were deeply disconcerting for the Talisman teachers. The older cohort of teachers, as with other case study schools, found the new reforms collided with their sense of mission and meaning. As the reforms grew in intensity and speed, these teachers experienced a collapsing sense of both commitment and indeed competence.
The new conjuncture contrasts starkly with the earlier period of optimism and change. The market fundamentalist orientations of Secondary School Reform in Ontario (Hargreaves 2003), with its elements of imposed prescription, breakneck speed of implementation, denigration of resource levels and working conditions, and denial of professional involvement and recognition – coupled with a more cumulative experience of reform as being inconsistent or even capricious – have led Talisman Park’s teachers to feel so disenfranchised politically, alienated intellectually, depressed emotionally and drained physically, that many just want to escape the system that they originally entered with confidence, hope and enthusiasm as new teachers in the 1970s.
In the conjuncture following 1995, Talisman Park began to lose more and more of its early cohorts of teachers to retirement – normally in their 50’s, but sometimes in their 40’s. As a result, a young cohort of teachers began to replace them, and with it a new acceptance of market fundamentalist reform became instantiated in the school. A vision of the school as a caring inclusive community, autonomous and academically insulated, was replaced by a school driven by market imperatives and occupying a stratified position in the new market matrix of schooling.
Whilst Blue Mountain cannot provide a comparison with the early conjuncture of the 60’s and 70’s since it was founded in 1992, its evolutionary profile is instructive. From optimistic and committed beginnings in 1992, the period since 1995 echoes many of the earlier findings about the second conjuncture. In the early years from 1992, Blue Mountain sustained high levels of commitment and competence from teachers and from students. But with the waves of reforms following 1995, all this changed. Some of the original teachers left; the leadership of the school became over stretched and uncertain in the face of change driven from outside, and a general climate of demoralization and professional disorientation grew up. As one informant noted: “I think we’re on a track to mediocrity, whereas we were on a track to stardom before.” Such an epitaph marks an incisive indictment of so much of the standardized reform of the conjuncture following 1995.
