Mind the Gap

The Fraser Institute is at it again. In their mission to

measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government interventions on the welfare of individuals

they have released a study Comparing Government and Private Sector Compensation in British Columbia.

The introduction states:

While British Columbia’s government has returned to an operating surplus, the province still faces fiscal challenges as it continues to borrow to pay for capital expenditures, thus increasing government debt. In fact, a recent study warned that the province’s fiscal position could become unsustainable unless the government restrains spending in the future (Wen, 2014) [This is another Fraser Institute study called Capital Budgeting and Fiscal Sustainability in British Columbia.]

As the BC government struggles with growing debt and looks for ways to restrain spending, now is an opportune time to examine the compensation levels of government employees, particularly in light of ongoing collective bargaining negotiations between the government and its public sector unions.

The report concludes that

The empirical analysis of wage data and a survey of available non-wage benefit data [there is insufficient data to calculate or make a definitive statement about the differences in non-wage benefits between the public and private sectors in British Columbia, the available data suggest that the public sector enjoys more generous non-wage benefits than the private sector. (p. 28)] for British Columbia indicate that government workers in the province enjoy both higher wages and likely higher non-wage benefits than their private sector counterparts. Specifically, British Columbia’s public sector workers (including federal, provincial, and local government workers) enjoy a 6.7 percent wage premium, on average, compared to private sector workers, after adjusting for personal characteristics such as gender, age, marital status, education, tenure, size of establishment, type of job, industry, and occupation. When unionization is included in the analysis, the wage premium for the government sector in British Columbia declines to 3.6 percent.

Could this be an argument for more unionization of private sector workplaces? Considering the Fraser Institute's vision is

a free and prosperous world where individuals benefit from greater choice, competitive markets, and personal responsibility.

probably not. It is more likely that they are recommending that the provincial debt can be retired by cutting the public sector 6.7% "wage premium."

But the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives portrays the situation differently.

Using data and analyses from the CCPA study Narrowing the Gap: The Difference That Public Sector Wages Make, one of the authors, Kate McInturff, in an article titled Who gets paid more? points out that

wages are higher in the public sector precisely for those groups of people who experience the greatest discrimination in the private sector—because the public sector goes further in correcting those discriminatory practices. Salaries are lower in the public sector for the groups least likely to experience discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

She proposes that in order to bring public sector compensation in line with the private sector, public sector employers would need to

• lower the wages of women, Aboriginal workers, and visible minority workers
• raise the wages of the highest paid employees
• shrink or eliminate non-wage compensations for workers who have accepted a public sector wage penalty because the public sector offered benefits such as pensions
• spend more money on compensation for the workers at the top end of the scale.
  (The highest paid public sector workers see their salaries top out at just under half a million dollars annually while the top private sector workers receive compensation packages worth twenty times that much. The CEO of Rogers Communications makes a base salary of $1.1 million, has a pension worth $1.9 million and receives additional benefits totalling $23.8 million)
• react to market volatility and economic shocks by laying off workers (oil prices fall, nurses get laid off)

The picture that CCPA paints is one of a public sector that is making moves to increase pay equity and shrink the pay gap.

Most public sector jobs are unionized and wages and benefits are collectively bargained by elected representatives who are accountable to their membership and representatives of elected governments that are accountable to their constituencies. This accountability structure means that the people at the bargaining table must balance budget constraints, long term community and economic health, individual rights, and fair employment standards.

The accountability structure in the private sector is much different and these reports show us that the outcome for workers, especially in non-union workplaces, reflects that difference.

Language Wars

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."  

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." 

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

quoted from here.

If you live in Canada you probably have heard about the semantic spat brewing between Oxfam Canada and The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

The Canada Revenue Agency has told a well-known charity that it can no longer try to prevent poverty around the world if it wants to keep its charitable status for tax purposes. It can only alleviate poverty — because preventing poverty might benefit people who are not already poor. ...

Agency officials informed Oxfam that "preventing poverty" was not an acceptable goal.
"Relieving poverty is charitable, but preventing it is not," the group was warned.
"Preventing poverty could mean providing for a class of beneficiaries that are not poor."

'Preventing poverty' not a valid goal for tax purposes,
CRA tells Oxfam Canada
from CBC News

Curious? You bet. So curious that all over the internet people have been deriding the notion preventing something is not a charitable activity.

Some people have been proposing that the CRA mastery over language is actually a sign of the agency's deference to its political masters.

Some have asked about the CRA definition of poverty.

"What about diseases?" others point out. Preventing malaria benefits people who are rich as well as people who are poor. It may benefit people who have less access to good medical care more than those who do but it does have benefits for everyone regardless of income level.

All charitable enterprises have ripple effects.

When I went to work in a community-based literacy program that uses volunteer tutors, I was surprised at how much more time I spent with tutors than I did with learners. All tutors get 15-hours of training before they start to tutor and then one-to-one support from program staff as they hone their tutoring skills.

I was also surprised at how many letters of reference I was asked to write for tutors. Often they used these letters to get into school - especially teacher's college - or to get better work. No literacy learner ever asked for a letter of reference for school or employment purposes. The fact that literacy volunteers can use their experience on resumes and applications while literacy learners often feel they must hide their participation in a program made me question who the real beneficiaries of community-based literacy are.

People in the not-for-profit sector often point to the ripple effects to encourage funding from public and private sources.

In our field, people can be heard to say, "When people learn to read and write better, they are more productive at work which benefits employers; make fewer mistakes and cost employers and governments less in health claims; access social services, unemployment benefits and health care systems less and cost governments and tax payers less." They do this because they think that arguing for how literacy education benefits people living in poverty and people who are marginalized in the labour market alone will fall on deaf ears. People in our field have been encouraged to highlight a return on investment when approaching potential funders. Of course this has led to a situation where funders demand to see evidence of that return over how the work is benefiting the people accessing the educational resources - but that is another story.

UPDATE: I think this blog post should end here. A careful reader on Twitter pointed out that I may be confusing registered charities with non-profit organizations and sent me a link to the CRA page that explains the difference. 

All three think tanks discussed below CAN provide tax receipts for donations and that is why I wrote about them as registered charities. The page linked above tells us that registered charities can have different designations: "a charitable organization, a public foundation, or a private foundation." 

It also explains that 

Examples under the four categories of charity generally include:

• relief of poverty (food banks, soup kitchens, low-cost housing units)
• advancement of education (colleges, universities, research institutes)
• advancement of religion (places of worship, missionary organizations)
• purposes beneficial to the community (animal shelters, libraries, volunteer fire departments) 

It seems that in comparing the think tanks and Oxfam, I have been comparing oranges and apples - or at least oranges and tangerines. Oxfam may fall into the relief of poverty category and the think tanks into the advancement of education category and members of each group probably have to meet different criteria to maintain charitable status under CRA rules. Or some other aspect of the law that I do not understand.

Thanks to @RyanDeschamps - the careful reader who took the time to help me learn more about this. If anyone knows more, please add a comment below or send me a tweet.

What about other organizations with charitable status? How do they benefit people currently living in poverty as defined by CRA? Let us look at a some oft cited think tanks.

What about the C.D. Howe Institute? This is the organization that prepared the report on the Temporary Foreign Workers program we talked about yesterday? Their mission statement reads:

The C. D. Howe Institute is an independent not-for-profit research institute whose mission is to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies. 

Curious. No mention of how this impacts the living standards of people currently living in poverty only.

They go on to say:

It is Canada’s trusted source of essential policy intelligence, distinguished by research that is nonpartisan, evidence-based and subject to definitive expert review. It is considered by many to be Canada’s most influential think tank.

Okay then.

What have they done? Here is what they say on the Policy Impact page:

Institute policy intelligence has laid the intellectual ground for such fundamental achievements as:

• The development of continental free trade;
• Ending the unsustainable deficits of the 1970s and 1980s;
• The development of rigorous inflation targets and tactically effective monetary policy;
• The reform of the Canadian and Quebec pension plans;
• Lower and more competitive tax rates; and
• The development of a key new saving vehicle, the Tax Free Saving Account.

I'll leave it to you to evaluate who might be the beneficiaries of these fundamental achievements.

What about The Fraser Institute?

The Fraser Institute measures and studies the impact of markets and government interventions on the welfare of individuals. ... We are involved in research on a wide range of topics, such as the quality of education, health care, and the overall tax burden of Canadians.

On their donation page they state:

Thank you for helping The Fraser Institute in the pursuit of free choice, competitive markets and less government regulation.

Again, I'll leave it to you to evaluate who might be the beneficiaries of these pursuits but I would posit that it is not only people currently living in poverty.

What about equal time for the lefties:

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is an independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social, economic and environmental justice. Founded in 1980, the CCPA is one of Canada’s leading progressive voices in public policy debates.

And even curiouser...

The Broadbent Institute is an independent, non-partisan organization championing progressive change through the promotion of democracy, equality, and sustainability and the training of a new generation of leaders. We are proud of Canada’s tradition as a diverse, fair, just, and inclusive society. 

But due to their political work, they are not a registered charity - no tax rebate here.

I think we can all can forgive Canadians if they are confused and stunned by the CRA definition of poverty, prevention and charity.

__________________________________________

Papers that matter:

ICYMI, you may find the 1977 paper by Sidney Pratt, Naldi Nomez and Patricio Urzua, Literacy: Charitable Enterprise or Political Right still quite relevant.

This paper was available at Copian.

Write to Jason Kenney to ask for it :)

I have posted it here in the meantime.

Jenny Horsman at TEDx Toronto - Yes Please!

We all want to see Jenny Horsman on the Toronto TEDx roster.

You can support her application by clicking here.

Kate Nonesuch has told us how to submit the nomination form and written us a "cheat sheet" to help us with our nomination form.  You can also go to http://jennyhorsman.com/ to find more about Jenny's work.

Here is what it is like when Jenny speaks



Isn't that powerful? Wouldn't be great if everyone heard that?

Fill out a nomination form and help make it happen.

Sound Science

About a year ago, some of us attended a CLLN (Canadian Literacy and Learning Network) webinar by T. Scott Murray. Most of us were surprised when he used the images of brain scans to bolster an argument.You can see our response here.

Today I watched a TEDTalk by Molly Crockatt (embedded below) about how neuroscientific research becomes headlines and headlines become products.

It seems that we were right to be skeptical about the science behind the claims Murray makes in the webinar.

At about the 4 minute mark she explains how including pictures of brains make us more likely to believe the claims made in an article or webinar.

The science of diagnosing reading diseases through the examination of brain scans may be junk but the idea of using brain scan images to add credibility to your claims is backed up by research. And so it goes.

“If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it … ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told.”

An Icy Alexandria

One of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's most famous quotes is "You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it."

There is some debate as to whether he actually said it but Noah Richler cited the quote in his book What We Talk About When We Talk About War and an excerpt from that book, including the quote, was published in the National Post.

Whether he said it or not, or whether he meant all the meanings that have been ascribed to the quote, the idea that Stephen Harper would say and think such a thing resonates with many Canadians.

This week it is resonating, once again, with people who do research.

In the wake of the announcement that seven Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries will closed this year, the  CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)'s Fifth Estate published a list of the federal programs and research facilities have been shut down or had their funding reduced by the federal government.

It is a long list. People are comparing this to the burning of the Library of Alexandria but a more Canadian metaphor might be the one Tannis Atkinson used in 2009 to describe the prospects for research that could support literacy practice and programs in her last editorial at Literacies: Nothing but ice, ice, ice as far as we can imagine.
 
What about the Canadian literacy library and research list? What would it look like?

Well, it might start with the National Literacy Secretariat - NLS (2007) and include, among others,

• Phase 2 of the Framework for Adult Literacy Research in Canada project to develop an infrastructure for research in practice that would bring together all the organizations, databases and networks currently supporting research initiatives and create a cohesive, sustainable pan-Canadian research network (2007);
• the AlphaPlus library which housed a pan-Canadian collection of adult education resources many of which are not available digitally (2007);
• the Festival of Literacies which was a pan-Canadian research in practice knowledge centre based at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (2008); and
• the Literacies research journal (2009) where much of the research conducted with NLS funding was reported and discussed;
• the database of Canadian literacy research, The Directory of Canadian Adult Literacy Research (2009); and
  
• RiPAL-BC (Research in Practice in Adult Literacy), a grass roots network of individuals and organizations committed to research in practice in adult literacy in British Columbia (2009).

The former National Adult Literacy Database (now Copian), another essential part of the pan-Canadian research in practice infrastructure, saw it's federal funding cut 25% in 2012 and another 15% in 2013 (PDF).

The federal government still participates in research about literacy statistics through Statistics Canada and occasionally the Office of Literacy and Essential Skills invites "eligible organizations" to

"submit proposals to indicate their interest in being part of a Pan-Canadian Network (PCN) focused on improving the labour market outcomes of Canadians through strengthened LES."

which represents quite a shift from the NLS' focus on these 4 types of research

• Understanding the literacy skills of the Canadian population and assessing the implications of these findings (including statistical and demographic research).
• Investigating new ways to assist various groups of Canadians in developing literacy skills (policy research).
• Assessing the nature and effectiveness of efforts to address literacy needs (program-related research).
• Understanding better how people develop literacy skills (pedagogical research).

and on

Research support provided by the NLS should help to develop Canada's capacity for literacy research. This means funding for research projects, for infrastructure, and for the training of future researchers.

Enhancing Literacy Research in Canada
A Framework for the Research Support Activities
of the National Literacy Secretariat, (PDF)
Human Resources Development Canada,
February 1998

The closing of libraries and the defunding of research diminishes us all. Not only do we lose our capacity to recognize ourselves but we lose our ability to wave across the room at international colleagues. 

Occasionally literacy researchers were funded by the NLS to attend international conferences to share research questions and findings and to learn about what was being asked and explored elsewhere. Now if we were to show up, we would show up with a much narrower offering. 

Canada's strength was not only that is supported 4 areas of research that captured a wide range of interests and needs but that it supported both academic and practice-based researchers as well as collaborations between the two groups.

Given the real possibility of dialogue between literacy workers and New Literacy researchers, literacy workers will be able to use the New Literacy research to clarify and further develop models for literacy work. New Literacy researchers will, in turn, benefit from accounts of literacy learning by literacy workers and from ideas by literacy workers about how the New Literacy Studies might apply to their work.

The New Literacy Studies:
a point of contact between literacy research and literacy work
by Guy Ewing, Literacies #1, spring 2003 

A new kind of research is emerging which is close to the ground and speaks directly to practitioners. It is worth reading, critiquing and applying to our practice. As well as reading, we need to write about our work. We can better support our learners and ourselves if we use our own literacy abilities to shape this work that we love.

Practitioners Making Time to Read and Write
by Sheila Stewart, Literacies #1, spring 2003

The pages of Literacies reflect the efforts, from 2003 to 2009, of the research-in-practice community to expand the range of practitioners who contributed to research and to discussions about research and the last issue reflects, well, the end of all that.

What was lost was not simply the NLS but the capacity of the federal government to play a catalyst role in creating a more literate society through developing and nurturing partnerships.

From community development
and partnerships to accountability:
the case of the National Literacy Secretariat (PDF)
by Brigid Hayes, Literacies #10, spring 2009

Right now the climate is not particularly conducive to genuine education. We are no longer allowed to ask literacy for what, literacy for whom. We are no longer allowed to say that literacy is a right rather than a charitable enterprise. Instead, in many parts of the country (those where basic literacy programs still exist), we are told we should be saying essential skills for all, so that the GDP will grow. So these are frozen wastelands, as far as genuine education is concerned. … As far as research that could support practice and programs? Nothing but ice, ice, ice as far as we can imagine.

What is to be done? (PDF)

by Tannis Atkinson, Literacies #10, spring 2009

Okay Literacy people, what will spring 2014 bring?

So why do I hold the image of spring in my mind? When I think of ice, I remember that it breaks by cracking. The huge dissonance between what is happening in programs and the ridiculous rhetoric that seeks to define literacy are creating cracks. Cracks can only lead to change. So let us consider that dissonance as rich in potential to foment change. Let us keep naming what doesn’t make sense. Let us keep clear about what we know to be true and real, and what is just nonsense. And let’s keep speaking out.

What is to be done? (PDF)

by Tannis Atkinson, Literacies #10, spring 2009

Towards a Tipping Point

Here is an old video Tracy Westell made of her discussion with Nancy Jackson about the slow movement and how some of those principles relate to educational approaches. We originally published the video over here on the original Literacy Enquirers site.



They talk about how to convince government that a slow approach is effective.

Nancy says that popular consciousness changes before policy regimes and we will have to wait for policy makers to catch up to what people in the field are thinking. She says that we will have to live with the current situation until policy makers understand that the testing and measurement regimes currently in place are not working and start to look critically at the approaches they are prescribing.

Tracy posits that we need a critical mass of opinion in order for policy makers to recognize what educators know.

In this recent article at Harvard Magazine, one such educator describes her approach and provides one more step towards the tipping point.

During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?

...

Now, the people in this room who are experienced in educational-feedback theory are probably horrified. Indeed, in the terms of educational science, this agonizingly slow response pace would be identified, I believe, as “non-formative” feedback. And yet I would like to suggest that slowness is not necessarily “non-formative”—in fact, in the case of this painting, it is thoroughly formative. Let me be clear that I am not arguing that we should wait 11 months to return papers. I’m talking in a more general way about the need to understand that delays are not just inert obstacles preventing productivity. Delays can themselves be productive.

...

I want to conclude with some thoughts about teaching patience as a strategy. The deliberate engagement of delay should itself be a primary skill that we teach to students. It’s a very old idea that patience leads to skill, of course—but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned. Granted—patience might be a pretty hard sell as an educational deliverable. It sounds nostalgic and gratuitously traditional. But I would argue that as the shape of time has changed around it, the meaning of patience today has reversed itself from its original connotations. The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment—perhaps now patience is power.

If “patience” sounds too old-fashioned, let’s call it “time management” or “temporal intelligence” or “massive temporal distortion engineering.” Either way, an awareness of time and patience as a productive medium of learning is something that I feel is urgent to model for—and expect of—my students. 

The Power of Patience
Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention

by Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2013

Tannis is our doctor now!

Here is good news for Literacy Enquirers! Our dear friend and esteemed colleague Tannis Atkinson has received her doctorate from OISE. Congratulations Tannis and congratulations to us for having this excellent ally in the academy.

Here is an excerpt from a blog post by Tannis that will show those of you unfamiliar with her work why it is so important to literacy learners and workers. Read more of Tannis' writing here: http://utoronto.academia.edu/TannisAtkinson

My dissertation examined how IALS (the International Adult Literacy Survey) -informed policies are changing what it is possible for educators to do when they meet adults who want to improve their reading and writing.  I’ve become convinced that it is vital to consider the historical and political contexts in which statistical accounts of literacy have come to dominance.

What happens when we turn our attention away from the calculations and statistics, and focus instead on the moments in which the numbers were developed?   We notice that calculative practices have been introduced as mechanisms for governing a host of other social realms, as discussed by post-realist scholars such as Higgins and Larner (2010).  We observe that the psychometric framing at the heart of IALS, despite its claim to be reliable “across cultures and languages”, carries forward a troubling history of efforts to rank people and justify inequalities at the heart of liberal democracies (Baum 2012, Fendler & Muzaffar 2008).  And we remember that the IALS statistics were developed to address concerns about shifts in the global economy. The explicit aim of these surveys was not to measure the relative access to information in print-saturated societies. Rather its goal was to inform a range of policies which would bolster the competitive advantage of OECD member nations. The relative wealth and political dominance of these same geopolitical regions, we would do well do remember, was itself historically produced in and through colonial relations.  That position was not substantially altered when colonialism formally ended (Duara 2004).

Perhaps it is possible for me to make these larger connections because I live in Canada. This settler-colonial state is in the midst of a process of truth and reconciliation about the devastating effects of residential schools designed to force indigenous children to adopt European culture and values. These schools were part of a broader strategy to construct Canada as a nation by dispossessing indigenous peoples of their land. Although there have been formal apologies for this history, the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission faces daily battles over access to records, information and resources. The legacies of residential schools, and the ongoing colonial relations in Canada, get erased each time someone repeats the decontextualized ‘fact’ that literacy levels are “consistently lower” for indigenous people compared to non-indigenous people (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada). Such larger questions are not the focus of my research, but do provide essential context for my investigation. They remind me that it is imperative to continue to question what we take for granted about literacy. One powerful way to do so is to investigate the historical, political and economic contexts in which ideas—including the idea that literacy can and should be counted—have developed.

Literacy as Numbers

On June 17th the International symposium on Literacy as Numbers was held in London, England to address the fact that

"Large-scale enumerative projects of literacy assessment are increasingly global in scope and impacting on educational policy and practice."

Here is a video of Mary Hamilton introducing the symposium.



Canada was represented by Tannis Atkinson, Richard Darville, Christine Pinsent-Johnson and Audrey Gardner.

Here is something from Richard's abstract that you might relate to:

Literacy workers experience reporting requirements aligned with enumerative discourses as ruptured from how they otherwise know the diverse, shape-shifting actualities of literacy learning. Experiences of rupture generate reform proposals for program-level accountability that better represents actual learner gains – especially in confidence and social connectedness. However, within an obdurate regime, critiques of enumeration don't stick, and accountability reform proposals aren't taken up. Reporting arrangements are held in place by their attachments into human resource quantifications and jurisdictional rate competitions, and by their parallel alignment with "management by outcomes."

Here is something from Chritine's abstract that people working in literacy in Ontario will recognize:

For nearly two decades federal policymakers in Canada have overseen a project that involves curricularizing the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), creating a virtual literacy for policy interests, and not teaching and learning. In addition, recent reformulations of the IALS testing initiative are being used to classify learners and redirect literacy policy development in order to focus educational efforts on certain groups of adults over others. Based on these reformulations, work is currently underway to develop and widely market to policymakers a comprehensive IALS derived literacy learning system that includes instruction, assessment and program accountability elements.

Leading the IALS curricular and policy projects are consultants who were directly involved in developing and implementing the IALS. They and others have honed their expertise developing various IALS derived curricular products over the years, such as assessments and a ‘basic skills' curriculum framework, the Essential Skills.

 And something from Tannis' abstract that literacy students might relate to:

This paper uses governmentality analytics to examine the statistical indicators of adult literacy developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and first employed in the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey. ...Drawing on empirical data from one jurisdiction in an OECD member nation, I outline how adult literacy policies based on these calculations coerce and punish those who are poor or unemployed. I argue that, by disciplining those who are not ‘productive'—even those who are not working because of injury, discrimination or broad economic conditions—these policies construct lack of ‘literacy' as a threat to the population as a whole. Further, the authoritarian mechanisms employed in these policies oblige (Scott, 2005, p. 25) everyone to comply with the narrow OECD definition of what constitutes an acceptably active and productive citizen.

Here are some of the presenters talking about how numbers represent, or not, literacy. You will see Tannis Atkinson at 4:44.