Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 144
members of the family in the wage economy. The two-wage-earner family and the singleparent
family are increasingly replacing the one-wage-earner, two-parent family. As a
result of these pressures, parents increasingly demand that the school system provide the
sorts of services that families traditionally provided for themselves—for example,
normative training and after-school child minding. However, this has given rise to an
intense debate as to the nature of the values that should be instilled in children in public
schools. One problem with this criticism of the educational system is that it may not
reflect an attainable institutional division of labour. That is, by demanding that our
educational institutions perform services as varied as skills training, moral education and
cultural enrichment, we may compromise their ability to perform any of these tasks
adequately.
Unequal access
Despite the belief that government provision of education should result in a rough
equality of educational experience and quality across the system, there is ample evidence
that significant and persistent disparities exist within schools across the public system,
and further that these disparities reflect underlying differences in the socio-economic
status of participating families. 27 This is because the better public schools are usually
located in wealthier neighbourhoods. Further exacerbating equity concerns is the fact that
it is more expensive to provide the same level of education to poorer children than it is to
their wealthier peers, and public schools located in low socio-economic status
neighbourhoods do not receive the appropriate level of funding to attend to the needs of
students. 28 In the US and in some Canadian provinces, the prominent role played by local
property taxes in financing public education, coupled with the ability of more politically
articulate upper and middle-class parents to ensure that their local schools receive
adequate state support, explains these patterns. 29
Inflexibility
Some argue that the public school system as it exists today is not sufficiently flexible to
adapt to the rapidly changing needs of the marketplace or to the diversity of needs of its
students. 30 Because of the cultural and economic diversity in many contemporary
industrial societies, as well as the complexity and dynamism of the modern economy, the
education system must provide more than just “3 Rs” education to all. It can be argued
that what is required is education that is sensitive to the needs of the individual student,
given her cultural background, her natural talents and her career goals. Of course, the
emphasis placed on flexibility will vary according to the educational model one espouses:
adherents of the “citizenship” model will find the system’s inflexibility to be less
problematic than “skills” model proponents.
Inefficiency
Many argue that the public school system is riddled with a variety of bureaucratic
inefficiencies. 31 First, there is the problem of duplication: there are several layers of
bureaucracy at state/province, school board, and school levels performing overlapping