BC Education System
Institutions, policies, funding, Ministry, districts, public education, unions, school boards.
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ParentGuardianExcuse: no excuse for exclusion in BC schools
The reason column in my son’s permanent record is mostly blank. When a reason survives, it’s ParentGuardianExcuse.
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Condition 15: the ethical teacher and the collapse of collective punishment in BC schools
In Milgram’s experiment, 65 percent of people kept shocking a stranger on command. In the variation no one teaches — two authorities, one of them saying stop — the number fell to zero. One dissenting voice in the room stops the cruelty.
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Transparency systems must themselves be transparent: FOI revelations
FOI is supposed to help the public hold government accountable. In schools, families often use it to learn what was never recorded, or what was hidden behind redactions. A new FIPA process analysis report raises concerns about how consistent and transparent that process really is.
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On opposite sides of the same door in BC schools
Families and teachers are describing the same failure from two positions inside it. The system survives by keeping them from recognising each other.
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Try harder, try different
On the pedagogy of “people are not supports,” the research it misreads, and what happens when an idea is transplanted into a starved system.
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A summer reading list for education leaders
The Canary Collective went upstream this week, and the gloves came off. In “Delay, Distract, and Deny”, Wren takes the old public-health parable about pulling bodies from a river and turns it into an indictment: while families stand waist-deep in the current keeping disabled children afloat, almost no one walks up the bank to ask who…
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CBC covers SD8’s elimination of Indigenous Education teachers
Earlier this week we wrote about School District 8’s decision to cut all Indigenous Education teacher positions from its elementary and middle schools, replacing them with support workers — a role with no instructional authority and no capacity to lead the cultural programming these teachers built over years. CBC’s Amber Wang has now published a…
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I’m a seventh grade failure
Institutional capture refers to the process by which individuals — parents, children, advocates, even dissenting professionals — are absorbed into the operational logic of an institution to the point where they begin reproducing its framework, its language, and its priorities, without necessarily endorsing them or recognising what is happening. It is distinct from agreement. You do…
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Children are not pawns: disability, private schools, and budget cost-containment
Public money should not be subsidising private advantage while public schools are told to make do with less. That is the clean version of the argument. It is intuitive, politically useful, and often true. When governments claim there is not enough money for education assistants, specialist support, safe buildings, accessible classrooms, or meaningful inclusion, it…
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Lies, damned lies, and ABA evidence: a prescription for greed
Imagine being told your child needs a treatment. Then imagine learning that the research used to sell that treatment was written, overwhelmingly, by people who make money from the treatment continuing. Now imagine that most of those researchers said they had no conflict of interest. That is the problem sitting underneath ABA. A new Psychology Today article highlights…
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The compliance trap: why IEP goals fail PDA students
Every IEP written for a PDA student begins with the same quiet betrayal. The team gathers — parents, teacher, learning support, maybe an administrator — and the goals are drafted in language that sounds like care: manage responsibilities with support, self-advocate before becoming overwhelmed, organise materials and meet deadlines. The phrases are familiar because they…
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Save Indigenous Education teachers in SD8
Kootenay Lake School District is moving toward a staffing change in Indigenous Education that families say will remove teacher-led Indigenous Education from elementary and middle schools and replace the teacher with Indigenous Support Worker positions. On paper, this may look like a staffing model change. One role is removed. Other roles are added. A budget…
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My Ollie is missing a lot of school
My Ollie has barely left his room since he came home exhausted from school one day last spring. He slept twenty-three hours a day for months. He barely spoke for months and had difficulty with basic hygiene. School chronically withdrew the supports he needed and pushed him to mask and comply until his nervous system…
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BC schools are failing disabled students: an absence analysis
This analysis is based on a provincial FOI request to the BC Ministry of Education, file ECC-2025-52461, which was shared recently, bc BCEdAccess. The data covers absence rates, absence reasons, enrolment, and mid-year exits for BC public school students, broken down by inclusive education designation, across the 2022/23 and 2023/24 school years. This analysis focuses on…
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An initial look at new provincial absence data
A new dataset on student absences in BC public schools has recently been released by BCEdAccess, based on a provincial FOI request. It brings together absence rates, reasons, and enrolment across the 2022/23 and 2023/24 school years, broken down by inclusive education designation. We plan to examine this data in more detail. For now, we…
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Sooke School District (SD62) secondary schools: a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
The Sooke School District secondary code of conduct opens with the steady, reassuring cadence of a district reading its own values back to itself: schools are “places for safe, purposeful learning,” conduct is “a shared responsibility of students, staff, parents / guardians and the broader community,” and every member carries an obligation to “support learning,”…
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They still haven’t learned: POPARD and PDA
POPARD’s internal PDA training materials have been circulating through parent communities this week, released through a freedom of information request to a BC school district, and what they reveal is something more structurally damning than a policy directive to dismiss Pathological Demand Avoidance — they expose the precise mechanism by which an organisation can train…
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When the complaint becomes the problem
The Canary Collective has published a piece Risk Assessment and Liability Management: The Hidden Function of Complaints that describes the process by which a parent raising legitimate concerns about their child’s education is transformed, through careful documentation and strategic delay, into a risk to be managed rather than a voice to be heard. The article…
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The masking tax: how autistic girls absorb bullying invisibly in BC schools
Autistic girls in B.C. schools often develop sophisticated masking or camouflaging strategies to hide their autism in order to fit in and avoid bullying. In the short term this can make them appear “fine” – leading teachers and administrators to assume no support is needed – but the “masking tax” is high. Decades of invisible stress and exclusion build up as girls…
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The cost of defending scarcity: moral injury and the exhaustion economy
The BC education system spends extraordinary resources defending scarcity while positioning that defence as fiscal responsibility, generating an exhaustion infrastructure that operates across every population the system touches—teachers, families, disabled children, administrators, support staff—all labouring to maintain stories that protect individual dignity within conditions designed to make moral action impossible. A recent analysis on Fund…