- Dr. Cameron McCuaig
- Jan 27
- 3 min read
Updated: May 1
Honouring student voice in schools must be a foundational aspect of institutionalized education. Society relies on culture and language to function - communication is the thread that weaves together the diverse cultures of society into a cohesive whole.
Schools exist to prepare children for life in society and should reflect this in microcosm. In this microcosm, students need opportunities to communicate effectively with people who hold different opinions. Through these experiences, they learn how to navigate differences, find common ground, and contribute positively to the “society” of their school community.
Without honouring student voice, schools risk serving only a single purpose: silencing the next generation to preserve societal stagnation for those already in positions of comfort and power.
What the Literature Says
Philosophers and educational theorists provide guidance on why student voice is essential:
John Dewey, in Pedagogic Creed, emphasizes that members of society must first understand how society functions before they can positively influence it.
Bobbitt’s theory of curriculum highlights the importance of culture in society, noting that culture allows individuals to form groups with shared values while still existing within a diverse social ecosystem.
Paulo Freire underscores the significance of the voices of the oppressed, showing how communication with those in positions of power is necessary for meaningful change.
Together, these ideas remind us that society is built from individuals who communicate their identities, form cultural groups, and interact with other groups. Schools, as a microcosm of society, should reflect these dynamics.
Essential Question
How can student voice be honoured in the curricula of government-mandated elementary public education systems?
Response
Through investigation of literature on curriculum development, implementation, and structure, it becomes clear that student voice must be considered a non-negotiable component of public education. Allowing students to actively participate in their learning ensures that curricula are not only delivered to them but shaped with them.
How to Honour Student Voice
Our current model of public elementary education is flawed. It is largely influenced by elected officials who rely on public votes to maintain their positions, yet often lack deep understanding of best practices in education. Decisions are frequently driven by political agendas rather than student learning needs.
The result is a rigid curriculum designed to demonstrate accountability, often measured through standardized testing. Research shows this approach is harmful: **Fu, Hopper, and Sanford** analyzed 183 studies highlighting the detrimental effects of standardized testing on students.
Recognizing these systemic flaws illuminates the *how*: students must be active participants in their own learning. But how do educators do this in practice?
Guidance from Educational Literature
Henry Giroux encourages educators to resist bureaucratic and political pressures, advocating for integrity in practice. He urges teachers to “go for broke,” standing up for student-centered learning despite systemic obstacles.
Goodlad emphasizes the importance of the learning environment. Students should have a voice in shaping the spaces where they learn, contributing to both the social and physical classroom environment.
By integrating these principles, schools can begin to honour student voice meaningfully. When students participate in decisions about how they learn, what they learn, and how their classrooms function, education becomes a shared process, not a top-down mandate.
Honouring student voice is not a “nice to have.” It is essential to the purpose of education itself. Schools exist to prepare children for society, and the ability to communicate, negotiate, and participate in decision-making is central to that preparation. By embedding student voice into curricula, classroom environments, and school culture, educators cultivate responsible, engaged, and empowered learners who are ready to contribute to society in meaningful ways.
References
Dewey, J. *Pedagogic Creed*
Bobbitt, J. Theory of Curriculum
Freire, P. *Pedagogy of the Oppressed*
Giroux, H. *Theory and Resistance in Education*
Goodlad, J. *A Place Called School*
Fu, Hopper & Sanford, Meta-Analysis on Standardized Testing
- Dr. Cameron McCuaig
- Jan 27
- 4 min read
Updated: May 1
Taking the Good, Leaving the Bad: An essay on how one school administrator blends system level policy with school level leadership
The Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB), my school district, operates a leadership model consisting of a top-down hierarchy of policy creation which contradicts its vision statement, resulting in disingenuous attempts at incorporating equitable practices and an avoidance of honouring the voices of those who matter most, the students. Further, my district fails to view areas of growth from any point of view other than that of standardization.
In Ontario, Canada, elected officials have the power to create, destroy and manipulate education policy and do so not for the betterment of the system, but for job retention purposes. My position as a school principal puts two people between me and an elected policy maker. The TVDSB has a director of education who answers to the minister of education and who oversees the district’s superintendents.
There are 161 schools in my district and each superintendent oversees a portion of these schools. Each school principal reports to one of the superintendents. This model, in which policy is created at the top and streams down, looks like this:
Senior leadership in my district is in a constant battle between forcing the implementation of policy created by selfish politicians and doing what’s best for students. They create teaching positions whose sole purpose is to improve standardized test scores while at the same time have a mission statement of ‘we build each students’ tomorrow, everyday.’
The system uses single loop learning strategies (Argyris, 1994) to solve superficially identified areas of need. The following will describe how I, a school principal, navigate district level policy, rely on my personal leadership resources and work to flatten the hierarchy in my school.
The TVDSB has many equitable practices at the forefront of their image but when push comes to shove, they are pushed and shoved to the side to make space for decreased suspension rates, increased graduation rates and better test scores.
As a school principal, who believes in student identity, I rely heavily on the district’s equity practices to push aside their less than equitable practices. For instance, Ontario holds an annual standardized test near the end of each school year. This past school year, my district began focusing on improving overall district test scores in September. I was told that the grade 3 and 6 teachers in my school needed to teach to the test. My push back relied on other initiatives the district had in place including, meeting students where they are and the essential conditions for learning. The essential conditions for learning is a framework which requires students to build relationships in order to feel safe and a sense of belonging before they can regulate and learn. Teaching to the test ignores this framework, which is advertised heavily on the district’s website. I focus on the aspects of my district that I believe are good, in order to steer away from those I believe are not. But how do I know I am right?
The first step is understanding and honouring my core values. These values are intertwined with personal leadership resources. I believe in student agency, compassion and integrity. I also believe that schools are in service of students and require a policy development model that begins with them and ends with the minister of education. I have heard this referred to as flipping the system. This is in alignment with my district’s equity framework, as superficial as it may be.
My integrity forces me to push back against policies that contradict my district’s mission statement, putting scores ahead of students. My compassion and belief in student voice, agency and engagement as well as educator voice, allow me to build authentic relationship from which a holistic picture of the state of our school can be developed. With these core values guiding my actions and equity guiding my practice, I am able to being a leadership journey at the school level that helps mitigate the incompetencies which exist above me.
The authentic relationships I am able to build and foster at the school level not only help set essential conditions for learning, where students and staff feel safe and feel like they belong but also afford me insight into school climate, and individual identity. I firmly believe that schools are in service of students, which may be a shift from the centuries old industrial model. With this in mind, building student capacity and achievement needs to stem from their voice, including the voices of those who support them, their community.
As my leadership journey as a school administrator continues, I find the most success in times when educators, parents and most importantly students, have worked together to identify areas of need and built a plan to improve. For instance, the district, through their standardized testing, identified our grade 3 students as low performers in math. We knew we were quite proficient in math based on far more data than a one off standardized test.
Working as a team, with me as an orchestrator, not an anchor, we identified that it was quite possibly students’ self consciousness in speaking French which was leading to low math scores on standardized testing. Our French immersion school was not doing a great job at promoting imperfections when speaking French, leading to students not speaking French, which lead to students not understanding French as well as they should have. Our plan to promote a safe French speaking culture was developed through a flattened leadership model and likely solved many other problems such as attendance records and participation.
Top-down leadership models in a system where the top rely on their position based on popular votes is not in service of students.
Breaking this system down at a provincial level is not feasible but holding them accountable to their policies which honour student identity is possible. Aligning these policies with leadership qualities that honour students and break down the hierarchy, helps build schools where students feel like they belong, where students feel like they can contribute and feel like they can grow into better versions of themselves.
- Dr. Cameron McCuaig
- Jan 27
- 4 min read
It was my third year teaching in a full day kindergarten class under Ontario, Canada’s relatively new play and inquiry based learning model. One of the students in my class, who we will refer to as Mike, presented me with the catalyst to dive into social change. Mike was of dark complexion and his father was raising him alone. His father had told me that Mike’s mother was addicted to drugs and alcohol during pregnancy and that Mike had a diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). This led me to reach out to a specialist in the field of FASD.
Although I do not remember the name of the FASD specialist I spoke to, a quick review of literature highlights the points I do remember. People with FASD struggle with memory, and rehearsal is a very helpful tool to combat this struggle (Hutton 2021). I remember the specialist telling me she worked with young adults. She would take them to the grocery store on a specific day, at a specific time, rehearsing what it would be like to buy groceries so that eventually they could do so successfully without her by their side. We discussed how Mike could get ahead of the curve, by beginning these tasks in kindergarten, rather than waiting until his late teens or early 20’s.
I took this suggestion to the school principal and was reminded that special education programs are not offered to kindergarten aged students. I was told to follow the outlined curriculum as I should with all students.
African Americans have a higher rate of FASD (Abel and Hannigan 1995) and in Mike’s case; a black student, with a unique story and a diagnosed learning impairment, struggle to access a curriculum that was equitable to him. Mike’s kindergarten experience is unfortunately, not unique and highlights how schools are racialized and a place of inequities.
Schools across North America have been built through a white lens. Policies that one may not even think impact the race inequities of public education certainly do. For instance, “public transportation policies that determine where highways will be built have further increased the access of white suburbs to better jobs and resources [education] and further limited access for non-white neighborhoods” (Blaisdell 2016). This author also writes “in public schools, where the effects of poverty and insufficient and inequitably allocated resources particularly hinder the academic success of students of color” (Blaisdell 2016). Our education system is built on the “tyranny of the majority” (Matias and Newlove 2017). As an educator who left a wealthy, private school for public education in order to better serve students, I am reminded that I am the majority, even if my social identity exists in intersectionalities (Breunig 2019).
In the situation with Mike, as a member of the majority I inadvertently perpetuated ableism; “the systematic discrimination and exclusion of individuals who have disabilities” (Bialka et al. 2019 ). My attempts of providing him with an equitable learning environment ended with the first ‘no’ I received from the system. Perhaps this was because I was a younger teacher and did not want to push back on authority. But more likely it was because “whiteness embeds itself in the epistemology, rhetoric, semiotics and emotionality of today’s sociopolitical climate” (Matias and Newlove 2017).
By not standing up to the policy and the authority and fighting for Mike’s right to an equitable education, I became an active participant in further increasing the race-based achievement gap, defined as “the disparity in educational outcomes existing between” racial minorities (Carey 2013). I had further become a perpetrator of structural racism (Blaisdell 2016).
Mike deserved better. He deserved an educator who not only understood but led with a transformative leadership framework. He deserved an advocate who held “notions of promise, liberation, hope, empowerment, activism, risk, social justice, courage, or revolution” (Sheilds 2010) at the forefront of his actions. He deserved an educator who understood that we live in a hierarchical society and that he and his father were significantly lower than me in that hierarchy (Yosso 2005). He should have had a teacher who asked him and his father what they wanted, and, with Paolo Freire’s work in mind, allowed them to fight for it. He should have had a school leader who asked, “how will this work redistribute resources or access to life pathways” (Miners 2011).
Mike and his father were stuck in a racialized system that was inequitable and un-serving of Mike’s educational journey. Without the work of Shields, Meiners, Carey, Matais and Newlove, the next Mike will face the same inequities.
Abel, E. L., & Hannigan, J. H. (1995). Maternal risk factors in fetal alcohol syndrome: Provocative and permissive influences. Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 17(4), 445–462. https://doi.org/10.1016/0892-0362(95)98055-6
Bialka, C. S., Havlik, S., Mancini, G., & Marano, H. (2019). “I guess I’ll have to bring it”: Examining the construction and outcomes of a social justice–oriented service-learning partnership. Journal of Transformative Education, 154134461984351.
Blaisdell, Benjamin (2016) Schools as racial spaces: understanding and resisting structural racism. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29:2, 248-272, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2015.1023228
Breunig, M. (2019). Beings who are becoming: Enhancing Social Justice Literacy. Journal of Experiential Education, 42(1), 7–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1053825918820694
Carey, R. L. (2013). A cultural analysis of the Achievement Gap Discourse. Urban Education, 49(4), 440–468. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085913507459
Hutton, L. (2021). Improving the behavior of children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Teaching Exceptional Children, 54(2), 97–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040059920977887
Matias, C. E., & Newlove, P. M. (2017). The Illusion of Freedom: Tyranny, whiteness, and the state of US society. Equity & Excellence in Education, 50(3), 316–330.
Meiners, E. R. (2011). Ending the school-to-prison pipeline/building abolition futures. The Urban Review, 43(4), 547–565. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-011-0187-9
Shields, C. M. (2010). Transformative leadership: Working for equity in diverse contexts. Educational Administration Quarterly, 46(4), 558–589.
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of Community Cultural Wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
