Policies to fund private schools – including private, religious schools - with public funds are now common across Europe and around the world, along with attendant concerns that they negatively impact educational equity (Zancajo et al., 2022).

In this paper I present findings from a critical policy study (Young & Diem, 2018) of long-standing debates over public funding of private schools in Alberta and Ontario, Canada. In particular, it focuses on the advocacy efforts of faith-based organizations in the two provinces since the 1960s to secure public funds for their schools. Notably, both provinces have always funded Catholic schools to some extent because of agreements made to protect education for religious minorities when Canada was formed in 1867.

I launched the research project in an effort to understand why Alberta provides public funding for private schools (including faith-based private schools) and Ontario does not. Grounded in Hajer’s (1997) argumentative discourse theory (discussed below), the study sought to answer the following questions:

1)    What are the storylines mobilized in debates over public funding of private schools in Alberta and Ontario?

2)    Who mobilized the storylines?

3)    Why have the outcomes of the debates about public funding of private schools in Alberta and Ontario varied?

Theoretical Framework: The study is grounded in Hajer’s (1997) argumentative discourse theory.  This theory posits that people draw upon discourses to understand social phenomena, including policy. Discourses are ensembles of “ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to a phenomenon, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices” (Hajer, 1997, p. 44). A discourse’s meaning is informed by ideologies in its historical and social contexts (Gale, 1999; Winton & Staples, 2022). In policy debates, actors present their understandings of the issue via storylines. A storyline is “a condensed statement summarising complex narratives” (Hajer, 2006, p. 69).  It defines policy problems, positions actors, and constructs moral and social order. Actors mobilizing the same storyline may present different, and possibly conflicting, arguments in support of it. In fact, these individuals may not share the same goals or values. Nevertheless, their arguments reflect a similar understanding of the social world. Pointing to the examples from debates over pollution wherein actors make scientific, economic, and moral arguments in support of reducing pollutants, Hajer (2006) explains: “the arguments are different but similar: from each of the positions the other arguments ‘sound right’” (p. 71). The simplicity of a storyline conceals differences between actors mobilizing it. Together these people form discourse coalitions.

            Members of discourse coalitions mobilize their arguments and shared storyline in their efforts to influence how others understand a policy and to change (or maintain) it by achieving discursive dominance. Storylines must resonate with socio-historical discourses in the wider context of a policy debate to have a chance at becoming (or remaining) dominant (Fischer, 2003). A discourse coalition and its storyline is considered dominant when many people draw upon it to understand the world (a condition called discourse structuration) and when it is reflected in institutions’ practices (the condition of discourse institutionalization).

Adopting a comparative case study design (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016), the research team used argumentative discourse analysis (ADA; Hajer, 2006) to answer the research questions. ADA pinpoints competing storylines in a public policy debate and the members of the discourse coalitions that mobilized them. The goal of ADA is to establish how the storyline of a discourse coalition becomes dominant. Data sources for the cases included media articles published, government documents, academic books and articles, and interviews with people who have themselves participated in the debate or represent an organization that has engaged in it. Specifically, for the Alberta case, data included 5 interviews, 6 policy documents, and 158 articles from the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, and The Globe and Mail. In Ontario, data included 10 interviews, 7 policy documents, and over 150 articles from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Articles and policy documents were published between 1960 and 2022 for both cases. The ADAs began with a close reading of the articles to identify phrases that represented arguments for or against public funding of private schools in the direct quotes from actors or from opinion pieces. Next, we grouped repeated arguments in categories named to reflect their shared meanings and noted the type of actor that mobilized them (e.g., parent groups, religious groups and schools, public school boards, teachers’ unions). Arguments drawing on the same discourses were then fit together to create storylines, and actors mobilizing complementary storylines were grouped into discourse coalitions. The semi-structured interviews were carried out over live video conferencing and were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Participants were asked to explain what happened during the debate, and how they made sense of what was going on. Interview data was analyzed using open coding. Finally, we consulted academic articles and books detailing the changing cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts of Alberta and Ontario in Canada, as well as other western, English-speaking countries since the 1950s, to help us understand and explain variations in the debates and outcomes in the two provinces.

The findings reveal that faith-based organizations in Alberta and Ontario have: 1) been on both sides of the debate; 2) mobilized the same storylines; and 3) formed discourse coalitions with advocates who desire and oppose the policy for reasons different than their own. In Alberta, the publicly-fund-private-schools discourse coalition has been dominant since 1967, whereas in Ontario the public-funds-are-for-public-schools discourse coalition is dominant. This difference between the two provinces is attributable to political and ideological factors. In Alberta, the Conservative government was in power for 44 years (1971-2015), and it favoured supporting choice for parents via public funding. Importantly, Conservatives relied on votes from rural constituents, many of whom were religious conservatives. Beginning in the 1990s, the meaning of choice was linked to competition that would improve schooling and make Albertans competitive in global markets. This policy meaning fit with the government’s neoliberal ideology, and it introduced privatization policies in multiple public sectors. It also resonated with a population that is generally populist and anti-statist (Banack, 2015). Conversely, in Ontario, arguments mobilized by the dominant public-money-is-for-public-schools discourse coalition reflect historical discourses of public schooling in the province: 1) that public schools promote social cohesion if they are secular, and 2) that public institutions are better positioned than families or churches to elevate a society’s moral, social, intellectual, and economic status. Opponents have also argued that funding private schools is a way to “fund the wealthy” and thus would undermine the dominant discursive meaning of equity in the province. In 2007, arguments against a candidate’s election promise to fund faith-based schools were grounded in fears of religious extremism and Islamophobia. In fact, since then, faith-based advocate of public funding of private schools have stopped discussing the policy in terms of religious parents’ right to choose or fairness between all faith-based schools.

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