The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools (2020) by Paul W. Bennett

The introduction of The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools captured the thesis: "Everywhere you look, the march of urbanized, bureaucratic, centralized K-12 education is nearly complete, marking the triumph of the System over students, parents, teachers, and the engaged public" (p.4).The author argued that those who are closest to the classroom and the outcomes of K-12 schooling are least involved in making decisions and that high-level school and ministry of education administrators are the insiders who confine parents, teachers, students, and employers to the outside where they are subjected to top-down decisions based on managerial, rather than student learning, priorities.Bennett concluded sardonically that the education system "processes students like hamburgers in a fast-food operation" (p.4).Such stark imagery was paired with other rhetorical devices to dramatize his argument.From the first page, for example, the author personified Canadian education as "the System", justifying this with Max Weber's iron cage metaphor to suggest efficiency, rationality, and bureaucracy have "found concrete expression in … the 'School System'" (p. 5).Such an articulation reflects the lexical tendencies of critical theorists, and the reader may expect a theoretical trouncing will ensue.To be clear, however, as stated on page five, The State of the System was not an attempt to re-diagnose the problems with Canadian schooling; the author sourced both American and Canadian thinkers and scholars who preceded him in this regard.Most notably, he borrowed Lewington and Orpwood's notion of "Fortress Education" (p.13); their imagery of insiders and outsiders was Bennett's launch point, and he suggested their almost thirty-year old characterization of the problems with Canadian schooling has been "virtually unchallenged" (p. 7).Admittedly, the school reform movement has suffered from inertia according to the critiques and commentaries published by internationally reputed scholars.At key historical moments, such as the beginning of a decade (e.g., Sarason, 1990) or a millennium (e.g., Eisner, 2000), scholars have registered disappointment and cautionary tales about reform initiatives.Most recently, Murphy (2020) argued that despite the promise of America's improvement agendas, schools have not significantly changed over the decades, and innovation tends to be more aspirational than operational.Both scholarly work and practice in Canadian education have been and continue to be influenced by our southern neighbour.John Dewey's progressive philosophy, for example, made its way into more than one province, and arguably with residual

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