The Courts, the Charter, and the Schools: The Impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on Educational Policy and Practice, 1982–2007 (review)

This volume follows up the 1986 publication Courts in the Classroom, an edited collection speculating on the possible impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on schools.⁴ This new book provides a view of what has actually happened in this area of law in the intervening twenty-three years, and this time Professor Michael Manley-Casimir (director of the Tecumseh Centre for Aboriginal Research and Education at Brock University) shares the editing duties with his daughter, Kristen Manley-Casimir (a PhD candidate and co-director of the Intensive Program in Aboriginal Lands, Resources and Governments at Osgoode Hall Law School). They and the contributors of the thoughtful pieces that make up the book have produced a work that stands in stark contrast to the grim instrumentalism of many of the books that fill the shelves at KF4150 (roughly, the Canadian school law section). In this zone of the library, one tends to find handbooks or manuals for teacher and school administrators, books that treat law as a set of defined rules and advise how to avoid running afoul of these rules. These books are so relentlessly, grimly doctrinal and positivistic that they convey a vision of law almost unrecognizable to critical scholars or those who take a more sociological approach.⁵ In contrast, The Courts, the Charter, and the Schools is a very welcome addition to the shelves, despite the fact that the editors resist drawing any broad conclusions, arguing that it is too early (although they do claim s. 15 as the most important provision of the Charter in the school context: p. 13). I would have preferred to see more on gender and race and on the ways that schools can both perpetuate and challenge the hierarchies that characterize this society, but I do not expect every edited collection to meet all my interests.⁶ A key contribution of this book is its acknowledgment of the very complicated ways in which law is implicated in constituting educational environments and the need to take a critical approach to the interplay of values and politics in the development of legal regimes. So, for instance, Greg Dickinson's discussion of the rules around search and seizure go far beyond providing doctrinal rules. Dickinson offers an impassioned critique of the conservative stance the Canadian Supreme Court has taken in cases such as R v MRM.⁷ To the extent that courts have treated schools as a "hands-off" zone, they have neglected to truly engage with educational theory on the meaning of schools and schooling (p. 178).

In the closing article, Manley-Casimir and Romero gather together the statements of Canadian courts to create a pastiche portrait of schools as seen by the courts. As they point out, the dry language of provincial education statutes rarely provides guidance as to the purpose of schools in Canadian society, and the courts must fill, and (to some extent) have filled, that gap. Yet the lofty statements that Manley-Casimir and Romero have assembled for examination seem at odds with the deferential approach to school administrators noted by a variety of other authors in the collection.⁸ There is incoherence in this approach to schools, one that sees students as both promise and threat, that treats schools both as fundamental to society and as fundamentally a zone for experts only. School "exceptionalism" allows us both to recognize the critical nature of schools as a site where citizens are created and nurtured and then to turn those sites over almost casually to (at worst) managers and bureaucrats or (at best) caring and thoughtful educators. It is the very importance of schools as sites where citizens are produced that requires a more engaged approach. Law is not a management tool—or, at...