Zero Cost Solutions in Education

We are not standing still in education. We are moving quietly but decisively in the opposite direction of progress, and if we are not careful, that shift will happen fast.

Budgets will tighten. Governments will say there is no more money. Teachers, already stretched beyond reason, will point to rising rates of violence, burnout, and unmanageable classrooms, and systems will begin protecting themselves. Somewhere in the noise, the voices that should matter most, the voices of children, will be muted, minimized, or treated as inconvenient.

It will not be the loudest voices that disappear first. It will be the marginalized and the excluded, the children who already sit at the edges of classrooms and policies, the ones for whom school was never designed but who are still expected to adapt to it without complaint.

Exclusion will return under a new language.
Segregation will be justified.

This is how progress is lost. Not all at once, but through a slow narrowing of what is considered reasonable, who is teachable, and where we put the effort.

What makes this moment particularly painful is that some of the most meaningful solutions cost nothing at all. They do not require new funding models, staffing allocations, or glossy policy announcements. That is not to say those things would not help, but they are not as necessary as we have been led to believe. Rethinking education to make it more accessible for all can be achieved if we have the courage to rethink the expectations we place on children.

Many of our expectations are not neutral. They are built around norms, ways of moving, learning, regulating, communicating, and tolerating discomfort that reflect a narrow definition of what a “successful” student looks like. These norms are often treated as natural or necessary when in fact they are cultural, historical, and deeply exclusionary.

Our education system was built on a factory model. Efficiency. Productivity. A conveyor belt that moves children through grades, assuming that within a 12-month period, children are more alike than different. Of course, this assumption was flawed. In response, a sorting system was created to measure, document, and treat those who fell outside that narrow window.

When we later tried to push inclusion into an education model that was never designed for it, we created a significant problem. We know that developmental variability within a single year is vast, and no amount of universal design alone can accommodate that reality. Education remains one of the most rigid systems we have, but it does not have to be.

When British Columbia redesigned the curriculum, there was hope that real change would follow. Instead, millions of dollars were spent attempting to repackage the curriculum as “progressive” by focusing on different ways children think, learn, and grow, with core competencies layered on as an overarching framework. On paper, it sounded promising. In practice, very little changed.

Many expectations are still framed as non-negotiable in the name of the curriculum. Things we must teach. Timelines we must follow. Outcomes we must produce if we hope to create an educated citizen. Along the way, education has quietly confused standardization with rigour and compliance with learning. 

Learning still looks like sitting still, listening for periods far beyond what is developmentally appropriate, producing work that is neither relevant nor meaningful, and the gradual stripping away of play and creativity.

Redefining expectations does not mean abandoning education. It means individualizing it. It means meeting kids where they are rather than where we expect them to be. It means responding rather than reacting. It means recognizing that access, dignity, and growth do not require every child to meet the same benchmarks at the same time, in the same way.

And that costs nothing.

What it does cost is certainty and control. It costs the comfort adults derive from predictability and uniformity, and it threatens something else that rarely gets named: the funding models that underpin education.

There is an entire system built around allocating resources based on deficit, disruption, and documentation. Categories, thresholds, and compliance measures determine who qualifies for support and who does not. Funding models reward complexity, pathology, and crisis rather than prevention, flexibility, and trust.

A solution that is free does not fit neatly into these models.
It cannot be counted, categorized, or justified through paperwork.
It does not trigger additional allocations or protect institutions from risk.

And so it is dismissed.

Dropping or reshaping expectations is framed as dangerous. It is described as lowering standards, giving in, or letting children have their own way. It feels risky to adults because it challenges deeply held beliefs about authority, success, and responsibility.

But to many children, especially those who have been marginalized by the system, it feels like relief. Like honesty. Like being seen.

It feels authentic.

We must be willing to face this and say it aloud. Schools were not designed equally for all children. They never were, and no amount of layered policy, revised funding models, redesigned curriculum, or new programs will fix that reality if we refuse to name the context in which education operates.

When we ignore context, systems default to control. When we ignore differences, systems drift toward exclusion. When we ignore children’s rights, they become optional and are easily sidelined when things get hard.

And things are getting hard.

If we do not collectively speak up now, parents, educators, administrators, and communities, we will watch exclusion rise again under the banner of necessity. We will hear that there was no other choice, that safety required it, that the system did its best.

But history will tell a different story.

It will say that we knew better.
That we had alternatives.
That we were warned.

Zero cost solutions exist. They live in our willingness to question whose comfort we are protecting, whose voices we are amplifying, whose norms we are enforcing, and whose needs we are willing to ignore when resources feel scarce.

Progress does not disappear because we lack money.
It disappears when we lack courage.

And the cost of that loss is never paid by systems.
It is paid by children.