Everywhere All At Once

You may have seen the analysis from the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) showing “the province’s education funding announcement suggests per-student funding is poised to drop even further in the national ranking, potentially landing in 10th place among all provinces.”

Oh, our mistake, that wasn't the ATA, but the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF).

The Saskatchewan NDP linked to the STF, but made this stronger claim, “Saskatchewan used to have the highest levels of per-student funding in Canada. But after years of cuts, Saskatchewan children receive less funding than kids in every other Canadian province.”

Neither Saskatchewan or Alberta have cut total education spending, but in a $3.3 billion (SK) or $9.3 billion (AB) education budget there will always be some way to claim there have been “cuts”.

Of course, the STF knows they can make estimates and assumptions that technically can't be faulted for inaccuracy.

They also know their allies will repeat their claims a little less carefully and give them media headlines constantly claiming Saskatchewan funds its kids the least.

And they aren't alone!

A pattern is clear across Canada.

Teacher unions make dishonestly worded claims in order to get headlines about how terribly their province underfunds their students, teachers, and the education system generally.

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation says, “While Canada as a whole has maintained funding for education in line with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) averages since 2006, British Columbia has only lagged further and further behind”.

This union also decries the very idea of per-student funding as “austerity and cutbacks”.

And one of their allies says, “B.C. has fallen behind the rest of Canada in how it funds its public schools. The only province that spends less of its GDP on education is Newfoundland and Labrador. B.C.’s relative contribution to public school budgets has fallen significantly over the period from year 2000 to the present, from the perspective of what the province can afford.”

The Manitoba Teachers’ Society also laments the focus on per-student funding (since theirs is outrageously high).

They and their allies would rather have a funding model that takes into account the following: “housing stability/frequent homelessness rates”, “social assistance program utilization rates”, “regional unemployment rates”, “student physical and mental well-being rates”, “disaggregated student achievement results”, “immigration/refugee settlement rates”, “non-English home language use rates”, “Low-Income Measure rates”.

It will shock you to learn that, when you account for all those and our favourite - “parental education attainment rates” (a measure, largely, of the poorer education a previous generation of Manitobans received) - Manitoba is also “underfunded”.

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario warns, "'[A] reduction in overall per-student funding are damaging the quality of public education today and for generations of students to come.'

 'This government has relied on a narrative of inflated deficits to justify deep cuts in public spending. The reality is that Ontario spends less per-capita on public programs than any other province or territory in Canada.'"

We haven't seen Quebec's teachers’ unions make it sound like Quebec spends the least on public education since that province's teacher strike that stretched from November 23rd through January 8th of this year.

They want to argue the concessions they won in that showdown were worth the cost of once again subjecting students to long school closures.

But for years building up to this strike, they would use teacher salary data to generate headlines like “Quebec Still Bottom of the Barrel in Canada”.

They also used terminology like “classroom funding” to conflate pay that goes to teachers still in the classroom, as opposed to retired teachers, with total education funding.

Thus, they issued statements like, “Quebec teachers deserve better than being at the bottom of the list. Despite all the nice promises and rhetoric, there's still nothing at the bargaining table that will help us fix this. The lack of a clear signal for those who are fighting for the schools is saddening and unacceptable. The teaching profession must be valued and be recognized for its full worth.”

For the Atlantic provinces and the territories, where student populations are lower and the numbers harder to twist, more creativity is required.

These last two examples should suffice.

We've already noted the claim that Newfoundland and Labrador spends less of its GDP on education than any other province.

When faced with the evidence that they, nevertheless, have the lowest student-to-teacher ratios in Canada, the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers’ Association insists that their population density is the lowest in the Atlantic provinces, so “The cost of providing services … will not be the same as it is for our geographically smaller, more densely populated neighbours.”

They do not further explain what that has to do with their lowest in Canada student-to-teacher ratio, but they do insist “Large class sizes, violence in schools, teacher allocations and other supports that are not adequate to meet complex student needs are ‘not okay’”.

“Nunavut has a teacher recruitment issue and it's worse than in the rest of the country because of the low teacher retention rate”, says the Nunavut Teachers’ Association, successfully arguing for Canada's highest teaching salaries.

It's about the only way a territory that spends three times what Alberta does per student can make their funding sound like the lowest in Canada.

So, in Alberta the ATA trots out some witch's brew of mangled “StatCan” data that contradict StatCan’s own straightforward assessment of the question.

But they are just showing solidarity with all their fellow unionists across Canada … by contradicting them.

We've mentioned specific reasons to doubt the ATA's numbers in a previous email.

For one thing, the ATA counts charter school students in its public school population numbers, but then cries foul any time they receive any funding and doesn't count it as public school funding.

That means they are dividing by more students than they are allowing to count towards the funding total.

We would hope the math teachers, at least, would see why that's a problem.

More fundamentally, while some problems require spending to solve, spending is not sufficient in itself to solve any problem.

Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and New Brunswick have each demonstrated this when they have spent the most in Canada and did not see education outcomes rise to meet that “investment”.

Alberta, Quebec, and British Columbia routinely spend near the lowest per-student and see the country's best student outcomes.

Even within Alberta, our highest per-student spending is in the school divisions with the worst outcomes.

Some school divisions receive three times the per-student funding as others, with no effect on outcomes.

That is why asking for spending without a specific, measurable outcome to show the value of the spending is bad advocacy.

Governments, by nature, have to balance spending priorities in a web of larger concerns.

For a government to spend more on education, they either must spend less on something else, or go into more debt.

Advocating for those policies would take the Alberta Parents’ Union outside our mandate to improve Alberta education, turn us into a general-purpose political advocate, and likely force us into alignment with one party - not unlike the ATA.

So, we here at the Alberta Parents’ Union, feel it's our obligation to always go deeper than calling for more spending.

That's because - unlike the ATA - our goal is not to build a monopolistic empire, transform society, or get you to vote for a particular party.

Our goal is to make sure you are equipped with the information you need to make a difference for your kids, whether or not you have the Finance Minister's ear.

We're also here to represent the authentic voice of parents to decision makers at the provincial level, of course.

But also at the school board level, where they do not have a say in overall spending levels, but they can spend what they receive from the province better.

When you join today, you propel forward those goals by making sure we have reliable funding and that we are recognized as an authentic voice of parents.

Working Hard to Watch Everything All at Once,

-Jeff and the Alberta Parents’ Union Team