Predictable response and unintended consequences

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The looming reductions in school board budgets should not come as a surprise to anyone. The COVID 19 pandemic has been devastating for most people and costly for governments. School Board business officials have been warning school trustees that the dramatic decline in international students, increase costs for the efforts to alleviate the pandemic’s impact on school children and staff, and enrollment decreases were putting strains on budgets despite the additional money that governments provided to boards. Formal warnings probably weren’t necessary, but some governments have issued formal notice that belt-tightening is on its way.

School boards with sound strategic plans for the provision of education are likely well-positioned to cope with reductions. It will not be easy, but having a plan enables boards to prioritize the allocation of the resources that will be available. Those without such plans will have a more challenging time.

I have observed the school board budget setting process for more than 50 years. The response from teachers’ organizations is predictable. They will point out that children suffer when budget reductions occur, and that vulnerable children will suffer more than others. Thus, when CBC described the likely budget reductions, I was not surprised to read that the president of the BC Teachers’ Federation said:

When budgets aren't sufficient and when cuts have to be made, those who really suffer are children, and they tend to be the most vulnerable children that need the most supports.

As an advocacy organization for its members and for public education, a teachers’ federation must try to enlist support from the public to resist reductions to school board budgets. I get that.

There are a few unintended consequences of making such a statement. First, the claim is misleading. School boards typically go to great lengths to prevent budget shortfalls from affecting the classroom. And never have I seen a board focus budget reductions on services to vulnerable groups of students.

School boards, especially the ones with good plans, keep budget cuts away from the classroom by reducing or deferring expenditures for transportation, custodial care, day-to-day maintenance, district administration, school-sponsored extra-curricular programming, etc. No one likes making such decisions, but that is why we have school boards: to make decisions about how to spend scarce resources.

I do not deny that these decisions have an impact. Some students are affected by these decisions. Their travel time to school may be lengthier, their school less clean and well-maintained, their teachers with less support from district staff, and fewer extra-curricular programs. But it is a mistake and misleading to imply that students are suffering and that the students most vulnerable suffer more. It is untrue.

By almost any standard I can think of, students today are better educated than at any time in the past. They receive more solicitous care and support than ever before. Performance and graduation rates have, for the most part, steadily increased over the past 50 years. I do believe the school system should serve vulnerable students better. No one should be complacent about the equity gaps between groups of students. But, by any objective standard, students will not be worse off because of budget shortfalls.

Besides being untrue, pronouncements about students suffering cause stress for parents, and especially parents of children who are vulnerable. Pronouncements like these erode confidence in public schools and prompt those who can afford the tuition to move their children to private schools.

One only needs to look south of the border to see the impact that 50 years of rhetoric about ‘school failure’ has had on education in the United States. There are two education systems: one public and one private. Over time, the public system has been increasingly starved of the social and political capital that those who now attend private schools brought when their children attended public schools. Even within the public system, boutique programming has increasingly separated students and families by social class, colour, and language.

Few Canadians want such a system. I know I do not. That is why I worry about the spectre of ‘suffering students.’ There are better arguments to make for increasing resources to public education.