Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if
authorship is acknowledged]
Concerned
about equity, some school boards differentiate the allocation of resources among
schools. The underlying assumption is that, in some schools, there will be
significant numbers of students facing challenges that require additional
resources.
There
is little doubt that there are additional costs associated with educating
students with developmental disabilities whose conditions necessitate the
assistance of personnel in addition to the classroom teacher. Students with
extreme externalizing behaviour often need placements in designated classrooms with fewer students and
the assistance of additional staff. Students who are deaf or blind often
require specialized equipment or additional classroom personnel to enable them
to benefit from the instructional program.
Equity
allocations often extend beyond the resources provided for such students. Some
school boards provide additional resources to schools in catchments with large
numbers of children whose families live below the poverty line, or where there
are high rates of student mobility, absenteeism, early school leaving
(dropouts), or where there are students for whom English or French is an
additional language. The thinking is that such challenges require extraordinary
effort to ensure that students’ educational progress is commensurate with their
peers who do not face such challenges.
The
schools receiving additional resources for the reasons stated in the previous
paragraph are typically afforded considerable discretion about how those
resources can be used. The decisions on resource use are typically
idiosyncratic. Some use the resources to increase their staffing, purchase
proprietary educational programs to enrich the educational experience, and/or
put the resources to other uses in aid of improving outcomes for students and
reducing gaps among identifiable groups of learners. We should always remember
that scarce resources allocated to one place take resources away from another.
If the other activities are not offered, students are deprived of the
opportunities afforded by those activities.
Improving
outcomes and reducing inequalities are, arguably, the two most important goals
of education. It is very important to know if additional resources help in
achieving those goals and the best applications of those additional funds. Because
resources are scarce, it is important to understand their impact. Program
evaluation is crucial. Boards must evaluate the impact of their efforts to
improve outcomes and eliminate inequalities. But, in the absence of systematic
assessment, it is difficult to know what difference, if any, the additional
resources make, or to tell if the resources might be applied to greater
advantage in some other way. Most schools and school boards do not
systematically assess student performance or outcomes and, thus, are unable to
determine the absolute impact of the additional resources, or their impact upon
reducing gaps.
Moreover,
even if schools and boards did assess performance and gaps systematically, the
idiosyncratic application of resources across schools would make it difficult,
if not impossible, to determine the relationship between the resources and
outcomes. However, the idiosyncratic use of resources at the school level is
often justified with the argument that those closest to students are in a better
position to know what will work.
Educators should welcome systematic evaluation of programs so that they can
demonstrate the impact of the additional resources for which they advocate.
By devising and
applying formulas for the allocation of resources to students who face
challenges, school boards can persuade themselves that they are addressing
inequities. Perhaps they are. They
can claim having tried to provide for ‘equality of opportunity’ for students –
whatever that might mean. But, in the absence of evidence of impact on
outcomes, we simply do not know. That is
not good enough.
Schools
might be asked to demonstrate the impact of the resources they have received:
how have student outcomes improved because of the new programs, or staffing, or
infrastructure. A school might say that it needs the additional resources
because, in the absence of those resources, student outcomes would deteriorate.
Again, school boards would want evidence that is the case.
And
what would a school board do if the schools were unable to demonstrate impact? A
school might argue that the problems for which it receives additional resources
are beyond the control of the school. It might say that poverty, homelessness,
and food insecurity are things over which school have little control. Making
such a statement would be tantamount to saying that schools are unable to teach
children from such environments, an insupportable claim. If it were true, why
would school boards provide the additional resources in the first place.
My
point is that school boards that have an equity
allocation formula but fail to assess the impact of the formula on student
outcomes are not making effective use of their scarce resources. Some might
say that such a gesture was, in today’s terminology, ‘performative’ or ‘virtue
signalling.’