Class Dismissed
“Who Killed Canada’s Education Advantage?” (November), by Roger Martin, addresses a serious Canadian concern: how can we keep up with or, better still, stay ahead of the US in the quality of our educational programs? However, his argument that the minor downgrading of Canada’s foreign currency debt was the primary cause of public education spending cuts is flawed. Paul Martin’s budgets had a limited impact on Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution or on anything Ralph Klein did to Alberta’s schools. (Note that other provinces continued to spend at least as much on schools as they had in the past.) Moreover, it is simplistic to claim that health and education constitute a zero-sum game. Spending more money on health care does not automatically mean there will be less to spend on education. Taxation and reducing expenditures give all levels of government a certain degree of freedom to implement their agendas.
The writer chiefly errs in measuring the quality of education only by “inputs,” totally ignoring results. Did the percentage of students graduating drop? Did average test scores diminish? Did the percentage of high school graduates going on to post-secondary education decline, etc.? Not according to any study I’ve ever seen. In fact, since the days of the Coleman Report, back in the 1960s, it has been grudgingly acknowledged that per student expenditures have little effect on achievement in comparison to a student’s home environment and socio-cultural setting. Surpassing the US in education won’t happen because our governments throw more money at schools. It will happen when Canadians turn off their kids’ TVs and cellphones and start reading to them and helping them with their homework.
Craig Copland
New York, NY
While it is indeed a shame that our country should suffer a decline in competitive advantage as a result of inadequate education funding, this concern is probably more relevant to the economic elite than to the common citizen. It seems to me that a more broadly shared fear concerns the loss of human potential when our youth are denied opportunities we can and should provide. Naturally, a solution to this problem would address Roger Martin’s economic concerns as well.
Al Lehmann
Terrace, BC
I appreciated Roger Martin’s concise analysis of government’s attempt to escape fiscal vulnerability in the 1990s. He is, however, back in the “old economy” when he proposes that heavy reinvestment in post-secondary education is a preferred alternative to health care spending. In May 2003, then Bank of Canada governor David Dodge suggested that investment in the early years might provide a higher social return than later educational investments. Indeed, the Human Early Learning Partnership, a consortium of BC scholars, has demonstrated that around 25 percent of children entering public school across Canada are vulnerable to failure. Given that our population is aging, we cannot afford to write off a quarter of our children to un- or underemployment in the knowledge economy.
Ashley Chester
Vancouver, BC
The November cover claims that “health care spending is shortchanging education,” but the corresponding article by Roger Martin makes only a passing and rather weak attempt to establish a causal relationship between the two. Moreover, although the piece tries desperately to be provocative, it fails because it ignores two important truths: one, spending more money on education doesn’t necessarily produce better results; and two, big public deficits are bad for all citizens.
This last point is significant because the only solution Martin offers for repairing Ontario’s education system is a massive financial investment. Since he never says explicitly where this money would come from, I can only assume that he wants to increase the federal debt, which continues to grow larger and more ominous.
Peter McKinnon
Ottawa, ON
Please, let us give credit where it is due. While Mike Harris (a university dropout) contributed greatly to the decline of the Canadian education system, former Alberta premier Ralph Klein (who stopped short of his high-school diploma) set the precedent.
The Alberta Advantage, Klein’s education initiative, was an oxymoron to say the least: it replaced a fiscal deficit with an intellectual deficit that continues to this day. ESL and special needs programs disappeared in record time. Teachers’ salaries were cut. A corporate model was applied to the public education system, and schools resorted to acquiring business partners in the community to compensate for their reduced budgets.
This year Ed Stelmach’s provincial government cut $80 million from the education budget, and they’ve proposed cuts of $340 million for 2010. It seems that Alberta’s intellectual shortfall has risen higher than anyone could have predicted during Klein’s ascent in the early 1990s.
Chris Gerein
Calgary, AB
Roger Martin presents an accurate account of the causes of Canada’s current educational crisis, but I wish he had spent more time discussing the crisis itself. His assertion that “those who graduated from Canadian universities before 1995 simply don’t know what the university experience is like today” is truer than most readers realize.
In the early nineties, massive cutbacks left Ontario learning institutions scrambling to make do with fewer resources. The most obvious result of trying to do more with less, of course, is that you do less. As such, universities dealt with their budget shortfalls by increasing enrolment without bolstering their faculty complement. Carleton increased its student body by 31 percent between 1988 and 2008, while the professoriate grew by only 8 percent during the same time period. Full-time enrolment increased by 49 percent, leaving student-to-instructor ratios stretched beyond a reasonable degree.
Large classes are especially problematic in the first year. In Ontario, introductory courses can be enormous, with many holding upwards of 500 students. Running a class this size is more like babysitting than teaching. As a result, first-year students — many of whom have already received an abysmal high-school education due to cutbacks at that level — do not learn the skills they need to be successful in their upper-level courses. University education becomes like a remedial-learning program. Upper-year instructors spend more time simply teaching students how to write, a skill they should have learned years earlier, and fourth-year seminars, which are meant to serve as educational capstones, become awkward affairs in which students try to avoid being called on by the professor. In the end, Canadian students are paying record-high tuition, and often getting very little in the way of a university education in exchange.
