Doing more with less

Here is the text of a letter that SQE is sending out to leading Ontario politicians today. 

For the sake of future generations we need to deal with Ontario’s massive deficit. And, of course, to cut the deficit, we will need to cut government waste, and that includes cutting the wasteful practices so prevalent in our education system. The Drummond Report, for instance, recommended cancelling all-day kindergarten and removing caps on class sizes. These are good ideas and should be implemented, but there are other areas where we can cut costs and at the same time improve student learning.

That’s why I am writing. My group, the Society for Quality Education, has identified several  ways in which our educational system can be made more cost efficient and better for students. For instance, the following agencies should be eliminated or curtailed:

Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat (LNS)
This expense is worse than useless; the secretariat’s activities are ideologically biased and they only depress student achievement in Ontario.

Ontario College of Teachers (OCT)
A pawn of the teachers’ unions, this agency is almost totally worthless.

Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO)
The EQAO’s tests are far too expensive and they provide meagre information of questionable validity. Plus their results are reported so late they lose any value they might have possessed in the first place. Existing standardized tests would yield far more comprehensive and valid information in a timely fashion for a fraction of the cost.

Ontario Curriculum Centre (OCC)
This agency oversees the Trillium List, a list of textbooks approved for use in Ontario classrooms. The Trillium List includes only textbooks that meet the ideological bias of its administrators: for example, there are no phonetic readers or sequential mathematics texts on the list. Ontario children would be far better off if the Trillium List (and the Ontario Curriculum Centre) did not exist.

The government might also consider abolishing Ontario’s 72 school boards. With a total administrative cost in the neighbourhood of $650 million annually, they accomplish almost nothing – and tend to get in the way of the classroom teachers. If anything, school boards are an expensive anachronism left over from the pre-information age. Most of the few functions that school boards are still carrying out (successive governments have gradually stripped them of their duties) can be shifted to individual schools, leaving the province with the responsibility of funding, goal setting, regulation, and evaluation. The devolution to individual schools of the responsibility of hiring and remunerating staff, by the way, would remove the need for province-wide bargaining with the teachers’ unions.

Another option is to reduce the expense of Ontario’s 13 faculties of education, especially given that most if not all of them are indoctrinating their students in the same flawed ideology that already dominates the Ontario educational landscape. If the government were to authorize alternative teacher training, including private institutions, it would not only save money but open up the possibility that better teacher training would become available to prospective teachers.

Lastly, there’s one way to save the government money and to improve parent satisfaction and to improve student achievement. I am talking about tuition tax credits/school vouchers for independent schools.

At present, the Ontario government spends more than $12,000 per student on primary and elementary education. If the government chose to offer a tuition tax credit/school voucher of $6,000 to independent school students, it would save about $6,000 per student. Of course, the government would lose money on the approximately 50,000 students who currently attend independent schools, but the breakeven point would be reached when 100,000 students were enrolled in independent schools – something that would probably happen by the second year of the program at the latest – and after that the tuition tax credits/school vouchers would save money.  And, in a win-win scenario, the new independent school students would be generally better off, plus an exodus of students from publicly-funded schools would galvanize those schools into improving their service.

The bottom line is the Society for Quality Education believes huge savings can be realized in the education portfolio – while at the same time improving student achievement. We would be pleased to provide fuller information on request.

SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT