It doesn’t have to be this way

Click here for a very thoughtful policy paper from Cardus. It's easy to get bogged down in the details of day-to-day realities - you know, be unable to see the forest because of all the trees - but this paper strips away the clutter and examines whether it makes sense for Canadian public education to continue to be controlled by monopolies. Stipulating that it makes sense for some services to be delivered by government monopolies - for example, policing and defence - the authors point out that governments have been shifting most of their services towards a continuum of public and private involvement in the delivery of goods and services, an approach called Alternative Service Delivery (ASD). "Examples include the privatization of Hydro One in Ontario, the contracting out of food services in hospitals, public-private partnerships on major infrastructure projects like highways, and funding of tuition (though not capital costs) for independent schools in Alberta."

I find this ab initio approach helpful as I think about how the education service could be best delivered to Canadian parents. You know, if a Martian were to design Ontario's education delivery from scratch, there is no way the Martian would set it up in its present form. I assume the Martian would favour continuing government involvement, but would the Martian recommend that the government get involved in the actual delivery - or just regulate and fund it? There is no end of different ways to set up education delivery, and careful thought should be given to "the appropriate mix of providers (public, private, and not-for-profit)... and the extent to which they can or should be exposed to user choice, competitive tendering, and performance benchmarking".

The rest of the Cardus paper looks at why the business community is so silent about the introduction of Alertnative Service Delivery approaches in the education sector while being quite vocal about it in most other sectors.

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