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Voting With Their Feet
There has been some discussion in the comments to “Cutting Off One’s Nose to Spite One’s Face” about whether Ontario’s Catholic school boards are being hit as hard as the public boards by declining enrollment. Using the Provincial Daily Enrollment statistics as presented on our Sunshine on Schools web-site, I learned that the public boards have lost approximately 5% of their students since 2003, while the Catholic boards have lost only about 2.6% of their students over the same time period.
Given the paucity of information about the comparative performance of schools and the fact that you have to be Catholic to send your children to a Catholic elementary school (albeit not to a Catholic high school), this 2.4% differential is a fairly powerful indication of parents’ preference for Catholic schools. Only about a third of Ontarians are Catholic, meaning that the 2.5% advantage translates to more like a 7.5% advantage over 6 years.
Just like Avis, the province’s Catholic boards are aware that they are number 2, and so they are trying harder. Perhaps if the Catholic boards continue to gain market share, the public boards will start to pull up their socks. We live in hope!