You may have seen some media coverage last week on the United Conservative Party (UCP) 21-page draft policy framework that will be debated at the party’s founding convention in May.
The document touched on a lot of different areas, but the sections of the document that got the most attention was the UCP’s proposals around education.
Specifically, the UCP proposes to ensure equal per-student funding regardless of school choice — in practical terms, that means giving private schools as much public money as public, separate and charter schools — and “devolving decision-making” to individual schools.
We didn’t manage to get out a story on these policy proposals, but the Town & Country did contact the Public School Boards Association of Alberta to comment on the “equal funding” proposal for private schools — see more on Page 3B.
However, we’d like to comment on this idea of devolving decision-making to give “public and separate schools the governance and curriculum flexibility currently enjoyed by charter schools.”
You can interpret this in a couple of different ways; perhaps it’s the UCP’s attempt to ban gay-straight alliances without taking direct action and invoking public wrath.
However, we basically understood this proposal as a way to either weaken school boards to the point of irrelevance or get rid of them entirely.
This issue sparked a very vocal debate in the newsroom. One side argued that school boards already served no practical purpose without any taxation powers, while the other maintained that the dissolution of school boards would open the door to the privatization of education (a point of view shared by education minister David Eggen).
Eventually, we came to a common ground on this point: if a school receives full per-student public funding, then it should follow the provincial curriculum and provincial legislation.
That’s the compromise private schools must endure; they get more freedom to teach what they want and who they want, but also less money from public coffers. (And one can argue that the portion they get now is too much.)
The alternative is chaos.
If you’re a UCP member who’s attending the policy convention this spring, we would recommend you vote this down hard.
