Reading the education portion of the report by the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances is a bit like watching a golf ball land on the green, stop just short of going in the hole and then roll backwards several feet.
In other words, the panel headed by former Saskatchewan finance minister Janice McKinnon nearly hit upon a crucial revelation regarding Alberta’s education system. They just couldn’t sink the shot.
In the 82-page report, which touches on all aspects of Alberta’s finances, the McKinnon panel talks about how the current enrolment-driven formula used to fund the education system has a number of shortcomings.
This is something that has been stated for years, especially by rural school boards coping with declining enrolment like Pembina Hills. Enrolment-driven funding has led to shrinking resources for rural schools.
To the panel’s credit, they do suggest that this formula needs to be reviewed. But their basis for doing so is utterly flawed.
You see, the McKinnon panel’s view of the funding formula is that it “incents competition between boards at the expense of collaboration in key areas,” including transportation, infrastructure and so forth.
The panel says that school divisions should focus more on sharing services and reducing administration costs, to the point that Alberta’s spending on administration and governance should be in line with B.C.
But that’s a flawed perspective. Anyone familiar with Pembina Hills’ inner workings knows that the division already does a great deal to share services with other divisions, providing transportation to the Evergreen Catholic division in Westlock and the private school in Neerlandia. As well, many smaller Pembina Hills schools resort to offering schools via videoconferencing and the like.
And administration forms an extremely small part of Pembina Hills’ overall expenses — far more is spent on transportation or maintaining facilities.
The panel also suggests that “linking some portion of funding to school boards achieving the strategic outcomes desired by the ministry might create more alignment across districts.”
Divisions already strive to achieve the outcomes desired by Alberta Education, particularly as they pertain to class size targets. So what else can this mean? Is the panel seriously suggesting that divisions be funded based on grades? That’s a terrifying prospect. Who in their right mind wants to move to an American-style system of have and have-not schools?
There may be some good ideas in the Blue Ribbon report elsewhere, but it has a simplistic view on the topic of education, taking the view that all that needs to be done is more school divisions sharing buses and reducing the number of bureaucrats.
