Why do activists want to shut down Alberta’s support for independent schools?

Polling suggests that this approach, where public funding follows the student, is broadly popular, with 64 percent of Albertans agreeing that students should have access to government funding for the type of school that suits them best.1This is a policy area where polls get very different responses depending on how a question is framed. Another recent poll suggested that a majority of Albertans would reduce or eliminate public funding of private schools. In fairness, this pluralist structure can be controversial. Critics argue that defunding independent schools could return more funds to public schools, although, presumably, these reforms would force many of the independent school students to withdraw and enroll in public schools. Then they would be funded at 100 percent—increasing costs overall, by about $300 million per year, according to a recent analysis—with a difficult transition period for all involved. Indeed, if you know much about independent school funding, you’ll know that stripping the approximately 70 percent could have forced many of those schools to shut down, and would have forced every remaining school to increase tuition. There are also those who simply do not like the idea of non-Catholic religious schools receiving equitable public funding; though, again, presumably the public includes non-Catholic religious families, who have children and pay education taxes just like anyone else.2One suspects that such critics don’t love the Catholic schools either, but have decided that those are too constitutionally and culturally entrenched to be dismantled just yet. Many of the province’s independent schools are simply community schools for observant Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and Protestant Christians, although there are also many independent schools with a particular educational focus: some for children with learning disabilities, others with a Montessori model, still others for children on the autism spectrum. There’s a particularly romantic vision of public education offered by those who oppose pluralism: every kid attends their local public school, and we make it work equally well for all of them. But this vision doesn’t survive contact with reality. If all kids must attend their local public school, parents have much less choice in how they’re educated, and each school more fully reflects the socio-economic status of its neighbourhood. That may be fine if you live in a well-off area, but it’s more difficult if you don’t—the quality of your kids’ education is determined by your postal code. Parents still have school choice, but it’s exercised through the real estate market, so the poor are worse off than ever. And of course, kids and families differ quite a bit, as do ideas about the best ways to educate them. While there are reasons to be frustrated with education in Alberta—large class sizes and increased classroom complexity, largely resulting from our booming population of young families—it’s still possible to tell a success story about how our system works together. On the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, Alberta students performed better than their counterparts in every other province in reading, financial literacy, and science, and were second only to Quebec students in math.3They were generally followed closely by students in British Columbia and Quebec, two other provinces with substantial educational pluralism—B.C. students at independent schools can receive up to 50 percent of the per-student grant, and Quebec provides about 60 percent. Strikingly, we have achieved these strong results with lower per-student funding than other provinces. While these test results aren’t everything, and fellow contributors to The Hub have sounded the alarm about nationwide declines over time, they indicate that we have a relatively successful system here, one that it would be unwise to dismantle. In my view, it’s no accident that an education system more accommodating of different models performs so well. More choices for families means a better fit between kids and the schools they attend, helping more kids feel more included and challenged at the right level. More equitable treatment for different faith and values communities creates a sense of fairness and stability, even as we all pursue somewhat different versions of ultimate meaning. From a practical, institutional perspective, more competition between schools drives innovation and collaboration—one school can try something, others can learn from it, improving results for everyone, including students and teachers in public schools. Alberta voters were given the chance to rethink the structure of their education system and narrow the choices available to families. They declined. When other provinces consider reform, they would be wise to pay attention.