Juno News - More money won’t fix our schools

00:00:00.000 I'm Jasmine Melton, and this is Reality Check.

00:00:09.980 Reality Check is a new show here at True North where we use facts and logic to debunk

00:00:14.380 the favorite arguments of the left. Every week we'll debunk one common leftist argument from

00:00:19.860 Canada. And if you're new to the show, last week we covered the topic of free tuition. The Greens

00:00:24.920 and the NDP, for example, are proposing that we completely abolish tuition in Canada.

00:00:29.020 Obviously, we delivered a Reality Check that not only is this a regressive policy, but actually

00:00:35.000 the reality is government debt is a far bigger burden on students than the average, even

00:00:40.060 doctoral student loan. Now, while the legacy media gives leftists a platform to spread these

00:00:45.200 sort of ideological claims, Reality Check is the only show in Canada with the explicit purpose

00:00:50.140 to push back against these baseless claims. So if you appreciate the work that we do here

00:00:54.980 at True North and you think this is an important program and you want more Canadians to hear

00:00:58.740 what we have to say, then please help support the show. Go to donate.tnc.news.

00:01:04.720 Now to this week's show. Now, with kids returning to school next week, now is the perfect time

00:01:10.360 to debunk some common leftist claims about public school education funding in Canada.

00:01:15.580 I know I've already seen a ton of posts on social media, Facebook, even Twitter, all talking

00:01:21.900 about how cuts to education are happening in Canada or over the course of the past few

00:01:26.880 years and how these cuts are hurting our kids. And a lot of this comment is just recycled

00:01:31.180 from different teachers' unions' paid advertising campaigns. But nonetheless, I think that we

00:01:36.520 have to address this issue because there's so much false information and false claims floating

00:01:41.740 around the internet. Take a listen.

00:01:44.040 Teachers came from across the province with a message for the government. 170 busloads from

00:01:54.860 five different unions. Upset about proposed changes, including the loss of almost 3,500

00:02:02.120 positions over four years and larger high school class sizes. Unions say some classes could have

00:02:08.920 40 or 45 students. That's insane right now. Like, I have like 33 kids in each of my classes

00:02:15.700 and I can barely fit all my desks in there as it is. That particular clip that you just saw

00:02:20.300 was a protest happening in Ontario back in 2020. But a lot of these education related,

00:02:25.780 oftentimes unionized protests all have the same themes in common. As you saw, if you're

00:02:31.380 watching this on YouTube, perhaps you're listening to the podcast, you may have seen people holding

00:02:35.800 signs saying, stop the cuts to education, cuts hurt our kids. In this particular clip, you even

00:02:41.800 saw a child that obviously her parents brought her to the protest holding a sign saying, don't

00:02:48.500 cut my future. So to summarize, the left has two main arguments when it comes to education

00:02:53.540 funding in Canada. The first, they'll say stop the cuts, meaning education funding, they're

00:02:59.060 arguing has decreased or is decreasing, is being rolled back. And the second claim that they'll

00:03:04.420 make is that cuts hurt kids, meaning every time these quote unquote cuts happen, kids perform

00:03:11.960 worse. So if you increase education funding, student outcomes will improve. All right, so now

00:03:16.900 the fun part, let's debunk these two claims that one, education funding is going down in

00:03:21.520 Canada, and two, that if you increase it, outcomes will improve. Let's start with argument one,

00:03:26.720 that education funding in Canada is decreasing. The easiest leftist myths to debunk are when

00:03:32.620 Stats Canada provides data that just so clearly paints the picture that the leftists are wrong.

00:03:38.540 And we're in luck. The Fraser Institute has compiled a report using Statistics Canada data

00:03:43.600 that shows that the growth in per student funding has outpaced both inflation and student enrollment.

00:03:49.900 The study titled Education Spending in Public Schools in Canada states this,

00:03:54.620 it is clear from the data that from the 2013-14 school year to 2017-18, Canada has increased

00:04:01.400 education spending in public schools beyond what was required for enrollment and price changes,

00:04:06.780 contrary to the general perception that education spending in public schools has been cut.

00:04:11.420 So it really does not get more clear than that. Obviously, education spending has gone up faster

00:04:16.700 than inflation and student enrollment. Specifically, the study found that when you adjust for increases

00:04:21.620 in enrollment and inflation, the actual increase in education spending across Canada over this time

00:04:27.160 period was about 3.8%, which equates to, again, in real terms, about $500 per student.

00:04:34.360 $500 per student is no small sum. If you think about it, if you've got a class of 20 or 30 kids,

00:04:39.620 that's a lot of money. And usually when leftists do make the argument that premiers are making cuts

00:04:45.340 to education, their time frame of reference is pretty myopic, meaning they may look at small

00:04:50.340 policy changes without considering the big picture over time. But overall, as I said, the trend is clear.

00:04:56.460 Education funding in Canada is going up at a faster rate than inflation and student enrollment are

00:05:01.900 increasing. But the obvious leftist rebuttal is, okay, if education funding is going up, as you say,

00:05:08.040 then why are class sizes getting bigger? Now, this is a really important argument to address

00:05:12.760 because a lot of times people say class sizes are getting bigger because education funding is going

00:05:17.820 down. We just established education spending is going up. So valid question. Let's explore it. Let's

00:05:23.620 dive in. The reason why class sizes are getting bigger despite education spending increasing is

00:05:29.360 because most of the increases to education spending in Canada, in fact, the vast majority of the increases

00:05:34.900 go into compensation. Again, the Fraser Institute study that analyzed education spending in Canada

00:05:41.300 found that the increase in compensation costs represents 73% of the total increase of $8.2 billion

00:05:49.120 in education spending in public schools between 2013 and 2017. And this leads us nicely into leftist

00:05:56.260 argument number two, which is that cuts her kids, or in other words, we need to increase education 1.00

00:06:02.400 spending in order to improve student outcomes. So as we just saw, a study has pointed out that 73%

00:06:08.880 of increases to education spending went into compensation. That means that 73 cents out of

00:06:15.120 every one new dollar going into education funding will go into compensation for people working within

00:06:21.040 the public school system. So right off the bat, while the left says that increases to education spending

00:06:26.080 will help students, the data actually shows that the vast majority of it will help people working

00:06:31.040 for the public school system. And then almost guaranteed the left retort to this will be,

00:06:36.240 well, the better you take care of teachers, the better off students are. But one thing you'll never

00:06:41.760 hear leftists admit is that the more you pay teachers, the fewer you can afford. And because of this

00:06:47.440 very simple principle, it's obvious that teacher compensation is tied directly to class sizes.

00:06:53.520 So let's dive into teacher compensation. I submitted access to information requests to the Ministry of

00:06:58.640 Education in Ontario, inquiring about average teacher pay in the province. And I got the

00:07:04.080 following response. The average high school teacher in Ontario earned a total compensation,

00:07:09.280 which means salary plus benefits and taxpayer funded pension contributions of $103,926 in 2018.

00:07:19.120 And that year was obviously more of a normalized year before any sort of pandemic related fluctuation.

00:07:24.880 Now the 2018 school year was 194 days long. So that means that for each working day in class,

00:07:32.240 teachers made $536 per working day. Now that was just the average total compensation for Ontario high

00:07:39.360 school teachers. Top burning teachers in Ontario earned a total compensation of $120,097 in 2018. Again,

00:07:49.760 divided by the 194 day school year, that means that the top burning teachers were earning over $619 per

00:07:57.680 day. And for context, this is compared to the median household income. So that could include two income

00:08:03.920 earners in Ontario for that year was just over $61,000. My point here is a simple one. The more you pay

00:08:12.480 teachers, the fewer you can afford. This is basic math. For example, if you had a hundred teachers paid at

00:08:18.720 a hundred thousand dollars per year for that same amount of money, you could have 143 teachers paid

00:08:25.120 at 70,000 a year. So if I haven't already overdone the point, the more you pay teachers, the fewer you

00:08:30.640 can afford. And this has obvious implications on class size. Higher compensation means we can afford

00:08:35.760 fewer teachers and fewer teachers means class sizes get bigger. Therefore it's increases to compensation,

00:08:41.440 not decreases to education funding that is causing class sizes to get bigger. And this leads us to the

00:08:47.280 most important argument today of the show, which is this, as spending on public education in Canada

00:08:53.200 has gone up, performance in our public schools has actually gone down. So PISA, which stands for

00:08:59.520 Program for International Student Assessment, is a international test coordinated every few years by

00:09:06.160 the OECD. And it's basically the gold standard for international educational performance. So this test

00:09:11.920 means business. Now, right off the bat, it's important to acknowledge, typically Canadian students have

00:09:16.800 performed pretty well on PISA. So they have ranked quite highly in comparison to other OECD countries.

00:09:23.760 And oftentimes leftists will use this to say, look, we need to defend the status quo. We need to continue

00:09:29.760 to spend more and more and more, dump more money into the same system because look, we rank highly

00:09:35.440 internationally. But a clear and obvious rebuttal to this is that Canada has been slipping. Ever since they

00:09:42.240 started benchmarking our scores in reading, science and math, Canadian student scores have been on the

00:09:48.000 decline. Consider this Canadian scores in all three subjects of reading, math and science have declined

00:09:54.240 from the respective benchmarking year to 2018. Reading has declined from 534 points to 520, mathematics from

00:10:03.200 532 points to 512 and science from 534 points to 518. So right away, that should disprove the leftist

00:10:13.600 claim that increasing education funding improves student outcomes. Because as we've seen over the

00:10:19.280 same period, education funding has increased, but our PISA scores have declined. Vincent Geloso, an economics

00:10:26.640 professor and senior economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, points out in a recent article,

00:10:32.080 Quebec data show that performance on PISA tests for mathematics has been quite stable, declining only

00:10:37.760 1.5% since 2006, even though spending per pupil has increased 18%. So Canada's been spending more

00:10:46.000 and getting worse results. Why? Here's the problem with Canada's education system. Results have been going

00:10:51.200 down despite increases in funding because Canada's public education system is a government-backed

00:10:56.800 monopoly. Canadians know that monopolies create less choice, poorer service and higher

00:11:01.200 prices. So why do we tolerate the government's monopoly over public education? In Ontario and

00:11:06.480 Atlantic provinces, if you want your tax dollars to follow your son or daughter wherever they're

00:11:11.280 going to school, you have to send them to a government school. You have no choice. However,

00:11:16.080 in other provinces, 35 to 80% of per pupil funding can follow students outside the government system.

00:11:23.120 And this leads us to the solution. Canada's public education system needs more

00:11:27.760 competition and more school choice for parents. Take a listen.

00:11:31.040 What we need to do in education is go to the full voucher system. You know,

00:11:35.360 if you ask who are the customers of education, ultimately, I think the customers are the parents,

00:11:40.320 not even the students, but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers

00:11:45.360 went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools for the most part. What happened was,

00:11:50.000 is that mothers started working and they didn't have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their 0.80

00:11:54.320 kids' school. Schools became much more institutionalized. Parents spent less and less

00:11:59.920 and less time involved in their kids' education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly

00:12:05.680 gets control, which is what's happened in our country, is that the service level almost always

00:12:10.880 goes down. I remember seeing a bumper sticker when the telephone company was all one, AT&T,

00:12:15.680 the Bell system. I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell logo on it and it said,

00:12:20.400 we don't care. We don't have to. And that's what a monopoly is. That's what IBM was in their day.

00:12:25.920 And that's certainly what the public school system is. They don't have to care. I believe very

00:12:29.920 strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher, a check for $4,400 that they could only

00:12:36.160 spend at any accredited school, several things would happen. Number one, schools would start

00:12:41.280 marketing themselves like crazy to parents to get students. Secondly, I think you see a lot of new

00:12:46.080 schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School,

00:12:49.360 they have a public policy track, they could start a school administrator track. So you could get a

00:12:53.280 bunch of people coming out of college, tying up with somebody who just got out of business school,

00:12:56.640 they could be starting their own schools. There are, as you said, many blacks today who are still

00:13:02.960 being given totally inadequate education, cannot be expected to get very far for that reason. What

00:13:08.400 would be your remedy for that? I know. Oh, that's very easy. I would allow their parents to have a choice of

00:13:16.320 where to send them to school, whether that choice is called a voucher scheme, open enrollment,

00:13:20.320 tuition tax credit, any kind of scheme of that sort. They would put that power in the hands of

00:13:25.040 their parents, mainly because that would mean that the schools would have to be responsive to them.

00:13:29.840 As it is now, the school is a monopoly. They need not be responsive. I have relatives right here in New

00:13:34.560 York, uh, whom I've had to intervene for because the schools would not even treat them decently,

00:13:40.720 much less give them access to the information they wanted that they were entitled to under the law.

00:13:45.280 It is hard for me to understand what harm is going to be done by allowing parents to have a choice

00:13:51.680 as compared to having self-interested bureaucrats have a monopoly. So if you're listening to the

00:13:56.640 podcast version of the show, you might have recognized those voices pretty famous. The first

00:14:01.200 was Steve Jobs of Apple and the second was respected economist Tom Sowell. Both were saying that the key to

00:14:08.160 more successful public education is to increase school choice for parents. If you consider that

00:14:13.440 the average per student funding in Canada in 2017 to the 2018 school year was $13,798, so close to $14,000,

00:14:23.760 and actually that went as high as $16,038 in Saskatchewan and the per student funding has only gone up since

00:14:32.080 then. Imagine if you had that money as a form of voucher where you could choose where your son or daughter

00:14:38.080 went to school. You can only imagine how that would change the incentive structures in public schools

00:14:42.640 in Canada. So as a recap of today's show, when you hear left to say that cuts to education are

00:14:47.440 hurting our kids, you can easily shut down that argument by stating that education funding in

00:14:51.680 Canada has outpaced both inflation and student enrollment. So no, cuts are not hurting our kids.

00:14:57.200 What's hurting our kids and the reason that their test scores are declining despite increased funding

00:15:01.200 to the public school system is the government monopoly over the public school system in Canada.

00:15:06.080 Reality Check, more choice, not more spending will improve education in Canada.

00:15:10.160 That's our show for this week. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you liked what you heard,

00:15:13.760 please give us a five-star review or like the show, share it on social media so that others can find

00:15:19.360 Reality Check too. And don't forget to tune in next Wednesday for another episode. I'm Jasmine Moulton and

00:15:24.240 this is Reality Check.

Juno News - August 31, 2022

More money won’t fix our schools

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript