Matthew Lau: Safety isn’t the only classroom concern in Ontario

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If all goes according to plan, Ontario students will return to the classroom in September. The Progressive Conservative government plans to spend an extra $309 million to ensure safety from the coronavirus. This substantial sum is not enough for the teachers’ unions, of course, who insist the number should instead be $3 billion. The Liberal party, not to be outdone, has called for new spending of $3.2 billion.

Whether the right amount is $30 million, or $300 million, or $3 billion is hard to say. What is certain is that over the past almost two decades, the province’s education budget has gotten out of hand. Whatever spending increase the pandemic requires could easily be financed by reductions elsewhere in the education budget.

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Matthew Lau: Safety isn’t the only classroom concern in Ontario Back to video

Ontario taxpayers are quite tolerant of expenditure abuse — they must be or they would not have elected the Liberal governments of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne to four consecutive terms. But at some point tolerance has to run out, and with government failures in education having become intolerable, now is a good time. After accounting for consumer price inflation and changes in the number of students, Ontario school board expenditures rose 47 per cent from 2002-03 to 2016-17 (the latest year for which Statistics Canada data are available). Meanwhile, over those years there was no improvement in the quality of education.

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The declining quality of Ontario schooling is seen in the test scores from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures 15-year-old students’ proficiency in mathematics, science and reading in 79 countries and jurisdictions around the world. In Ontario, test scores in all three areas — but especially in mathematics and science — have trended steadily downward since 2003.

This decline in academic performance is confirmed by test scores from the Ontario government’s own arm’s-length crown agency, the Education Quality and Accountability Office, which show that only 58 per cent of Grade 3 students and 48 per cent of Grade 6 students are meeting provincial standards in mathematics, down from 70 per cent and 61 per cent, respectively, in 2009.

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The rising costs and deteriorating quality of government-run schools make clear that it’s the producers (the bureaucrats and the unions) that are in the driver’s seat in Ontario, while the consumers (parents and taxpayers) are getting ripped off. The government’s near-monopoly on schooling produces the exact opposite of what would happen in a free competitive market, where consumers would be in charge and producers would have to deliver continuously better goods and services at lower costs or find other work.

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In addition to safety in the classroom, Ontarians should be demanding a complete reform of the education system so as to give parents more school choice. Absent such a system, they should at least be pushing back against the continued torching of their tax dollars in the government-run schools. Some increase in costs to ensure safety amidst the pandemic is justifiable, but there is plenty of room to cut costs elsewhere. The average salary of Ontario teachers is $92,000. Good teachers may actually deserve more but for the vast majority a fair package would almost certainly be much less.

As for where else in the education budget to find savings, in 2012 the Drummond Report on public services, which was commissioned by the McGuinty government, recommended: reducing the number of teachers by increasing class sizes; cutting per-student spending on textbooks, classroom supplies, capital renewal and transportation by 25 per cent; eliminating over 9,600 non-teaching positions; making the teachers’ pension plan more affordable to taxpayers; and cancelling full-day kindergarten.

Since then the province has seen nine more budget deficits, an increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio and an economic lockdown that has decimated large parts of the private economy. Meanwhile, the recommendations to economize on teacher salaries by increasing class sizes have been ignored, there have been no plans to cancel full-day kindergarten and other costs have not been effectively contained. Some of the blame belongs to the school boards themselves: the Toronto District School Board, for example, purposely overpays for contract work by restricting bids to select union shops.

It is long past time for Ontario’s government to curtail this abuse of taxpayers and to bring the cost of government-run schools under control. The tolerance of this taxpayer, at least, has worn through.

Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer.