Scathing report leaves class size funds in doubt

Internal review says spending launched in 2004 ‘has not moved needle’ on issues

EDMONTON Alberta’s education minister is contemplating the fate of provincial class size guidelines and targeted class-size reduction funding after an internal review found the initiative “does not appear to be effective.”

The government also intends to introduce a new provincial education funding formula by next September, reveals a report released Friday morning by the education ministry, and obtained under embargo by Postmedia.

Whether changes to class size funding would come in next Thursday’s provincial budget or later, when a new funding formula takes effect, Education Minister Adriana Lagrange wouldn’t say in a Thursday interview.

With the review and newly released class size data in hand, she’ll be talking to school boards, teachers, education organizations and others about what to do next, she said. “We have spent a lot of money, and in terms of meeting the objective of reducing class size, it has not moved the needle,” Lagrange said.

In February 2018, Alberta’s auditor general published a scathing report of the Class Size Initiative program, saying governments failed to adequately track how the money had been spent or whether the initiative was achieving its goals. Since 2004, the provincial government has spent $3.4 billion attempting to meet class size guidelines for different grade groups.

“I’ve never been a fan of throwing money at a problem,” Lagrange said. “At the end of the day, if you throw money at a problem, and you haven’t gotten down to the root causes of the problem, you end up just having a more expensive problem.”

With less than a week to go before the United Conservative Party’s first provincial budget, Opposition NDP education critic Sarah Hoffman said she fears the report is a “primer” for a budget that’s miserly for kids. Hoffman does think the class size initiative worked, but that school divisions were constrained by a shortage of buildings in growing areas after years of low spending on public infrastructure, she said Friday.

Alberta’s class-size guidelines were established in 2003 by the Alberta Commission on Learning — a panel struck to look into teachers’ concerns about deteriorating working conditions following an acrimonious strike in 2002.

After reviewing research, the commission recommended the average K-3 classroom have 17 students, Grade 4-6 classes have 23 students, junior high classes have 25 students and high school classes have 27 students.

In 2018, when teachers began raising concerns about large classes, raw class size numbers were not publicly available. Postmedia filed freedom of information requests to public and Catholic school boards in Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer to see how many classes were hitting provincial targets.

In five of the six districts more than 85 per cent of kindergarten to Grade 3 classes exceeded the target size of 17 students per class, the data showed. The information also revealed high school math and physics classes with as many as 47 teens and a Calgary Grade 9 French class with 46 students.

The former government then published 14 years of raw class size data online. Postmedia’s analysis of that data showed that, provincewide, class sizes began to drop in 2004 when the government of the day first began the class size initiative.

However, progress stalled in 2009, and the number of class sizes exceeding provincial targets rose steadily during the last decade.

Schools particularly struggled to meet the K-3 target. In a handful of cases, key academic courses in science, math, social studies and language arts had classes with between 45 and 51 students.

Earlier this week, the ministry also released class-size data from the 2018-19 school year to Postmedia under embargo. They showed that while some class sizes decreased from last year, the number of K-3 classes exceeding targets is the highest it’s been in 15 years. However, the number of classes with more than 30 students enrolled is beginning to decrease.

School enrolment has also grown substantially, especially during the last decade. There were 669,178 students enrolled in publicly funded Alberta schools last year, which is nearly 23 per cent more than in 2004.

According to data from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, Alberta gained 5,956 full- and parttime teachers during that time period, which added one full- or part-time teacher for roughly every 21 new students.

Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said Friday the class size funding didn’t pay for enough teachers, given Alberta’s growing student population. The association estimates the province needs at least 2,000 more teachers to make class sizes more workable.

“I worry a little bit that this report is going to signal that the government is going to abandon efforts to handle class sizes,” Schilling said Friday.