Money alone doesn’t educate

Waterloo Region’s schools have just taught us all a sad but important lesson in tax-dollar arithmetic. You don’t always get what you pay for. In this community, at least, more public money plus more teachers with higher salaries plus smaller class sizes is adding up to mediocre student performance.

It’s hard to reach any other conclusion after massive funding increases from the Ontario government for more than a decade have failed to produce the significant performance improvements teachers want, parents expect and our young people deserve.

If nothing else, this should fuel considerable public skepticism when the province crows about pouring an additional $39 million into local schools in 2017 and 2018. So what? What will it buy the students? Between 2005 and 2018, the amount of money being spent on each local student has shot up by 47 per cent — about double the inflation rate for that period.

While per-pupil-spending was about $7,600 in 2005, it will top $11,000 by 2018.

But if public spending skyrocketed, the results are hardly stellar.

It’s true that as the province pumped more money into local schools, students’ literacy test scores rose somewhat.

But these, also, are inconvenient truths: Local elementary students haven’t kept pace with other Ontario students, drifting to four percentage points behind the provincial average across tests in reading, writing and math.

Likewise, our high school students aren’t keeping up in standardized tests. They’ve fallen from being above the provincial average in 2005 to being slightly below it in their most recent math and literacy performances.

Most sobering of all is the news that the graduation rate for local high school students is in the bottom third among Ontario school boards.

The region’s high schools would have to graduate 269 more students a year simply to reach the average graduation rate.

Clearly, jacking up spending — or making more “investments” as politicians and bureaucrats never tire of saying in their misleading jargon — does not automatically deliver the desired results. More and better paid teachers are not a magic bullet.

Local taxpayers have every right to complain they are not getting good value for their money.

But even more to the point, they are justified in writing a report card that says our local schools “must do better.”

There is some comfort in knowing the Waterloo Region District School Board — which educates three-quarters of local students — agrees with this assessment.

“Where we are is not acceptable and we’re working really, really hard to change it,” says the board’s chair, Scott McMillan.

It’s also good to know the public and Catholic boards have plans in place to improve student achievement. But the public needs more specifics. Exactly why have local students fallen behind many of their peers in other parts of Ontario and in boards that have also received lavish boosts in funding? Can underlying causes for this be found outside the classrooms in the broader community?

Finally, can local boards get remedial help from their more successful counterparts, such as those in Ottawa?

For local students to learn more, our local boards might also have to.