Keep Catholic schools for the sake of students

Why close a fine system in hopes of minor savings, asks Brett Fawcett.

The Public School Boards’ Association of Alberta has recently launched an initiative invitingly named “Together for Students,” advocating for a single public school system — that is to say, for ending the separate Catholic school system. Regrettably, a vocal minority subscribes to this idea, often because of a lack of information, and so a few points need to be made. The question is not “why should we fund Catholic schools?” The real question is: Why would we want to stop funding them?

Catholic schools in Alberta have consistently been places where students are nurtured into success. Publicly available statistics show that Catholic schools produce higher test scores, high-school completion rates, and levels of parental involvement than their public counterparts. Moreover, the programming offered is universally recognized as first-rate.

So why would we want to shut them down and deprive families of these advantages?

It usually boils down to one of two reasons. One is finances. The claim is made the cost of running two systems is too high. There are two problems with this argument.

One is the fact that running two systems is not that costly. Former education minister David King, another opponent of Catholic schools, estimates a cost of $60 million is barely one per cent of the $6.1-billion education budget.

Is such a trivial amount of funding really worth losing all the benefits to our province that we have seen Catholic schools offer? Evidence from places like Ontario shows that amalgamation can actually end up being even more expensive for municipalities.

The other reason usually proffered for ending separate schools has to do with “unity.” Having two different school districts, one organized around a religion, divides our community, according to the PSBAA.

But this argument misunderstands the nature of Canadian multiculturalism, and it is worth remembering how important the separate-school compromise was to the founding of our nation.

One of the most important reasons Canada became a nation was because its Catholic communities wanted to protect their culture against encroaching American liber- alism from the south. A key issue for them was the right and freedom to educate their children in their faith.

This is why, as Prime Minister Charles Tupper noted that, without Section 93 of the BNA Act, which provided for publicly funded separate schools, “there would have been no confederation.”

On the other hand, movements to close Catholic schools have always been anti-multicultural in nature. Egerton Ryerson, father of the public school system in Upper Canada, envisioned a single non-denominational system as a tool of cultural assimilation for the empire. It is no coincidence that he was also the intellectual architect of the residential schools, the ultimate example of this assimilationist tendency.

Unsurprisingly, Ryerson disliked Catholic schools because they broke up that hegemony, declared that “the fewer of these schools, the better,” and hoped that in the future, Canadians would follow the American model of school funding.

Since then, efforts to close Catholic schools have always had an anti-multicultural undercurrent.

Yes, Quebec closed its separate school system, but is Quebec a good model of how we want to treat religious minorities in our province? Or, to put it another way: Do we want to be more like America?

It’s true that religious demographics are different now than they were in 1905 (although Catholics are still the largest religious group in Alberta), but evidence offered at the Theodore trial in Saskatchewan and elsewhere indicates that many non-Catholic and even nonChristian minorities value publicly funded Catholic schools as a place where their children can be taught openly about faith and God. Closing down these schools would, once again, be a blow against multiculturalism.

Finally, the PSBAA has suggested that there could be public schools that offer religious programming, a proposal similar to one floated by Edmonton Public Schools trustee Michael Janz. At the time, former columnist Paula Simons remarked, based on her own experience with Catholic schools, that they had an ethos which would be hard for any public school to replicate.

As we have seen, that ethos has consistently benefited the children of Alberta. For the sake of students, we should continue to promote it.