Schools require flexibility

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/03/2012 (5291 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

School board taxes on property are rising across Manitoba, a wholly predictable result of Education Minister Nancy Allan’s decision to hold operating grant increases to 2.5 per cent, not enough to maintain programs at stand-pat levels. The provincial government says it has no more to give because deficit financing requires that demands on the treasury be carefully managed. But there are other ways to relieve the financial pressure.

First, the government should reconsider the moratorium on the closing of small schools it put in place in 2008. Second, it needs to rethink its election-campaign promise to force school boards to cap the class sizes of grades 1 to 3.

Boards across Manitoba lost the authority to close schools with enrolment so small as to make the buildings unnecessarily expensive. Some schools have fewer than 100 students and some 13 schools were on the chopping block before the provincial government made its sudden edict.

School boards also are being told to cut class sizes in grades 1 to 3. As a stand-alone policy, this ignores the conclusions by those who have looked at the breadth of research on small class sizes. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education found there were notable problems with a lot of the research on the impact of small classes in a variety of jurisdictions. OISE cautions parents (on the page opposite) that they should expect, at most, modest results in their children’s learning from class caps.

The best that can be said is very small classes (well below 20) have shown benefits for disadvantaged students who are at elevated risk of falling behind, but generally, small class size alone in the early grades cannot be said to make a difference to improving academic achievement.

The provincial NDP government has essentially conceded this will be an expensive initiative. This year, it will begin working to figure out how to implement the class cap with a panel of advisers. Some $4 million has been budgeted to get the work started. That cash is peanuts compared to the money school boards will have to spend to hire more teachers and perhaps reconfigure schools to make room for more classes — and this at a time when some school divisions are seeing growth in enrolment due to immigration.

Both the moratorium on school closings and the launch of class-size cuts are pricey policies for school boards, some of which received no more money this year than last year’s total allotment from the province, as their grants in other categories were cut or eliminated.

School boards should be given the authority to close schools as necessary. In times of restraint, demanding class caps merely ramps up the pressures on budgets, when a little flexibility might go a long way — other jurisdictions have given boards leeway to manage classrooms. This allows boards to accommodate sudden boosts to enrolment without a huge disruption to the schools, and lets them manage the pressure on budgets as adjustments are made.

The better idea, the research suggests, would be to drop across-the-board caps and fund schools with high enrolment of children from high-risk homes to enrich early grades to improve teaching in smaller classes. Clearly, in cash-strapped times, the money saved by boards that are allowed to shut small schools can be put to good use elsewhere in the divisions.