SUMMARY

Public Interest Alberta's advocacy for K-12 education in Alberta centres around the following priorities:

1. The provincial government needs to commit to systematically increasing funding to reduce class sizes, and to improve learning and teaching conditions over the next four years. The provincial government also needs to embed class size and composition into negotiated collective agreements with teachers and others who work in education.

2. Phase out all funding to private schools and homeschooling, and absorb charter schools into the existing public system.

3. Abandon the government’s current program of curriculum revision, and begin anew with a curriculum development process based on widespread and inclusive consultation, clear understandings of how students learn, systematic and informed decisions about current and future learning needs, and an implementation plan that has the support of those who will be engaged in its delivery.

4. Priority Change: Commit to identify, provide and fully fund all appropriate supports for the learning needs of all students in the form of teacher assistants and other specialized personnel, as well as resources at the classroom, school and system levels over the four-year period of the government’s mandate.

5. Expand Alberta’s kindergarten program to include fully funded, full-day kindergarten accessible to all students.

6. Commit to building, implementing and funding a comprehensive, high quality early childhood education and care system accessible to all families, regardless of their ability to pay.

7. Reinstate and expand the PUF funding.

8. Systematically address the needs of children living in poverty through a comprehensive framework to prevent, reduce and ultimately eliminate poverty in Alberta’s families.

INTRODUCTION

For purposes of this document, public education encompasses schools administered by publicly elected Public, Catholic and Francophone School Boards.

Alberta's provincial election scheduled for May of 2023 offers a superb opportunity for much-needed advocacy in support of Alberta’s cherished, but increasingly-threatened, system of public education. Our once-envied K-12 public education system has been badly battered by underfunding, neglect, lack of support, and misguided public policies in recent years — all compounded by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teachers, students and their families are rightfully frustrated with large class sizes, lack of support for student needs, regressive curriculum and assessment processes, and a growing inability to provide the classroom learning conditions that are necessary to develop the full potential of all of our children and youth. And conditions are getting worse, rather than better.

Public education is our single best investment into our individual and collective futures, and is at the core of building a strong, prosperous and democratic society.

Instead of allowing this distressing decline to continue, we must make a full commitment to strengthening this essential public institution.

ISSUES & DIRECTIONS

1. Class size, composition and classroom learning conditions

nstead of becoming smaller and higher in quality, class sizes have grown much larger over the past decade in far too many schools. At the same time, the needs of students are increasingly more complex, while the various supports necessary to meet the needs of these students are either diminishing or absent.

The primary cause of these unacceptable conditions is a lack of sustained and adequate funding provided by provincial governments. School boards have no choice but to consistently increase their class sizes and cut back on program supports in order to deal with these budget shortfalls.

In order to ensure that all children can develop to their full potential regardless of their individual circumstances, we need to commit to substantially increasing financial supports for our Public, Separate and Francophone school systems in smart and effective ways.

The provincial government must work with school boards and other partners to reinstate the systemic collection of data and reporting on class size and composition in order to better inform decision making regarding class sizes, composition and adequacy of supports.

Priority Change: The provincial government needs to commit to systematically increasing funding to reduce class sizes, and to improve learning and teaching conditions over the next four years. The provincial government also needs to embed class size and composition into negotiated collective agreements with teachers and others who work in education.

Such collective agreements exist in multiple provinces and territories within Canada as well as in many other jurisdictions across North America. Class size limits and class composition must take complex student needs and multi-grade configurations into consideration. Phasing the class size reductions over the usual four-year life of the provincial government will allow school boards to hire the new teachers and additional staff necessary to allow for smaller class sizes and better supports. Given the tenuous and temporary nature of efforts to reduce class size in the past, the only way to ensure that class size reductions are properly protected is to negotiate them into collective agreements. These changes to collective agreements will ensure that improvements can be made in systematic ways that are sustained over time.

2. Strengthening our system of public education under democratically elected school boards by reversing privatization in education

Not only have our public education systems (Public, Catholic and Francophone school boards) been increasingly starved of necessary funding, substantial funding has also been systematically diverted to privatization efforts under the misleading narrative of “enhancing parent choice” — which has turned out to be a cover for “privatization by stealth.”

Alberta spends in excess of $200 million per year providing subsidies to private schools — which are in direct competition with our public systems. (Some of these subsidies go to expensive, elite private schools, where annual tuition fees can be higher than $20,000 per student in some cases.) Alberta’s growing number of charter schools are, in reality, private schools masquerading as public schools: they receive full funding, but are not accountable to democratically elected school boards, and can even choose or reject students — which are both key characteristics of private schools. Home schooling has also been increasingly subsidized by Alberta’s government.

The adverse consequences of diverting funds from the public system are well documented, having immediate and long-term impacts on the system. The $200 million per year being provided to augment private schools would be a boon to public school divisions as they struggle to meet the demands of increasing numbers of students with an ever-widening diversity of needs — all of whom have the right to quality, publicly-funded education.

Priority Change: Phase out all funding to private schools and homeschooling, and absorb charter schools into the existing public system.

Over a four-year period, the provincial government must end funding to all private schools - with the exception of those providing services to high-needs students (which should be fully funded and brought within our public education systems) - and reallocate the funding to our public systems.

The category and “experiment” of charter schools should be ended, and current charter schools should be given the option of operating as a regular part of our public education system, or becoming a private school.

Parents may have a right to home school their children, but that choice should not be subsidized by the public. Strong regulations and oversight must be applied to home school programs and systems to ensure the highest quality of education that follows the provincial curricula and that will allow for transition into the public school system or post-secondary programs of study.

3. Curriculum and assessment issues

The current situation with respect to curriculum in Alberta is best described as a national embarrassment and a self-inflicted wound. The province’s curriculum and assessment program that once received international acclaim has been debased and undermined by the current government’s policies, which are clearly rooted in a combination of ideology, arrogance and incompetence.

The government’s curriculum efforts have sparked unprecedented dismay and comprehensive criticism from across the education spectrum. Parents are upset. Teachers have been shut out and have rejected the entire venture. Academic experts have criticized the curriculum for not being based on current research, and school boards have resisted piloting and implementation.

All curricula need revision over time, but the Alberta government’s current program and approach cannot be salvaged. Both the product and the process are fundamentally flawed and have destroyed the confidence of the profession, education experts and much of the public. The current program must be scrapped as a first step to to initiating a very different but necessary process to create high-quality curricula that will support an excellent education for all Alberta students.

Priority Change: Abandon the government’s current program of curriculum revision, and begin anew with a curriculum development process based on widespread and inclusive consultation, clear understandings of how students learn, systematic and informed decisions about current and future learning needs, and an implementation plan that has the support of those who will be engaged in its delivery.

A well-designed curriculum must also be grounded in educational research, be inclusive of multiple perspectives, respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and include the skills of critical and creative thinking to prepare students for an uncertain and ever-changing future.

There is widespread willingness among the wide range of individuals, organizations and groups who care about education — teachers, parents, administrators, academics, school boards and others — to work together in respectful, positive and constructive ways to develop and implement a first-rate K-12 curriculum that will meet the needs of students and society in the years ahead. In order to do so, we need a government willing to abandon this manifestly inappropriate program, and to commit to building new curricula through a process that has the confidence of those who are the most engaged in and affected by the province's educational system.

4. Supporting students and their learning

In order to achieve the fundamental goal of public education — that is, developing the full potential of all children and youth — we clearly need to do much more than reduce class sizes to reasonable levels (such as those recommended by the  Alberta Commission on Learning in 2003).

Our students are increasingly diverse in their circumstances and needs, and their needs are increasingly urgent. Instead of better meeting these needs, the provision of vital supports for learning has consistently declined over the past decade — particularly during the time of the pandemic, when more than 25,000 educational support workers were initially laid off. Program Unit Funding, or PUF, was reduced by as much as 75% in some divisions, resulting in the dismantling of valuable supports for preschool and kindergarten students with special needs.

The failure to provide these necessary supports, particularly in the case of high needs students, has led to frustration and guilt on the part of teachers — and legitimate anger on the part of many parents. It is no exaggeration to say that this failure has compromised the education, and ultimately the future, of too many students. This situation is not only unnecessary, but utterly unacceptable in a wealthy province such as Alberta — it belies any claims of commitment to equity in education.

Priority Change: Commit to identify, provide and fully fund all appropriate supports for the learning needs of all students in the form of teacher assistants and other specialized personnel, as well as resources at the classroom, school and system levels over the four-year period of the government’s mandate.

At the classroom level, the greatest need is for well-trained and properly-compensated teacher assistants/aides, especially in regard to high-needs students and those with learning accommodations.

n order to achieve equitable learning opportunities for all students in our classrooms, a wide range of other supports are necessary, either at the classroom or school level. These include fully-funded music and art programs, fully-funded libraries with teacher librarians, and all program requirements (musical instruments, computers, playground equipment) funded by the government rather than through fundraising or school fees.

At the system level, all schools must have access to one or more dedicated and appropriate paraprofessional support (speech and language pathologists, physiotherapists and nurses). Food programs — especially for the most vulnerable. schools and students — also flourish when the wrap-around supports are provided to support their success.

In addition, we need a dramatic infusion of resources to school systems to ensure that schools are not only built where needed, but also maintained and renovated on a consistent basis in order to ensure safe and appropriate physical learning environments for all students and staff.

5. Early learning, children and poverty

A genuine commitment to providing an effective, appropriate and equitable education for all children means that we must pay special attention to at least two elements that have an enormous impact on many children: early learning, and the powerful, negative effects of poverty on the education and development of far too many of our children.

It has been clear for some time that the most important and productive investments in education are those made in early learning — investments that not only bring about long-term improvements in learning, but also in our social, economic, health and justice systems.

Yet, Alberta remains a laggard in early learning — despite recommendations from Alberta’s Commission on Learning almost two decades ago strongly urging a move to full-day kindergarten for all children, as well as making junior kindergarten available.

n terms of addressing the needs of children living in poverty, there have been positive developments due to increased resources for families by federal and provincial programs, as well as progress in providing accessible and affordable child care — again due to federal initiatives in partnership with the province.

Still, there is obviously an enormous amount of work yet to be done: poverty is still far too prevalent in too many families, and the effects of the pandemic and inflation are exponentially worse for families living in poverty. It has often been said that “poverty is the greatest learning disability,” and we must make a major commitment in this area in order to make the most important and needed differences in children’s learning.

Priority Changes:

• Expand Alberta’s kindergarten program to include fully funded, full-day kindergarten accessible to all students.

• Commit to building, implementing and funding a comprehensive, high quality early childhood education and care system accessible to all families, regardless of their ability to pay.

• Reinstate and expand the PUF funding.

• Systematically address the needs of children living in poverty through a comprehensive framework to prevent, reduce and ultimately eliminate poverty in Alberta’s families.

In terms of early learning, the government must move to implement and fully fund a program of full-day kindergarten available for all Alberta children, to be followed by the implementation of a program of junior kindergarten before the four-year term of the government is finished.

It also needs to continue to expand investment to ensure that a universal, affordable and high quality child care system (including after school care) is available to all Alberta families, and needs to support the professionalization and compensation of early childhood educators to improve the quality of care.

We have learned a substantial amount about poverty reduction in recent years: now what we need is the political will and commitment of resources necessary to address the issues through comprehensive and well-funded programs which enable, support and enhance local poverty reduction initiatives that are happening in municipalities across the province. It is also essential to work in partnership with Indigenous communities to ensure access to culturally relevant and appropriate services and programs.

Effective and sustained poverty reduction programs can potentially have the most powerful positive effects on the education of children who are most disadvantaged in Alberta’s schools, and they must be a central feature of the programs of our province’s government in future.

CONCLUSION

While there are a considerable number of other areas of much-needed improvement in order to further strengthen Alberta’s K-12 system of public education, it is important to determine a set of priorities for action — especially when it comes to advocacy with candidates for office during an election. This is essential in this year’s contest, which promises to be one of the most important in decades.

These priority areas — in the view of representatives of Public Interest Alberta — represent the most pressing and productive areas of change, which are most likely to improve and strengthen public education in its essential efforts to provide all children with high-quality education.