Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolven
Currently it is $461M. Calling that "insignificant" is a deceptive comment. $461M is a big pot of money that could be going toward funding the public sector to do things like... pay the teachers. The UCP budget shows an increase of $55M next year for private schools and then $188M over the next two years. Private school funding is booming in the UCP's plan.
Charter schools represents another $66M in annual funding, but that doesn't count the $123M that the UCP gifted to private and charter schools on top of their operating budget.
All of these issues come back to the same root cause: The UCP is defunding and dismantling the public education system to enable more and more private schools (including Charters). You cannot ignore a part of the problem when it is clearly a significant part of their strategy.
Private schools do not get funding elsewhere in Canada and they do not need public funding in Alberta either. This isn't an "us vs. them" problem as much as it is aligning to the norm and stopping with giving handouts to (rich) people who can afford private education when the public education system is breaking down.
For those of you who are lucky enough to have kids in Private/Charter schools, the point should be to build up a strong enough public school system that has enough capacity and support to address the needs of all kids.
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Not that I don't believe you, but where does the $461mm come from?
In an earlier post (maybe in the other thread), I broke down the math... It's something like 38,000 private school students * $11,464 in per student funding *.70, which comes out to just under $305mm... Everyone seems to accept the $11,464 per student and the 70% funding; maybe the private student enrolment is much higher than the source I'd found, but it's hard to explain a 50+ % discrepancy...
In any case, I still feel my point from my last post stands - $461mm is
still a drop in a $10B bucket... If that was eliminated and redirected to public school pupils, it would mean a whopping 6% increase in per student funding, or $658 - still far less than other provinces. And that doesn't account for any redistribution of students back to the public system that would likely occur if funding was dropped and parents had to pay full freight tuition (negating, or offsetting some of those new funding $).
To look at it another way, that would barely cover the 3,000 teachers that gov't keeps harping about, that everyone says is woefully inadequate, especially without having somewhere to put them... 1, 2 maybe 3 teachers per school in the province. Peanuts. Bupkis. Nothin'.
And while railing against the elite seems to be some on CP's favourite past time, let's not forget that not all private schools are gilded palaces for rich kids - many serve niches such as student athletes or those with learning disabilities.
Now all that said, I'm not arguing that what the UCP is doing to education in Alberta isn't atrocious... but again, I've said this before - what's ####ing new? Classes were over crowded when I was a student 30 years ago; we were jammed into portables, or bussed across the city.
To no one's surprise, this is the main reason my kids go to private school. The learning environment was pretty #### when I went to school and there's been zero progress made to address the shortcomings, which have only been exacerbated by further decades of neglectful budgets, lack of investment and a booming population. I wish this weren't the case. I wish public schools provided a reliable level of service and education that made me comfortable with sending my kids. My wallet sure as #### agrees. And I recognize that I'm beyond fortunate to be able to provide an alternative to my kids. But I also pay into the same system as everyone else. At the very least, I appreciate getting (nearly) the same back out of the system as everyone else (yeah, yeah, the childless pay in too - don't worry, you'll make it back from the taxes paid by my offspring).
At the end of the day, we don't have a $300mm, or a $461mm problem and that amount isn't going to make a dent in - let alone fix - public education in Alberta. It is a multi-billion dollar, multi (multi) year problem and worst of all, it's one we could afford to fix if the leadership (ewww, feels gross using that word to describe what the UCP does) of this province would actually, you know, do something about it.