Ontario’s School Boards and Schools are at the Mercy of the Provincial Funding Model

September 7, 2020

In Ontario, the tweet below explains the overarching dynamic of public education. It speaks to where the power lies, and where responsibility and accountability get placed. As John Michael McGrath tweets, “a reasonably engaged citizen of Ontario could be forgiven for thinking that the primary reason this province maintains school boards at all is so the Premier of the day can push responsibility for all the operational consequences of their funding decisions (onto school boards)“.

https://twitter.com/jm_mcgrath/status/1301586064637911040?s=20

This dynamic is important to understand in the current context of a safe return to school amidst a global pandemic. Fix Our Schools addressed this issue very early on in our campaign, when we wrote to Premier Wynne to remind her that “with great power comes great responsibility.” We urged that Wynne’s “government must start taking the responsibility that comes with having sole power over the funding of public education. Trustees are not magicians. The funding being provided by your government to school boards is insufficient.” The fact that Ontario’s provincial government has all the power and no accountability for education has existed for over 20 years. It is a dynamic that is dysfunctional, and it is a dynamic that has never served the needs of 2-million students in Ontario.

As economist Hugh Mackenzie said, “The (Provincial) government is fully responsible for the level of funding provided but local school boards bear the consequences and are accountable for the results. Despite the government’s complete control over funding, there is no provincial accountability mechanism for the performance of and funding for the system as a whole.”

Our current Premier essentially admitted this dynamic last week, when at his daily press conference, he stated, “We’re really relying on school boards. I just told them I have all the confidence in the world that they’re going to be able to get through this and make sure that the students and the staff are in a very safe environment”. And yet, medical professionals, the SickKids report (that seems to be this government’s guiding light on a safe return to school), parents, teachers, education workers, principals, and citizens across the province have been expressing serious concerns about the plan that the Ford government is funding. And rest assured, the provincial funding model for schools and education is at the root of these current concerns.

At a time when small cohorts, physical distancing, and good ventilation are being cited by experts as critical elements of a safe return to schools, our provincial government’s funding model is creating a situation that is seeing classes “collapsed”, increasing the number of students in a given classroom rather than enabling school boards to hire additional teachers to accommodate smaller class sizes. Shockingly, our provincial government’s funding model is leading to situations where there will be empty classrooms in school buildings that also have classrooms with desks less than a metre apart, with no real possibility of physical distancing.

If you’d like to fully understand how the provincial funding model impacts class sizes, we encourage you to take 3 minutes and 29 seconds of your time to watch this excellent video,


which takes a complicated situation and explains it in a crystal-clear manner, clearly demonstrating how school boards (that cannot, by law, run a deficit budget and have zero power to access a tax base so rely exclusively on provincial funding) and schools (which rely on the money provided to school boards by the provincial government) have zero power over reducing class sizes, or, for that matter, ensuring that every school is retrofitted to ensure proper ventilation – because the money simply is not there.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare just how grossly underfunded our public schools and our public education system have been for over two decades. It has laid bare how the provincial funding formula for education and schools in this province is simply not providing the amount of money that is actually needed. It has laid bare the dysfunctional dynamic of successive provincial governments holding all the power over funding, yet blaming school boards for any deficiencies. This craziness has got to stop. Moving forward, our provincial government simply must look at genuine funding solutions that provide what is actually needed for our public schools and our public education system. If we have learned anything from this pandemic, surely it is that?