Let's Talk Education

I went on a Twitter rant again today about education prior to this announcement by the Alberta government surrounding the future of the Calgary Board of Education. Here it is for my LinkedIn followers:

As Education Minister Adriana Lagrange gets ready to officially unveil her plan to tell the Calgary Board of Education to shape up or ship out, I have a bunch of questions here. Let's start off with the obvious: what will canning the whole board accomplish? Is it to send a message to superintendents, etc?

Because these fiscal issues have been around longer than I've been in Calgary media. I covered the CBE for a couple of years & always had an interest in education. So is the expectation from Ms. Lagrange & her ministry that they fall in line with the current Alberta government? Begs another question...

Board members are elected representatives. So if the government does follow through with canning the board, will they commit to byelections so the people of Calgary can determine what they want out of the CBE? And if so, what happens if the new board doesn't fall in line?

Beyond that, what are the chances that we see an ad hoc slate of Conservative-minded candidates in the mix? On the flipside, could we see a slate of Liberal/NDP-minded candidates hoping to make the UCP's life more miserable? Just so many questions.

Don't get me wrong: I think school boards should be held accountable for the money they spent. I do think it's wrong to compare boards to one another because they all face unique challenges. But almost all have said they're facing budgetary problems. CBE isn't alone here.

I do wonder if, at the root of all that ails the CBE, is if they tried to go too niche. They have a bunch of specialty programs that I'm sure some believe were created simply to thwart any charter school development in Calgary. So is that what's really at the heart of all of this?

Is the minister hoping someone (the board) will get rid of some of these programs so that charter or private schools can handle them? Who knows. Are there any charter or private school operators even looking to set up shop here? Who knows. So many questions.

To me, at the heart of this needs to be an actual conversation about the funding of education in Alberta. I'm going to over-simplify this but we should start with how many kids we have & work our way up from there. Almost zero-based budgeting. Here's how...

We have X number of students. Our goal is to have a student-teacher ratio of Y. So that's how many teachers you need. Now you can figure out how many schools you need, which will help determine the number of admin, counsellors, support staff, etc. From there...

We can start getting into the nitty-gritty like special needs kids, so you can determine how many EAs you need. That's a big one. How many students are coded (funded) by the government but don't actually get an EA or aide for budgetary reasons, etc.

I know some believe the CBE is broken, but I wonder if the whole system isn't in need of a reboot. Right now, it is seemingly about maintaining the status quo, which is the opposite of being progressive & forward-thinking in education. So let's talk about it. Thoughts?