COOKIE CUTTER

End cookie-cutter approach to education 
Toronto Star Jan. 4, 99 - editorial

With the kids heading back to school, provincial bureaucrats should head back to the drawing board. A new government, if one is elected this year, will demand a new school funding formula. If Mike Harris is returned to power, he'd better. 

There are huge flaws in the present formula. The government's retreat on school closings - after three tries at fixes - demonstrates clearly that fixes won't do. And school closings are only one of the symptoms. 

The most basic problem is that the government did what the experts said couldn't be done - and it proved them right. 

Queen's Park stripped school boards of taxing power and adopted a single set of numbers to apply across-the-board, regardless of geography and diversity, regardless of each student's needs and each school's differences and 150 years of history.

It built a whole school system on a premise no parent ever shared - a province full of ``average'' students. Never has our school system been so centralized, strait-jacketed, lowest-common-denominated and strife-ridden.

The testimony during the Bill 160 court battle reflected the concerns that the government ignored. The judge, in fact, cited nine reports advising against what the government did.

The government's own experts said the same. Brian Lenglet, now comptroller for the Toronto District School Board, testified that as senior manager of provincial school finances, he ``spent countless hours'' seeking a funding model reflecting the diversity of the province.

He concluded it was ``a practical impossibility.''

The best to be hoped for, he said, was reasonably equitable basic funding balanced by some local fiscal autonomy ``to ensure that students are not disadvantaged by the imposition of centralized `one size fits all' solutions.''

As it is, Lenglet testified, government has simply replaced one unequal system with another - from one favouring school districts with high real estate values to one favouring districts with low costs.

Not surprisingly, after six months of shifted inequities, the Caledon Institute - in a report called Centralizing Power, Decentralizing Blame - said ``when we asked people to talk about their experiences with the education system, we found the reforms ignore the complexity of their lives.''

What's needed now is to restore the flexibility needed to again embrace that complexity.

This doesn't mean a whole new system of funding, at least not yet. For now, turning the province's rigid funding categories into looser guidelines would give schools wiggle room to make a start on the problems before them.

This is a big leap, of course. It involves trust - and abandoning shibboleths about ``fat cat bureaucrats'' creaming off school budgets.

But maybe teachers care about kids more than Queen's Park thinks. Maybe teachers know more than formula-writers about the needs of the ``average'' students sitting in front of them.

This does not deal with under-funding. But more local flexibility may be just as good for starters - because it will let local schools make better use of the shrinking loonies the Tories are providing for each student as rising enrolment and inflation cut the real value of ``stable funding.''

But only for starters. In real terms - constant 1998 dollars - the Caledon Institute says spending will be down by nearly $2 billion a year in 2001 compared to 1995, from $13.91 billion to $11.96 billion. That can't go on without dumbing down all our schools.

A better system, however, has to restore, in some form, a local capacity to meet local needs.

That might mean restoring some modest local power to raise school taxes - the usual number bandied about is 5 to 10 per cent of basic provincial funding.

But more important is the way funding is changed. We need no more untested policies imposed province-wide on schools.

Next time, let the government listen first. Let it think through its ``solutions'' all the way before lurching into vast social mega-projects. Let it try its ideas in one or two districts, so that big problems can be discovered before they do great harm.

Let it demonstrate, at least, that it's learned from its mistakes, and that this province isn't a playschool for unworkable ideas.