The Cure to Broken Promises
We’re asking ourselves far too many “How did we get here?” questions as a society.
We’re asking ourselves far too many “How did we get here?” questions as a society. But there’s one, in particular, that sits at the heart of the CTF/FCE’s work—and it demands our attention.
Education budgets have fallen so far that we’re now at risk of breaking our promise to Canada’s children. How did we let it get to this point?
This is not an opinion. You can look at the public education landscape in Canada and find as many examples of this issue as you’d like. The rates of teachers leaving the system are on a steady rise—and they are leaving earlier. The number of new teachers joining is falling, and those who stay often do so at the risk of their own physical and mental health. The effect of these three factors has hit a critical point that can’t be ignored. But it is also just the visible symptom of a system that has been neglected for far too long. Educating, certifying, and hiring more teachers is absolutely necessary—but it is not the cure.
The “cure” is properly funding education systems so that they have the resources and staffing to support every child to fulfill their potential as healthy, happy, and productive members of our communities.
That’s it. It’s not complicated. There will absolutely be discussion and debate amongst those in the public education system about the best way to achieve that—professional discourse is healthy and should be part of improving things for our students. But the crucial step is to properly fund. Without that, the discourse—the one happening now in virtually every region of the country—is about how to serve too many children with not enough. In those conversations, there are inevitable winners and losers, and that is simply not acceptable.
So how, indeed, did we get here? Well, I have had the privilege of listening to, and being the voice of, teachers for a dozen years now, from the local level up to the national. I have listened to, advocated for, and lobbied on behalf of teachers for all those years—to politicians of all stripes, and I have a theory: one of the major reasons why this funding gap has been allowed to grow into the crisis it now is, and shocker, it’s political.
Unarguably, education is the building block of each individual in a society and of the society itself. Each of us spends some 13 years of our lives making our way through the public K-12 education system. That’s a lot of time. But educating a child, supporting their growth—mental, social, personal, physical, etc.—takes at least that long, and the results aren’t immediately apparent: it is a cumulative effect from a collective effort sustained over time. And here’s the crux of the problem: when it comes to the funding of education, the decision-makers have a three or four-year term, dependent on context.
Most often, they are looking for the immediate return on their decision; it is the nature of the political system we have created. There is unequivocal and significant literature on the positive financial return that investment in education is for a government/society, but that return only comes after a decade or more in most cases.
This butts up directly against the fact that individuals in power, and their party, want results that will get them votes within a year or two. And so, when budget decisions are being made, too often education is left wanting—it is too easy to reduce and not have the consequences land on you, hard to do the right thing, and keep investment from falling behind. This, I believe, is a significant part of the answer to how we got here.
So how do we get out of here, back to where we should be? The answer is political will. We need to push every provincial and territorial decision-maker to look beyond their own horizon of an election. We need them to understand that the future of every child—those in classrooms today and those yet to come—is shaped by the 13 years we, as a nation, have promised will lead to a fair chance at a good life. We need them to see that every dollar withheld today is a child shortchanged, a child undervalued. This belief is what drives me, and everyone at the CTF/FCE, in our work each day. I know that your daily impact on students is what drives you as well—and you deserve to be fully supported in that endeavour.
Because, in the words of Gabriela Mistral,
“Many things can wait. Children cannot. Today their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, their senses are being developed. To them we cannot say ‘tomorrow.’ Their name is today.”
