B.C. Education minister Christy Clark's numerous attempts to repair the system are ignoring the real problem.

Angus Reid
Vancouver Sun

With the midpoint of Gordon Campbell's four-year term less than a month away, the merry British Columbia premier and his party continue to practise their fetish for all things performance-measured and bean-counted. This week the target was education. Education minister Christy Clark introduced yet another round of new tests. But it doesn't matter how often she changes the gauges. It's the engine that needs to be rebuilt.

Education is now second only to health care among the anxieties that people raise when asked what issues concern them the most. And this issue has seen the biggest increase in public concern since the Liberals took office.

According to the Ipsos polling firm, more than 30 per cent of B.C. voters now say education is the foremost issue on their minds. That's up from 20 per cent two years ago and nearly double the worry level of a decade ago.

For me, three things are most indicative of the sorry state of education, and how the actions of the Campbell "Librocred" government are likely making matters worse.

The first concerns the ability of our public schools to promote students from Grade 12. Without strong performance in this area, the school system relegates a huge segment of B.C. society to marginal jobs, chronic unemployment and a life of limited opportunity.

In this department, B.C. has historically been weak. In 1990, only 62.5 per cent of 18-year-olds in the province were high school graduates—one of the worst records in the country. By 2000, we'd improved to 75 per cent—good progress, but still below the Canadian average of 78 per cent.

This enhancement came as a result of a decade of increased investment in education.

But now these gains are threatened by cuts to teaching positions, further alienating students most at risk of dropping out. Estimates of teachers laid off reach as high as 2,000, most of them specialists in ESL, counselling and special education.

Add to all this, the effects of 40 schools closed this past year and as many as 60 more over the next two. The consequences for kids aren't encouraging.

The second indictment of education in B.C. is that we have one of the worst levels of participation in post-secondary education in Canada. Only a quarter of our 18-to-25-year-olds are enrolled in college or university, compared with a national average of close to 35 per cent. When it comes to university enrolment, we're dead last.

For several decades, successive B.C. governments have failed to ensure that the number of university places keeps pace with population growth. They've also invested in a model considerably different than that in other provinces. It directs great numbers of high school graduates to a community college system with the implicit promise that they will be eligible to "transfer" to university after the first or second year. But this transfer system is failing increasing numbers of young people.

Work by Joanne Hespol, an analyst at Simon Fraser University, shows that about one in six college students who meets published admission standards and attempts transition to university doesn't get in. I suspect that many more don't even bother to apply.

We simply don't have enough spaces in post-secondary education, especially at the university level.

Since Gordon Campbell took office, the average grade required to get into university has moved up to the 80s, and sometimes even 90s, at places like Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria. The elitists might see this as progress, but I see it as a step back

The third indicator of the deplorable state of education in B.C. is that school districts, colleges and universities are so desperate to find additional revenue, they are all aggressively selling our otherwise scarce educational resources on the international market. I've got nothing against international students, but the time has come to question how far we're prepared to go at the expense of our own taxpayers and residents.

Last year, UBC turned away several thousand B.C. students who met its published admission criteria while at the same time expanding its international recruitment, which accounted for about 30 per cent of its growth in full-time admissions.

This fascination with international content has spread to the public schools that have come to realize the obvious potential for extra revenue, and maybe the odd trip abroad, from expanded international enrolment. Across B.C., the international student population in public districts has grown from 2,000 three years ago to more than 7,500 today.

Depending on your perspective, this development is either good business or a further drain of scarce resources that our educational system can't afford.

But perhaps the most worrisome issue is the prospect of creating a two-tiered system throughout our educational system that gives greater attention and deference to foreign students. At the secondary level, the B.C. government gives a school district only about $4,150 U.S. for a B.C. resident while non-resident fees average $9,000 U.S.

As one teacher told me recently, "We've been told to make sure that these international students graduate or word will get out and future students won't come here."

Of course, Campbell isn't the only one to blame. The Socreds were notorious for their lack of interest in education. Leaders all the way back to Wacky Bennett saw their mission as fostering a vibrant resources sector that would provide jobs for their sons and daughters. For skills that were in short supply in B.C., such as medicine, they counted on the appeal of Lotusland to bring graduates from other provinces to the West Coast.

The New Democrats tried in their own way to correct the situation, but freezing tuition did little to help universities expand admission or access.

But so far, from kindergarten to graduate school, all we've seen from the Campbell government is a new entrepreneurial ethic and the promise of enhanced local control, rewards for local initiative and freedom from collective bargaining agreements. There's a commitment to finally expand our medical school and several new research chairs have been created, but behind the facade of progress the school system is slowly crumbling for want of the two ingredients it needs most: money and vision.

Unless it acts soon, the Campbell government will undermine not just the transition to the new "post-resources" economic era that the province so desperately needs but, even worse, the career ambitions and dreams of an entire generation.

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