By Robert Green
On June 13th the Gazette published a letter entitled “Education won’t be able to escape budget belt-tightening” by Jim Wilson. The letter was an attack on my recent op-ed about the injustice of the Liberal government’s austerity measures for education. As Mr Wilson is a well known commentator on Quebec’s English school system whose writing has been often published on this blog, I feel it is important to publicly respond.
The whole reason I submit articles to the Gazette is to stir up public debate. Though I strongly disagree with the positions Mr Wilson takes in his letter, I am more than happy to debate these issues with him. I hope this exchange of ideas will be interesting and informative for readers.
As Mr Wilson’s letter raises a number of points and poses a number of questions, I will deal with them one paragraph at a time.
Robert Green makes one point that I fully support: that public funds should not be used to support private schools. However, he fails in his principal arguments that the budget means that “the neediest students are asked to make serious sacrifices” and that cutting the private-school subsidies would do much to remedy the overall financial situation.
Actually my principal argument was not about remedying the province’s overall financial situation so much as it was about the injustice of imposing austerity on the public education system while leaving generous subsidies for the rich to attend private schools untouched. I’m surprised that someone who claims to oppose public subsidies for private schools doesn’t share my outrage over this blatant injustice.
A secondary point of my op-ed was to show that there is no good reason to exempt private school subsidies from sharing in the burden of austerity. The private schools claim these subsidies save the system money. However, this is a highly questionable claim due to the other forms of government support private schools receive (listed in my article) in addition to the 60% tuition subsidy. While the FAE’s claim that there are significant savings to achieve by integrating private school students into the public system may also be somewhat questionable, even if this reintegration is cost neutral it is still extremely worthwhile as it will eliminate the significant social costs associated with an education system that is segregated along class lines.
It is true that Quebec‘s teachers are the country’s lowest paid, but that harks back more than 30 years, when salaries were slashed by the PQ government, never to recover. Of course, the teachers’ own union leaders, rather than repudiating such a party, actually joined its ranks and fought for its election.
Yes it harks back that far but over the last 30 years it has been made significantly worse by Liberal and PQ governments alike. The gap between the pay of teachers in Quebec compared to that of teachers in the rest of Canada has been steadily growing.
Green suggests that poor working conditions mean that Quebec teachers are younger and less experienced than their counterparts in other provinces. In fact, that is essentially a demographic outcome, brought about by Quebec’s baby boom having produced a need for teachers in the 1960s and ’70s. There was a paucity of jobs due to the birthrate decline of later decades. Bill 101 exacerbated this problem for the English sector. Jobs only appeared when many of those hired in the “boom” period took retirement after 35 years, replaced by new teachers, most of whom have less than 10 years experience. No budget can address that issue.
It is not merely a demographic issue. Other provinces experienced baby booms at the same time and their teachers are not as young as Quebec’s. At least part of what explains this is a high rate of burn-out. In 2006 CBC reported that one in three teachers in Quebec’s English system had left work due to stress related illness. In 2009 it reported that there had been a 10 percent increase in the use of long-term medical leave compared to five years earlier. The question my op-ed is posing is how much further are we prepared to go as a society in degrading this profession. When a full fifty percent are having to leave work for stress related illness, would Mr Wilson then recognize there’s a problem? Or would he suggest that we shouldn’t worry because there is an army of young inexperienced teachers ready to replace them…
Green should not be concerned about attracting individuals to teaching; there are very few openings. A board official recently told me there were 500 applicants at his board, but only a fraction of them would even be interviewed.
We as a society should all be concerned about attracting and retaining quality individuals into the teaching profession. A teacher’s years of experience is one of the few factors that has been identified as making significant improvements to student achievement. I would think that a former teachers union president such as Mr Wilson would be well versed in this research. If Mr Wilson wants to see what kind of quality of education one ends up with when teachers are viewed as expendable and easily replaceable by inexperienced young graduates just take a look at the disaster that is currently unfolding in the US education system.
Quebec is groaning under its bureaucratic weight. So I am surprised that Green bemoans, rather than applauds, any potential cut to administration. He makes no suggestion that we amalgamate boards to reduce expenditures, nor does he explain how administrative cuts affect the classroom. Class sizes remains as they are, and I hear no mention of slashing support for special needs. He points to the private system as being “elitist,” yet ignores his own board’s practice of operating its own “elite” schools.
Mr Wilson seems to have great faith in the government’s aim.
I do not deny that there is waste within the school boards. However, I completely reject the notion that arbitrary government cuts will eliminate that waste. What is far more likely is that the waste will remain and the cuts will in some way be put on the backs of students and school employees. Mr Wilson is extremely naive to suggest otherwise.
It is not up to me to demonstrate that these cuts will hurt students. The onus is on government to demonstrate that cuts won’t hurt students and thus far the government has done no such thing. Neoliberal governments always claim that their budget cuts won’t affect frontline services. Mr Wilson have we not learned better than to believe them? The rumour swirling around my school is that secretaries, lab techs, programmers and librarians will be hit by these cuts. If this turns out to be true, do you really think this won’t affect students?
As I wrote about in the Gazette back in April, if there is trimming of bureaucracy that must be done, it should not be done arbitrarily but by targeting specific things of questionable value such as the bureaucracy associated with standardized ministry exams. Such a targeted approach is the only way to ensure that cuts aren’t passed on to students.
It would have been nice if Mr Wilson had taken this article into consideration before publicly accusing me of “bemoaning” efforts to reduce bureaucracy. Similarly, before publicly accusing me of “ignoring” the elite schools within my own school board, it would have been nice if Mr Wilson had bothered to consult some of the other op-eds I had previously published in the Gazette. Had he done so he would see that Quebec’s “four-tiered education system” is a topic I have been quite vocal about.
My own budget is squeezed, too. Notwithstanding the decline in school enrollment, I continue to pay ever-increasing school taxes, something that last year was publicly advocated by the president of his provincial union. Does Green support that stance? Education takes a large portion of the overall taxes, so it seems inevitable that it must shoulder part of the burden. I have yet to hear how we solve Quebec’s economic mess in a way that leaves education untouched.
In this passage we really see the extent to which Mr Wilson has drunk the neoliberal koolaid. He seems to have bought the line, repeated ad nauseam in the mainstream media, that if governments have deficits, this is because of out-of-control spending. According to this logic it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest then that public services like education “must shoulder part of the burden”.
The problem with this logic is that it is based on the false premise that our current deficit is the result of out-of-control spending. It isn’t. It is the result of out-of-control tax cutting in the first decade of the 2000’s. As IRIS has documented, between 2000 and 2008 Liberal and PQ governments combined for about 4 billion in tax cuts which primarily benefited the wealthiest members of society, corporations and banks. That amounts to 24 billion removed from Quebec’s public coffers since 2008. Is it any wonder we are now facing a structural deficit?
The central issue facing Quebec is that someone has to pay for these tax cuts. While Mr Wilson believes that the public school system “must shoulder the burden”, I believe the burden should be shouldered by those who created it; the rich.
Mr Wilson needs to consider the fact that when it comes to eliminating government deficits there is more than one way to skin a cat. There are ways to eliminate deficits that widen inequality by making the poor shoulder the burden through degraded public services. And there are also ways to eliminate deficits that have the added bonus of achieving the inherently beneficial goal of a more equal society by requiring those with plenty to contribute more. Given the growing amount of research demonstrating the extent to which more equal societies are happier, healthier, better educated and more prosperous why would we ever want to act in a way that widens inequality? This is exactly what the Leitão budget does and exactly what Mr Wilson advocates when he suggests that it is appropriate to balance the province’s books with cuts to public services.
As a former teachers union president Mr Wilson should know full well that over the years Quebec’s public sector employees have done more than their fare share to help the province keep its books balanced. Is it not time now for those at the top who have enjoyed such generous tax cuts to do their part? Why is it that over the last 20 years it is only those on the bottom that have had to pay for government deficits?
Mr Wilson presents this as a false choice between spending cuts that hurt schools and increases to school taxes that hurt the middle class. In doing so he is operating squarely within the logic of neoliberalism. However there are many other options that he ignores. In addition to rolling back the tax-cuts that the wealthy enjoyed from 2000 to 2008 governments could be doing much more to root out the corruption that siphons billions out of Quebec’s public coffers and to stop the flight of capital to off-shore tax havens. Each of these things are possible and each has the potential to make massive improvements to the state of Quebec’s public finances. The only thing that is lacking is political will.
Mr Wilson, rather than affirming the Couillard government’s attempt to widen inequality and redistribute Quebec’s wealth upward should we not be speaking out against this, exposing the illegitimacy of calls to cut public services and advocating for a more equal society where the wealthy pay their fare share?
See Mr Wilson’s response to this in the comments section below
Montreal Teachers 4 Change.org 