May 14, 2021

Provincial funding and accountability should go hand in hand

In my blog posts recently I’ve been writing about why it’s important to have democratically-elected public school board trustees.

The Public School Boards’ Association of Alberta’s (PSBAA) third belief statement is that Public schools are governed by democratically-elected trustees, accountable to communities and to the province.

This is important because together as a board, school trustees decide how to allocate their jurisdiction’s share of more than $8.3 billion in yearly provincial funding for K-12 education. That funding goes to meet the educational priorities and needs of the students in that school jurisdiction.

Democracy and accountability are key pillars of the public school board system, but not every school board system in Alberta has locally-elected school board trustees.

Alberta has more K-12 school systems than any other province in Canada. In addition to the public school system, there is also a separate school system, a francophone school system and a charter school, private school and home school system.

Like the public school system, separate school boards and francophone school boards receive taxpayer funding and elect local trustees to provide oversight and accountability. Not so with the charter, private school and home school systems, which receive varying amounts of public funding but are not required to have the same level of accountability – or indeed, any accountability at all.

People are sometimes surprised when I tell them this fact. They may ask me why that accountability matters, and why it’s important to have local school board trustees.

Trustees are accountable to the community members who elect them and to Alberta Education to make sure that they are allocating funding appropriately in their jurisdiction to meet the learning needs of all of their K-12 students. That means having properly trained teachers, classroom resources, safe and well-maintained schools, transportation to and from schools, and learning resources to help students achieve academic success and reach their full potential.

The Alberta government has a system it uses for school jurisdictions to be able to consistently measure success and progress. This system is called the Accountability Pillar, and it uses 16 different measures to show communities how schools and the school jurisdictions are performing each year. You can read more about the Accountability Pillar and why it’s important on the Alberta government website.

Schools and school jurisdictions use Accountability Pillar data to identify areas for improvement and help build their education plans to meet the specific needs of learners in their communities, as well as set future priorities.

This is important work, but it is not required in the charter school, private school or home school systems. The PSBAA believes that if a school jurisdiction or system receives public funding, it should be required to account for how those dollars are spent. This is why in September 2020 PSBAA released a report called “Privatizing Public Choice: The Past, Present, and Future of Charter Schools in Alberta” by Ph.D. candidate Curtis Riep. You can read the full report at this link.

We also called for Alberta’s Auditor General to conduct a full review of the educational, administrative and financial benefits of charter schools. You can read the news release here.

Accountability is one of the reasons it’s so important to elect the local school board trustee who best represents you and your community’s priorities. This is equally important whether or not you have children in a local K-12 school. And every school and school system that receives taxpayer dollars from the Alberta government should be accountable to the government and to their local communities for how those dollars are spent.

Cathy Hogg,
President