Education Action: Toronto

by Hugh Mackenzie

The Toronto District School Board has just cut somewhere in the neighbourhood of $30 million from its 2009-2010 operating budget. The savagery of these cuts is primarily the result of a flawed provincial funding formula introduced by Mike Harris and continued in its essentials by Dalton McGuinty. In these notes, Hugh Mackenzie outlines just how destructive this formula has been, especially for large urban boards like the TDSB. He also proposes some key principles which must govern the TDSB respond to this funding crisis.

The Ministry of Education suggests the above budget solution to school boards facing fiscal crises.

The Toronto District School Board does not have a budget crisis. It has an education crisis. More precisely, it is facing a crisis in its ability to meet the needs of students.

Putting the issue this way is not intended in any way to minimize the fiscal issues facing the board, but rather to point to the fact that the consequences of the changes the board is going to be forced to make in response to those issues will reduce the ability of the board to meet the needs of students in this city.

I

The fiscal problems of the Toronto District School Board are not new, nor is their source new.

In its original design, the provincial funding formula for education introduced for the 1998-89 school year was a recipe for disaster for large urban school boards in Ontario.

It did not provide for the actual costs of the basics of the school system: the operations and maintenance of the buildings and equipment; the payment of teachers and other staff; the need for non-classroom administrative and support services.

It was insensitive to even the most obvious drivers of differences in costs among school jurisdictions such as the age of buildings, climate, population density and local labour markets.
It did not adequately recognize the need to provide enhanced services for students with special needs.
It did not provide for any additional funding to address purely local needs and requirements.

It provided funding to support only a narrow – and some would say an inaccurately remembered nostalgic – view of what constituted education, treating the arts, physical education, citizenship and indeed any academic pursuit other than reading, writing and arithmetic as a “frill” for which funding should not be provided.

It failed completely to recognize or support the role that schools play in their communities.

In implementing its fixation on students as a driver of funding, it failed to recognize adequately the fixed costs associated with an education system, laying the foundation for a crisis in any school board experiencing declining enrolment.
Finally, although the funding system has been truly obsessed with accountability mechanisms – for teachers, for schools and for school boards – there is no system of accountability for the adequacy of the provincial commitment to education through the funding formula.

II

Over the years since the formula’s introduction, there have been many changes to the details of the formula, but none that address adequately any of these fundamental problems.

Temporary relief on the operations and maintenance front was made available through school renewal funding, which allowed maintenance projects to be funded as renewal projects. That avenue for flexibility is soon to end and renewal funding dries up and projects wind down.

Salary and benefit benchmarks for teachers were updated to reflect actual salaries, but were funded by reducing already-inadequate funding in other areas.
New grants have been created to address some of the specific cost differences among boards, but core funding is still based on the assumption that every school system in Ontario is identical.

Funding for students with special needs was increased in the later years of the Harris era, but has since been reduced as an offset against other changes. Just as important, the inadequacy of funding for the basics of the system has led all boards, including the TDSB, to allocate funding generated under special needs grants to filling the holes in the funding of the basic system.

Literally every report that has been prepared on education funding in Ontario in the past 35 years has recommended extra funding of 5% to 10% to cover local needs not otherwise recognized in the central formula. The original design of the formula provided nothing for local needs. The Harris government belatedly added a local priorities amount. The McGuinty government eliminated it. The lack of funding for local needs is a flat-out denial of the reality that schools and school systems differ across the province.

Funding has been introduced to support some educational programs originally de-funded by the Harris government, but the amount falls far short of what is required to support a well-rounded education for citizenship and participation in society. Most notably given the universally acknowledged importance of continuing education, the formula has never recognized the role that some school boards have traditionally played in adult education.

A limited amount of funding has been provided for community use of schools, but again, not nearly enough.

The formula was amended to provide for a ‘school foundation grant’ which made funding school-based administrative services less dependent on enrolment numbers, but it failed to extend the same logic to the funding of other requirements that do not vary continuously with enrolment. Special funding to offset the effect of declining enrolment is helpful, but inadequate in the face of fixed costs that are funded as if they vary with enrolment and the cumulative effects of many years of enrolment decline being experienced by a growing number of school boards.
The provincial government has chosen to focus its funding improvements on new priorities, most notably class size reductions in elementary schools, leaving basic funding problems unaddressed.

And this year, in particular, the provincial government has chosen to offset some of the increased costs arising from its provincial labour relations framework with a ‘death of a thousand cuts’ approach to the funding of programs like textbooks and classroom computers.

The numbers are obvious. Less obvious, but more important, are the impacts on students and the environment in which they study.

The TDSB already invests less than it should in ESL programming. It already invests less than it should in programs to support students with demographically influenced special needs. It already invests less than it should in arts, physical education and libraries. It already invests less than it should in special education programming, allocating no more than the inadequate amount provided under the funding formula.

When the TDSB invests less than it should in these areas, the TDSB saves, but our students pay.

What does this mean for the TDSB budgets for 2009-10 and 2010-11?

Adopting a flat “no cuts” strategy for the TDSB budgets for 2009-10 runs the risk that it will serve as a gold-plated invitation to the Ministry of Education to take over the board and override whatever semblance of local democracy remains in the TDSB.

At the same time, acceptance of the current budgetary framework as a “given” within which the TDSB must operate in the long term is not an acceptable response to the needs of students in this city.

This gives rise to several principles which must govern the TDSB’s funding response.

1. No budget responses that would have a negative effect on the educational opportunities of ANY TDSB student.
2. No budget responses that would adversely affect the ability of the TDSB to meet its basic obligation to provide a safe and healthy study and work environment for its students and staff.
3. Support for budget reallocations that enhance the ability of the TDSB to meet student needs.
4. Protect funding to support the TDSB’s participation in the upcoming funding formula review, including:
• The development of a model for funding requirements for student success
• Analysis of the relationship between the funding formula and those requirements
• Support for the engagement of students and their parents as well teachers and other TDSB staff in the funding formula review process.