Failing Grade

It’s dropout time in our public schools

This June, about 20 percent of the students who started school 12 years ago will not graduate. They are called “dropouts.” Recently, Shirley Bond, B.C.’s Minister of Education, made the public admission that the failure rate of 20 percent non-graduates, province-wide, hasn’t changed in the last four years. Some school districts have disgraceful non-graduate, dropout rates of over 50 percent. Who are these non-graduates? Who are these dropouts?

Overwhelmingly they are the children of the poor, the deprived, the disadvantaged, the unemployed, the low income—the “underclass” and the minority groups such as aboriginals and uneducated immigrants and refugees. What is not publicly admitted is that most of the children in our schools who are branded as low achievers or failures are all too often assigned to classes that are taught by the least qualified, least imaginative and least inspirational teachers.

The “best teachers” and the most qualified are usually assigned to teach the “best students”—the students who score well on exams, who win the most scholarships or who are motivated to learn and achieve despite the incompetence or lack of teaching skills of the teacher. A socio-economic profile of the best students in our public schools invariably reveals that they almost all come from families with educated parents with relatively high incomes.

And, as is well known, the great majority of private, independent schools—which cater primarily to students from the most affluent families—out-perform the public school students to a degree that the public school system rarely acknowledges. Incidentally, but unsurprisingly, many public school teachers enroll their own children in private schools. They recognize the serious shortcomings of the public school system. Thus, they don’t send their children there.

Quite simply, most of our teachers work in public schools that are underfinanced, inefficiently operated, resistant to change and where incompetent teachers cannot be dismissed because of union protection. Public school teachers—with average annual incomes and benefits in the $80,000 range—are now among the most economically advantaged, highest-paid members of society. Many teachers can easily afford to send their own children to expensive, private schools. And many of them do just that.

Private school principals and teachers frequently work for salaries that are substantially less than their counterparts in the public school system. Many public school principals earn over $100,000 annually—for a school year of less than 195 working days. They retire from teaching with indexed, annual pension incomes of $70,000 or more. Society should expect such high-income public-school principals, who are presumably paid for their skills and expertise, to organize their schools to cater to the learning needs of all students—not to the academic elite primarily.

Students whom the system brands as “slow learners” or “failures” or “dropouts” should have the right to be taught by, and have equal access to, their fair share of teachers who are recognized as the best in the school. This rarely happens in our public schools; indeed, the least effective teachers are often assigned to the slowest-learning students. Imagine the least-skilled surgeons being assigned to perform the most complicated operations.

Boards of education, for their part, rarely show determination to wage fair battle on the side of the dropouts. They accept dropouts as a natural function of a school system that is not designed or operated to serve the learning needs of every child. The Victoria Board, for example, simply refused to examine this year’s $169 million budget in order to liberate funds to finance better services to disadvantaged children at the classroom level. The unacceptable dropout rate of 20 percent in Victoria’s public schools, for example, consistently fails to motivate trustees to take action to eliminate this disgrace.

This happens every year. The board was more interested in financing grass cutting, paving parking lots, painting buildings or spending money to send teachers to visit other boards of education who are wasting money in a manner similar to that of the Victoria Board. This is typical of what happens at budget time every year by boards of education all over the province.

Every teacher, through the teachers’ union, the BCTF, should be waging fierce battle against boards of education that assign low priority—and meager finances—to learning programs aimed at the “losers” in the system. Our school system is heavily in the business of picking winners and losers—a system that destines so many of the losers to a life of unfairness, little hope, much despair and failure. M

John A. Young is the president and trustee of Greater Victoria Board of Education #61.