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The Governance Corner

A forum for discussing issues in Independent School governance in the third decade of the 21st Century

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Considering the Hidden Costs of Staffing Schools

3/25/2019

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In my last post, I wrote about the unintended negative outcomes on learners that come from arbitrary class size caps and composition constraints. Although intended as reasonable working condition demands, they invariably result in hardships for students "on the margins" - those with additional learning needs and those in small schools. It is no coincidence that in the face of these contractual restrictions on staffing, that school districts resort to consolidating and closing their small schools in order to maximize the use of their budget allocations. This not so hidden cost is borne by students and local communities. It is also highly predictable that students with low incidence designations find themselves exiled from school due to staffing shortages caused by these constraints.

Education is a people business. The "clients" are young people looking for a teaching and learning situation that meets their personal needs. The service providers are highly professional and dedicated teachers who give everything that they can to deliver what their students require. Adequate funding is the grease that keeps the wheels of the system turning. Anytime that a government announces that it is going to freeze or reduce funding, the immediate "victims" are teachers who are now declared surplus but the ultimate price is paid by students whom no longer receive the education that they need.

Independent schools are a microcosm of the larger public school community. Charging fees that are double or triple the local per student grant rate, they offer small classes as an incentive to parents as an alternative to their larger public counterparts. As a result, schools often justify ever increasing fees by the need to preserve these small classes - cuts to public education are a perfect foil to support them in their arguments.

However, the rising costs of independent education has little or nothing to do with class size. In actual fact, average class size in most private school has not changed over the past ten years while, meanwhile, fees have increased many times the rate of inflation. So the question is, "where is all of that money going?". Two easy answers have been an increase in the number of instructional support staff since 2008/9 from one to every 153 students to one to every 53 students today and an increase in administration staff from one to every 45 students to one in every 26. Add to this rising benefit and pension costs and you have half of the story.

The other, virtually hidden, rising cost of staffing is focused on workload. For example, in the last decade, a typical staffing assignment might require teaching 30/35 blocks per week - in other words, one paid preparation period per day. In many schools that number has drifted down to 25/35 blocks per week - two paid preparation periods per day. In a school with 100 teachers, that reduction would necessitate an increase in staffing of 20 additional teachers to maintain current class sizes. At an average of $80K - $100K per teacher (salary and benefits) you are looking at an increased cost - with no additional service to students - of between $1.6 and $2 million dollars per year. 

Looking at independent school statistics, the result has been status quo in class size and a drop of between 10-15% in the PTR in those same schools. Keeping in mind that that decrease in PTR has had no direct impact on students (the client) it can only be seen as a pure working condition expense.

It is no wonder that provincial governments and public boards see working conditions as the area in which the greatest savings and cost efficiencies can be found. Can independent schools be far behind? Taking an ostrich approach to this issue can only lead to education systems and independent schools driving themselves into bankruptcy.

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Tilting at Windmills: The Class Size Debate

3/23/2019

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There has been a predictable outcry about the Ontario government's pronouncement that they will phase in larger class size maximums from Grades 4-12 over the next few years. While there is no question that smaller classes increase the possibility of greater individual attention for some students and definitely lessen teacher workload and stress, class size has long been wrongly held up as the gold standard for determining the quality of a learning environment. Research has consistently shown that after Grade 3, the statistical effect of class size on student learning is marginal at best. Other factors such as educator/student ratios, teacher/student contacts, or even teacher teaching load can have a far greater impact on both learning and the financial bottom line.

Traditionally, in most jurisdictions, staffing was allocated on a PTR formula. That is, for example, for every X number of students, there is funding for 1 teacher. It used to be that that was the end of the story. Schools would be allocated the requisite number of staff as per the formula, and the Principal would assign teachers as she/he saw fit. This often meant that a large history class might be used to off-set a small German language cohort or learning resource programme. However, over the years, class size maximums began to be legislated by provincial governments or negotiated through Collective Agreements. While meaning improvements in working conditions for teachers, it resulted in staffing nightmares for administrators. All of a sudden, that History class of 30 students had to be split to adhere to a lower maximum. The result was that schools had to make the hard choices of cutting other programmes (goodbye German!) in order to staff under the new guidelines. This was particularly challenging in small rural schools where one or two students over the max could result in staffing shortages or a variety of split grade classes in order to comply. It may sound like heresy, but in my experience, a class of 30 elementary students, with two teachers is a far more productive learning environment than two classes of 15 with a single instructor in each.

The "solution" was to tie funding to students, not staffing. As a result, school districts were given a pool of dollars to allocate under the constraints of class size maximums and other negotiated staffing requirements. The result was the disappearance of librarians, music programmes, counsellors, etc. from schools. Classes were smaller, but the quality of the educational experience was diminished.

Currently, British Columbia is suffering under the limitations to staffing flexibility imposed by a Supreme Court reinstatement of class size and composition restrictions negotiated in 2002. Needless to say, education has changed in the past more than 15 years, and the imposition of outdated guidelines on the new realities of schools has created disruption in the quality of programming, particularly for students with special needs. While there is no question that in the next round of negotiations, both sides will work to fix this situation, it points to the problematic nature of staffing by formula, rather than by need.

Back to Ontario where the nonsensical arguments that larger classes will build "resilience" (here's the ultimate legacy of the "grit" movement!) and that students can help each other, or that parents can hire tutors are just cover for the fact that some politicians are more than willing to write off marginalized groups of students, and raise the drop-out rate, in order to streamline the education system and lower costs (fewer students = fewer teachers). As long as education remains a political football between big government and big labour, meaningful change will remain out of reach.
 
In the final analysis, this is a two pronged problem. School districts need to be better resourced to ensure that the complex needs of their learners can be met. Government purse-strings need to be opened further, not tightened, in order to make this happen. Secondly, staffing constraints need to be loosened up or eliminated. Class size and composition requirements are discriminatory and restrictive and focus on working conditions rather than the quality of education for all learners. School districts and Principals need to be given more autonomy to determine the best local allocation of their resources and to be answerable to students and their parents, not Provincial governments and unions as to how to best serve their communities. 

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    Author

    Dr. Jim Christopher
    has been working with Boards and Heads on Governance issues for the past 15 years. He is a former Superintendent of Schools, ED of the Canadian Association of Independent Schools and Canadian Educational Standards Institute and is the author of a number of books and articles of education and governance. His latest book, Beyond the Manual: A Realist's Guide to Independent School Governance is available on iTunes or at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/388729

    View my profile on LinkedIn
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