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FIRST, THE QUESTION

T.. board of School District 88 has a few weeks

_ to decide where it’s going to cut $200,000 in expenses

to stay within the budget guidelines it received from
the province last week. To keep matters in
perspective, the Vancouver School District, whose
bureaucracy one acquaintance has told us provided

the original model for the Peter Principle, has to

carve $18 million off its budget from 1991. Things
could be worse for us.

At this time of the year school financing becomes
a prominent topic of discussion among taxpayers of
all ‘sorts, from the chronically cynical to the
chronically dissatisfied. The relationship of quality to
dollars spent is mumbled about in coffee shops and
bars, at service club meetings and work stations, in

--a series of circular arguments that have

inconclusiveness as a common theme. Oldsters call
up a tired reserve of amazement for the nth time at

the inability of high school graduates these days to

punctuate, spell, read, add, subtract and breathe
without. mechanical assistance. After a shake of the
head and a suitable period of silence, the topic of
discussion moves on to other matters of equal mys-
tery and momentousness.

' The fact is that few people from any graduating

‘class back to the Middle Ages can punctuate, capital-

ize or spell with any great level of proficiency, and
the notion that today’s graduates are any worse at it
than those of 20 or 30 years ago is suspect at best.
The real nature of the complaint is that people,
especially parents, are confused about what is going
on in schools and in their kids’ brains. They. are
paying increasing amounts of money through a
taxation process that is arcane and obscure, and they
don’t understand what they are paying for.

This kind of confusion tends to give birth to.

simplistic solutions like the voucher system, a
proposal for which, printed in booklet form, was

16 Terrace Review — March 13, 1992

given wide circulation at the beginning of this

month. The proponent, Byron. Price of Victoria,
believes the cure for the system would be to issue
block funding on a per student basis not to the school
districts but to the parents in the form of a voucher.
The parents could then "spend" the voucher at the
education institution of their choice. The competition
among schools for students would then compel
teachers and administrators to pull up their argyle
socks and the education free market would put th

world right. .

Price describes idyllic scenes from districts in
England where the system has been tried. What he
does not describe is places like Telegraph Creek,
Hazelton and Stewart, to which one cannot expect a
sudden stampede of competing schools. He does not
speculate how special systems might be set up for
the disadvantaged students, as those systems require
a large minimum number of students to be cost-
effective. He does not describe how low-income
parents can be put on equal footing with those in
higher income brackets when it comes to paying to
transport their children if they choose to send them
to distant schools. :

This is a scheme that won't work and it’s typical
of the kind of solution that comes forward from
brains that have only a tenuous grasp of the prob-
lem. If as Mr. Price points out 40% of Canadians
under the age of 24 cannot fill out a catalogue order
form properly, perhaps the problem lies with the
catalogue companies rather than the clients. It is
probable that nine out of 10 Canadians can’t fill out
their income tax forms correctly, but that is widely
perceived to be the fault of the federal government,
not the education system. | .

There are unquestionably flaws in the B.C.
system. The term "block" is an appropriate appella-
tion for the current method of distributing money: it
is inexact, unwieldy, and difficult to move once it has