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Boomers a 'Time Bomb' for BC Schools

Educators, be prepared. As demographics shift, BC's coffers will prioritize the old.

Thomas Fleming 30 Nov 2011TheTyee.ca

Thomas Fleming is professor emeritus in educational history at the University of Victoria. Bendall Educational Publishers in Mill Bay, B.C., has published two of his recent histories, Schooling in British Columbia: Voices from the Educational Past, 1849-2005 and Worlds Apart: British Columbia Schools, Politics, and Labour Relations Before and After 1972. Fleming also served as a research director and editor-in-chief of the 1987-88 British Columbia Royal Commission on Education.

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Public school enrolment is dropping; is funding to follow?

Imagine we get beyond the current impasse in educational labour relations. Imagine, for once, it's not just about money. Imagine, also, that government and the teachers' federation somehow set aside 40 years of rancor and distrust long enough to confront deep and fundamental challenges already changing the face of public schooling.

What should they be thinking and talking about? What will public schooling look like in B.C. in 20 years? What do government and the teachers want it to look like? Are they even thinking about it at all?

Even without a crystal ball, a few seemingly unavoidable facts spring to mind.

First, public school enrolments, relative to the general population, have been shrinking for four decades and appear unlikely to recover soon. The spectacular growth that characterized much of the public school's history for the last 60 years is over. Schooling is no longer an expanding industry. Instead, a "demographic time bomb," as one journalist put it, is transforming our public institutions, especially the school.

Let's look at the numbers. The public school's prominence reached its zenith in 1971 when 25 per cent of the general population attended public schools. Today, it is closer to 12 per cent. Fewer youngsters attend public school, measured as a percentage of the provincial population, than at any time since 1911. That's a century ago!

Likewise, fewer than 10 per cent of British Columbians were over 65 years of age in 1971. Now, more than 25 per cent are. A once-youthful province has grown old and, with this change, a re-ordering of economic and political priorities is at hand. Public health and pension fund issues are already rocketing to the top of policy agendas at both provincial and federal levels.

This shift in provincial demographics has profound implications for public schools and government spending. School closings in Vancouver and elsewhere are just the first sign of more fundamental structural changes that are likely to come.

Schools subject to 'new realities'

Going forward, our society is confronting new challenges. Growth in the 65 plus segment of the population, increasing longevity rates, an ever-shrinking ratio of workers to dependents during the next two or three decades (in effect, both a labour force and tax base contraction), not to mention accelerating public sector pension costs, will compel government to make difficult and unanticipated decisions about where resources are allocated, as well as who gets them.

At first there will be vigorous crusades to raise more money to support services. At the same time, there will be strident calls for governments at all levels to save money as new realities displace old priorities. Public schools are unlikely to be spared in the program reviews close at hand. While it is possible to fantasize that public schooling can go forward on a "business as usual" basis, or that provincial authorities will continue to direct close to 28 per cent of general revenues -- the current level of B.C. school support -- toward educating youngsters who comprise no more than 12 per cent of the province's population, such outcomes seem improbable.

Sooner or later, government will be obliged to deem this level of investment "unsustainable." Sooner or later, government will re-examine the entire machinery of school governance, administration and finance systems all built to meet circumstances prevailing in the 19th century. This will be a real "tipping point" the moment when new realities faced by voters will oblige government to invent strategies and structures that will make public schooling far less costly and much more customer oriented.

This will be the moment when the two main actors in provincial schooling, the government and the B.C. Teachers' Federation (BCTF), will have to face the fact that old-fashioned pedagogical and organizational structures are simply no longer affordable, or even appropriate. We are now in an age when much learning takes place outside school walls and where the internet surpasses libraries as the chief warehouse for information.

This will be the moment when government and the teachers will be forced to have the conversation that both have long avoided. No one outruns history forever! Sooner or later, the future has to be faced.

[Tags: Education, Politics.]  [Tyee]

Read more: Politics, Education

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