I was spending a weekend at my brother's at the end of the past school year. While our teenage boys were engaged in a Minecraft mission in the backroom, we discussed how junior high was going for them.

My nephew is a bubbly young fellow who likes school but is held back by severe learning disabilities. "The special ed teacher suggested that we send him to the Fraser Academy," my brother told me. The Fraser Academy is a Vancouver private school for learning disabled students. Since the classes are very small, students get a lot more attention than they would in a public setting.

"We can't afford that," he confessed. Since I am a public school teacher, he wanted to know what I thought.

"That is so wrong," I responded, my tone revealing that he had hit a vein that ran close to my heart.

This happened around the time that the BC Liberals were drafting legislation to end the labour dispute with my colleagues and myself. At this time, BCTF president Susan Lambert addressed a group of Ontario teachers, telling them that, "Our government does not want us to succeed... in building a strong public education system" like the one that exists in Ontario. She warned them that the BC Liberals are "lock step marching towards the privatization of education." A BCTF report from 2010 called The Numbers Tell the Story widely circulated by email amongst parents and teachers, claimed that relative education spending had been declining throughout the Liberals' reign.

This had my colleagues and I very concerned.

We were still in job action, which many felt was our only way to stop the government from throttling our public school system, turning it into a ghetto, driving middle-class families towards private schools with their gated-community mentality and non-union staff.

At this time, Education Minister George Abbott tweeted that the "government is investing in public education -- $5.3 billion today, up 29 per cent from $4.1 billion in 2001." He announced that under his direction, "the government is increasing funding in some areas and introducing new measures to support B.C. schools and students."

Reading through the statements coming from both sides was making my head swim. On one side, the system is being driven to failure by bureaucrats with knives in their smiles, on the other, entitled teachers need to be given a lesson in how good they have it. Over the summer, I decided to do my best to make sense of this by digging up the facts and discussing them with some people who might shine some light on them for me.

Building confidence

As is often the case, my search has proven more interesting than the answers that I have discovered, which are lukewarm and murky. Perhaps it was not hard facts, locked up in the safe of reason that mattered so much. Maybe it does not matter who is right and who is wrong. Instead, the real issue might be confidence in the system -- the kind of belief that holds up a cathedral roof more surely than stone pillars.

The stone-cold fact that both sides agree on is that public school enrollment has declined by about 10 per cent over the past 10 years, while private school enrollment has been steadily rising.

Last week, I had a brief but spirited chat with Susan Lambert, catching her between office and car on her cell phone. I asked her if there is intent to decrease the standards in public schools in order to give an advantage to private institutions. "There is a deliberate encouraging of falling standards," she answered. I asked if there was any evidence for this position. "A lot," she countered.

After a pause, pregnant with "Where do I begin?" she explained that since educational funding is per-pupil, the private system has been grabbing a bigger slice of the educational pie as their numbers have shot up. In addition she told me, "There is now more money for children with disabilities."

She continued, "There is the legislative encouragement for those to seek private alternatives. Parents can be compensated for private lessons, say, if they enroll their child in a hockey academy or in tennis lessons. They can claim the costs and be reimbursed. Not only that, but they can get credit for it -- be given P.E. (Physical Education) credit."

She tells me that our education minister proudly announced that B.C. now places eighth in the world according to an international educational assessment. "We used to boast of being number one," she claims.

When I asked her where the increased private school enrollment has come from, she could not give me a breakdown, only that it has increased steadily over the past 10 years and now sits at around eleven per cent of total school enrollment. She attributed this shift to "declining standards under this government."