CALGARY—Education advocates are calling on the government to reinstate a requirement that school boards report their class sizes after it was removed in the 2019 budget.

In Oct. 2019, the government released a report on the Class Size Initiative, a grant program in place since 2004 meant to help school boards prevent and mitigate larger class sizes. The report said the funding hadn’t worked, and that despite putting $3.4 billion into the issue over 15 years, class size averages have stayed steady.

At a press conference Oct. 18, Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said the Class Size Initiative didn’t “move the needle” on classroom sizes.

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So, when the 2019 budget was released a week later, the funding initiative was scrapped. The money will be reallocated after the current school year, according to the budget document.

When the funding initiative ends, so will the requirement that school boards report their class sizes in detail to the government. Since the program began in 2004, this data has been made publicly available on the government’s website.

But education advocates with Support Our Students say the Class Size Initiative was actually more effective than the government’s report let on, and that without continued access to class size data, there will be no way to track the effect of scrapping the program.

“It’s a really important part of the public being able to access data and to keep the government accountable,” said Barbara Silva, co-founder of Support Our Students.

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Colin Aitchison, press secretary for the minister of education, confirmed in an email that the reporting standards were created to “track progress on the failed Class Size Initiative, which did not succeed in reducing class sizes.”

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“The Minister is currently creating a working group which will consist of education partners who will examine how to best address complexities in the modern classroom, including class size. One aspect of this that the group will consider is how to best measure improvement in the classroom,” he said.

Silva said she feels the government’s report does not take into account an important question: “What would have happened to those class sizes had that funding not been in place at all?”

Silva said Support Our Students found numerous flaws with the report. That’s why Sean Dunn, a software engineer, parent and volunteer for Support Our Students, decided to take the publicly available data into his own hands after the government report was released.

Aitchison said Support Our Students did not formally submit their report to the government.

Dunn said the government’s analysis of the data was “superficial,” which is why he wrote a competing report for Support Our Students.

For example, the government report states that a “small percentage” of the funding was targeted toward hiring teachers. It also states that 2,900 teachers were hired or retained under the funding initiative. Dunn did his own calculations, using average teacher salaries and the total funding allocated each year. He said upwards of 80 per cent of the funding has gone to hiring teachers.

Dunn also pointed out that the government report compares class size averages from 2003-04, before the funding began; 2004-05, the year the funding was first given out; and then from 2016 onwards.

By those metrics, average class sizes stayed steady, even rising a little bit. For example, in 2003-04, Kindergarten to Grade Three had an average of 21.8 students. The year after the funding was implemented, the average was 19.7, but by 2018-19, it was 20.4. (The recommended average is 17.)

But what happened between 2005 and 2016? Dunn found that the funding had its biggest impact up until 2008. During this period, the proportion of Kindergarten to Grade Three students in urban schools with a class size of 23 or more decreased from 27 per cent to 17 per cent, his report states.

“Ultimately, the program couldn’t keep pace with enrolment growth. But that was just conveniently left out of the (government) report,” said Dunn.

“We did, in our opinion, the analysis that the government should have done with this data,” he said, adding that, without the publicly available data from school boards, this analysis would have been “impossible.”

Even though the class size initiative is ending, Dunn said he thinks the government should continue to mandate the reporting of class size data.

“The concern Albertans have for class sizes isn’t going away. The concern the government should have over class sizes isn’t going away. And so (reporting) should be completely independent of that,” he said.