Equity and equality are not the same thing in education
Written by the London Community Foundation
Though London is known Canada-wide as a hub for post-secondary education and research, as a community we’re lagging behind both provincial and national levels of educational attainment. Approximately 8% of Canadians and 7% of Ontarians have not completed high school – in London, this number is 16%. And the global pandemic has not made the situation better.
Through the LCF COVID-19 Response Fund, we received countless requests for funding from organizations and agencies across the city and throughout the county. While applications came from a wide variety of sectors, a large portion of submissions came from educational organizations, particularly those concerned with supporting youth struggling with a disability or from low-income households.
In theory, schools in our community are funded fairly. Property taxes are levied and a portion of the revenue from each area goes to that area’s respective school, with government grants supplementing the budgets of poorer areas up to a limit. In reality though, since property tax revenue is heavily dependent on property values, more affluent neighbourhoods receive far more than poorer ones, and the capped government funding cannot make up the difference. This inequality results in fewer opportunities, less support for special needs, less support staff and teachers, and less funds for supplies, infrastructure and repairs for schools in poorer districts.
The pandemic exposed another very acute problem: poorer families could not afford the technology or tutoring necessary for their children to keep up with school while physically distancing, and the schools from poorer districts did not have the funding to provide the support themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic has widened the already existing gap between the rich and the poor in our community, amplifying the harsh truth that educational attainment and income are intertwined.
Approximately 18% of our population are living at or below the Low Income Measure (LIM) – for the Indigenous Peoples of our community, this number is a staggering 36%. The alarming inequality represented by these numbers is also reflected by educational attainment rates. If you recall, 16% of adults in London do not have a high school diploma, whereas the rate for Indigenous adults is 28%. Education, poverty, racism – these issues are like the interlocking gears of a broken system billed as fair and impartial. We can do better and it should not take a pandemic to spur us into action.
Sarmishta Subramanian, writing for Mclean’s, put it succinctly in her article about provincial cuts to education funding.
“Meritocracies reward those who do well—and therefore reward practice, good instruction and opportunities for learning, all of which can be bought with money. [. . .] All we can do is make the systems available to everyone the best they can be.”
Source: https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/education-cuts-ontario-doug-ford-inequality/
The answer is not to simply increase funding for education, but evenly distribute it so that poorer areas have the same opportunities to learn and grow that richer areas do. We need to fund schools equitably, not equally.