How Business Leaders Can Help Our Students Make The Grade
Alec Bruce is a Halifax-based columnist who writes on business, government and the economy in Atlantic Canada. Read more of his stuff at www.brucescribe.com.
Apart from occasional narcissists, bouncing from one self-made crisis to another in the nation’s executive suites, do Canadian businesses care about the toddlers in their midst?
They should.
We Canucks may relish the top marks the civilized world regularly grants us for our peace, order and good government.
But when it comes to the condition of our early-years education system, we’re more apt to receive a big, fat “needs improvement”.
And that’s bad for, of all things, the bottom line.
Ask anyone who crunches numbers for a living. Specifically, ask the Conference Board of Canada. It finds that every dollar spent on expanding early childhood education enrolment of kids younger than five would yield close to $6 in economic benefits.
Said Craig Alexander, the Conference Board’s senior vice-president and chief economist, in a 2017 report: “The economy and society benefits when more mothers enter the labour force and when children who have received additional early childhood education enter the workforce. Yet, despite the evident benefits of extended access, Canada lags its international peers.”
Boy, does it ever.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has even made an institutional project of clucking its tongue over this country’s incomprehensible approach to education. “In 2010, only one per cent of three-year-olds and 48 per cent of four-year-olds were enrolled in early childhood education programmes (OECD average in 2011: 67 per cent and 82 per cent, respectively),” it reported not long ago.
Meanwhile, there’s no evidence to suggest that matters have improved much over the past few years.
Today, in Ontario, Conservative Premier Doug Ford says his latest round of classroom cutbacks will save money – otherwise spent by “grandstanding”, left-leaning educators – and make the littlest ones among us “more resilient” to the oddities of life (oddities, presumably, like Doug Ford).
Nor is Nova Scotia’s government bureaucracy above retailing its own brand of job terror whenever the situation suits its bargaining position. According to a CBC News report in early April, “a Department of Justice lawyer sent a letter to every pre-primary early child educator in the province, warning them their jobs might be in jeopardy.” It referred to a grievance filed by the Nova Scotia Teacher’s Union that, frankly, had more to do with playing knuckleball during contract negotiations than the fate of ECEs.
Indeed, when contacted by the public broadcaster, the head of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union Paul Wozney said: “Our position was never that these positions should be exclusively NSTU positions. . .From our perspective what we are hoping now is that we see teachers added to the staffing mix (of ECEs).”
What a colossal waste of time and energy.
Study after study over 50 years of hard-won experience in places like Norway, Sweden and Finland convincingly argues that investments in ECE programs are among the best guarantees of peak, private-sector performance: higher productivity and rates of innovation, keener competitiveness, durable and more meaningful job creation, lower turnover. That’s nothing to say of the bite it takes out of illiteracy, crime and social dissolution among young people.
According to the Carolina Abecedarian Project, conceived 30 years ago at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina, “Children who participated in early intervention program(s) … completed more years of education and were more likely to attend a four-year college. Mothers whose children participated in the program achieved higher educational and employment status than mothers whose children (did not).”
Still, with few exceptions, successive governments in this country – with all their money and resources – choose to spend the public bucks they haven’t promised to return to taxpayers on prisons, military aircraft that don’t fly, boats that won’t float, and staged commemorations of wars Canada may or may not have won two centuries ago.
Is it time, then, for businesses – ever tuned to their economic self-interests – to step up?
In fact, erecting a national system of privately capitalized, universally accessible ECE might cost Canadian industry, collectively, as much as $8 billion a year. But that’s a bargain given the long-term boons. Consider that Ford’s Ontario currently spends $10-13 billion a year fighting a largely fruitless war against systemic poverty. In Nova Scotia, that annual toll is a lower, but still alarming, $2.5 billion. Those are tax dollars.
Effective ECE is not an expensive frill or wobbly experiment. Nor should it be a political football. On the contrary, it’s a tangible, real-world application for fighting some of our biggest problems, including skills deficiencies, underemployment and outright joblessness.
That’s why ECE is, as much as anything, a business issue. And why we Canadians, who “need improvement”, must start making the grade both in and beyond the nation’s executive suites.
Huddle publishes commentaries from groups and individuals on important business issues facing the Maritimes. These commentaries do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Huddle. To submit a commentary for consideration, contact editor Mark Leger: [email protected].