Comment on the federal announcement of $2B for K-12 schools to use to safely return. It’s very unusual for the federal govt to spend this much on a specific K-12 policy, because K-12 is provincial responsibility and the gov’t can’t spend directly if it wanted to. 1/9

What will happen is that the provinces will absorb this cash into their planned K-12 expenditures anyway. They won’t likely spend more, they will use this to defray planned spending. 2/9

An example of this from history is the federal technical and vocational training assistance in the 1960s (the last big federal expenditure that reached K-12) that the provinces used to build high schools they would have had to build anyway. 3/9

But the federal government today knows this and doesn’t care. It needs to transfer the provinces extra health and education $ anyway. By calling this pandemic $ it scores political points as doing what the provinces have not been doing, spending $ to make schools safe. 4/9

$2B additional in undifferentiated provincial education spending could hire 20k more teachers. But there aren’t that many available and even hiring them would reduce class sizes by a negligible 1-2 students. 5/9

A far more effective use of this $2B would be a federal program like CERB that gives sick benefits to parents who have little or no sick leave the to stay home with their sick kids and not send them to school. That would do more to reduce Covid spread in schools. 6/9

However, that’s not as politically slick as the $2B announcement that PM Trudeau is saving your kids from (insert name of your Premier here). 7/9

And a problem we are facing now w/ back to school policy is that pundits, professors, unions, opposition parties have made it partisan. Instead of good policy we get better PR. 8/9

Simply demanding more $ or smaller class sizes or new HVAC, with the idea that the demanding makes kids safer will not make policy that actually does. It will make policy like the federal $2B. That dog won’t hunt. 9/9