Canadian Education & America’s Regression

While the U. S. rushes to completely nationalize education, allegedly to improve test scores, America’s nearest northern neighbor, Canada, is taking a different approach.  “I don’t know why Americans don’t adopt the Canadian approach to education,” Jason Clemens of the Canadian Fraser Institute said last weekend at a seminar in Chicago.

In Canada, there is “no federal role in education,” Clemens said at the Friday conference sponsored by the free-market Atlas Network and the Illinois Policy Institute.  Both spending and governance of education in Canada are “entirely provincial,” Clemens said.

While, over the past two decades, Canada’s national government achieved this fundamental transformation, test scores went up. “Canada spends less than the United States on education but beats the US and the OECD averages on PISA results,” Clemens notes.

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development consists of:

PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment sponsored by the OECD.  Canada achieved all of the above, ironically, under mostly left-leaning leaders who insisted it was a matter of “mathematics, not ideology,” Clemens said. Now if only the two party establishments in the U. S. would improve their computational skills….