A 33-year-old student teacher, Martin (not his real name), has just wrapped up his last class of the day. He’s been teaching junior high students at a school in northeast Edmonton. Spring break is within sight. He admits to being burned out. It’s the seventh week of his field placement.
“It was awful, really bad,” he says over Zoom with a rueful smile, recounting his day. He’s been teaching social studies and outdoor education. All his classes have over 30 students. “It’s very difficult to manage the room. Can you get the kids to be quiet enough and respect your time so you can get through the content?”
Tomorrow he will be responsible for a class of 43 students—unusually large, but not at all unheard of in Alberta these days.
Martin is one of the student teachers in an advanced field placement class supervised by J-C Couture at the University of Alberta. At a “callback session” during the first week of March, they had a chance to share their experiences with one another and their professor. Among the practicum teachers in attendance, well over half had been teaching in classes of larger than 30 students, a third had classes of over 35, and three had classes of more than 40.
No teacher—or student teacher—was prepared to let me use their name for this article. Those in search of their first permanent job didn’t want to damage their work prospects. Experienced teachers face a different challenge. They serve as ambassadors for their schools, staffing open houses and answering questions from parents. They made it clear that classrooms in Alberta are often overcrowded and too many students are being left behind for want of support. But they didn’t want this information to be tied to any particular teacher’s name or to a specific school. And, as I confirmed, school boards will generally not permit journalists to access classrooms and observe conditions for themselves—not even on the promise of maintaining the confidentiality of the school, the teacher and the students. This means the burden of reporting what’s going on falls almost entirely on teachers. And what teachers are seeing in 2023 is perhaps without precedent.
Martin is unequivocal about what’s been most shocking to him about the education system. “Just the complete lack of money and support. Our school probably needs about 30 educational assistants. We have six. For some students, they need a reader, they need a translator. They need things that are just not being provided.”
It was not always like this. Couture, now 67, started his teaching career in 1978 in Hinton. “There was an implied social contract that the optimal class size was 20 students,” he recalls. “By the mid-1980s, and with the provincial focus on inclusion… class complexity grew dramatically. We were fortunate to have principals who advocated for support for inclusion and who made every effort to keep a cap of 25 students. Compared to the class sizes and complexity we experienced before the late 1980s, few of us could have managed current realities—where 30 or more students is considered unremarkable.”
Martin is responsible for a class of 43 students—unusually large, but not at all unheard of
in Alberta these days.
You cannot recount the recent history of K–12 education in Alberta without discussing Ralph Klein. During his premiership the province’s education funding formula underwent one of its most comprehensive changes. Prior to the Klein government, municipalities levied local taxes and gave the funds directly to school boards. These funds were supplemented by the provincial government. This was not necessarily a perfect situation. Per-student funding depended on the affluence of the local tax base, as Klein-era education minister Gary Mar then lamented.
The School Amendment Act of 1994 changed this. The province gave itself the power to set property tax rates for education. But at the same time, in keeping with the general austerity program of that era, the Klein government cut overall education funding by 12.4 per cent. Because the power to set tax rates locally had been removed, municipalities were unable to make up for provincial funding shortfalls. Over time, the amount of funding derived from local taxes declined, and the amount from general provincial revenue increased proportionally.
One consequence of these changes was that schools—and by extension, school boards—started to compete for students. Enrolment became the main factor determining their budgets. Under a certain light, this can seem like a perverse incentive. The more students a school crams into classrooms, the more funding it receives. The reality is not quite so straightforward.
Today the government provides funding through several grants, of which base funding (covering teachers’ salaries and classroom materials) is the largest. The portion of funding of most interest when it comes to class size is targeted funding. This is a separate category that supports particular initiatives—including, at least formerly, the Class Size Initiative.
The impetus for the Class Size Initiative dates back to 2002, the year of the largest teachers’ strike in Alberta history. In his chronicle of the strike, former Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) president Larry Booi explained that prior to the 2001 budget, premier Klein promised to address teachers’ concerns over pay and classroom conditions. When the actual budget came down in April 2001, then-minister of education Lyle Oberg announced a dramatic U-turn. He earmarked funds for pay increases of only 4 per cent the first year and 2 per cent for the following two years.
By early February 2002, over 21,000 teachers were out on strike. It wasn’t until April 19 that the ATA and the government agreed to an arbitration process to determine new collective agreements.
During the strike, few issues captured public attention more strongly than class sizes. According to a search of the official record of legislature proceedings, Hansard, the term “class size” is explicitly referenced 252 times during the second session of the 25th Legislature, from 2002 to 2003. Here’s a typical exchange from November 25, 2002, between Alberta Liberal education critic Don Massey and the minister:
DONALD MASSEY: Given that class size was a major issue in the teachers’ strike, what action is the minister taking to avoid a new budget-driven crisis?…
LYLE OBERG: Mr. Speaker, the mountain of evidence that is accumulating about class size basically shows that flexibility is by far the most important element when it comes to class size… Some classes, for example, at 12 might be too big; some classes of 35 might be fine. It’s flexibility that is important.…
Oberg’s dismissiveness notwithstanding, Klein’s government established Alberta’s Commission on Learning (ACOL) to look more closely at classroom conditions. ACOL reported back in October 2003, recommending that each school jurisdiction try to limit class sizes to the following targets:
Kindergarten–Grade 3: 17 students
Grades 4–6: 23 students
Grades 7–9: 25 students
Grades 10–12: 27 students
The provincial government accepted these recommendations and began giving targeted funding to help school boards hire additional teachers. The Class Size Initiative launched for the 2004/2005 school year. Sure enough, the initiative started to have results. By 2008, average class sizes were trending downward, and the issue had subsided as a source of major public debate.
However, after 2008, average class sizes—the main metric collected in a standardized way by the province—started to creep up again. They have done so ever since.
With 35, 40-plus students, it sure feels like a crisis. Our ability to be inclusive of different learners and abilities is dramatically reduced.
In 2019, under the new UCP government, Alberta Education reviewed the Class Size Initiative. Its final report noted that school boards had only been required to report on how they’d used their targeted funding during the first three years of the initiative. After that point, boards had continued to use the funding to limit class size increases but had also reallocated some of it to supplement base funding.
Alberta Education’s report, along with the Auditor General’s report of 2018, “Processes to Manage the Student Class Size Initiative,” reveal the full extent of the problem, which has remained particularly acute at the younger grade levels. In 2004, when the Class Size Initiative started, the average class in Kindergarten to Grade 3 had 19.7 students. That declined to 18.2 students by 2008, but then increased again in 2018/2019 to 20.4.
In fact, at all grade levels, average class sizes were higher after 15 years of the initiative than at the outset.
As many critics of the provincial government’s approach to class size have pointed out, focusing on averages was flawed all along. Support Our Schools Alberta, an advocacy group for public education, released a report after Alberta Education’s 2019 review, noting that “class size averages do not accurately represent the widening distribution of class sizes, especially the worrying increase in the proportion of students in the extreme end of class sizes.”
Another way to look at the situation is at the number of classes exceeding recommended guidelines. Even as the Auditor General’s report found that most class sizes in Grades 7 through 12 were meeting the mark, only 71.8 per cent of classes from Grades 4 to 6 achieved the guidelines in 2016/17. A paltry 8.8 per cent of classes in Kindergarten to Grade 3 were meeting the targets in the 2004/05 school year. By 2016/17 that had declined to only 7.2 per cent. In other words, well over 90 per cent of Alberta children at the youngest grade levels were in classrooms that exceeded the recommended guidelines.
During its 2019 review, Alberta Education asked school jurisdictions for their perspective of the Class Size Initiative, and subsequently reported that “the overall theme of the responses was that the class size model is not effective and should be rolled into the base instruction funding amount.” Alberta transitioned to a new funding model in September 2020 and the targeted grant for the Class Size Initiative was officially phased out. With the cessation of the initiative came an end to the centralized data that had been collected each year to give Albertans insight into the size of classes across the province.
To try and compensate for that, the ATA has since 2020 conducted among its members a voluntary survey on class sizes. In the fall of 2022 the ATA reported that nearly 40 per cent of teachers had between 30 and 40 students, and that 73 per cent of school leaders reported an increase in class sizes in their schools.
For her part, Alberta Education Minister Adriana LaGrange appeared confident that the funding currently provided was meeting the need in classrooms. “Over the next three years, the government is increasing funding to school authorities by $820-million specifically to support enrolment growth and growing student bodies,” her spokesperson, Emily Peckham, told me. “Additionally, funding in Budget 2023 includes $126-million to address class complexity so school authorities can add supports to classrooms and give students the focused time and attention they need. School boards have the flexibility and autonomy to spend their dollars in the way they feel is best for their students.”
The stated priority on “flexibility” sounds pretty similar to Lyle Oberg’s answer to Don Massey back in 2002.
So how are school boards benefiting from their flexibility? I focused on the school board in my hometown. Edmonton Public School Board chair Trisha Estabrooks is not reticent to connect the inadequacy of the provincial education budget to class sizes. “We can track cuts to education by looking at class sizes,” she says. “If we’re seeing class sizes that are incrementally growing, or ballooning in size, that’s one indicator of a school division facing budget pressures.”
In Edmonton, the public school board has decided to continue to collect data on class sizes in a manner consistent with how the province once did. It also uses a weighted enrolment allocation that takes into consideration the specialized learning supports needed in any given school in order to determine the appropriate level of funding. According to a memo from April 2021, the intent is to “offset the elimination of the Alberta Small Class Size grant.”
Despite these efforts, class sizes in Edmonton public schools continue to increase. “There’s some incremental growth in class sizes, not just in Kindergarten to Grade 3 but for Kindergarten to Grade 9,” says Estabrooks. “We’re expecting an almost 5 per cent enrolment growth next year. We don’t have any space to put these kids, in particular in the city’s southeast and southwest… In the most recent provincial announcement, we got one [new] school. We need 12.”
The complexity of classrooms is increasing—and not just in Alberta’s biggest cities.
Estabrooks says she worries that the increase in class sizes, even if incremental, is a step along the wrong trajectory. “It’s taking you down a path you don’t want to go on.” The Class Size Initiative clearly wasn’t an effective solution to the problem—after all, after 15 years, Alberta schools were no better off than they were in 2004. But this situation can perhaps be explained in part by the fact that per-student funding in the province had fallen from the third-highest in Canada in 2012 to the lowest, according to Statistics Canada data.
Furthermore, provincial funding is constantly in a game of catch-up with actual enrolment numbers in Alberta schools. As of September 2020, Alberta Education shifted its funding formula. It now calculates school boards’ total enrolment on a three-year weighted moving average, factoring in the prior year’s actual enrolment, the current year’s estimated enrolment and the projected enrolment for the following year. Consequently, per-student funding never actually reflects precisely the number of students in schools in any given year. Estabrooks says that in Edmonton public schools the funding fell short by the equivalent of 1,700 students last year.
Larry Booi believes a solution to the class size problem exists today that wasn’t tried back when he was ATA president. It’s one that has already been implemented by British Columbia: build class sizes into teacher contracts. (The “Agreement Regarding Restoration of Class Size, Composition, Ratios and Ancillary Language” was part of the broader collective agreement BC teachers negotiated in 2020.) “If you don’t fund enrolment and inflation, you’re automatically going to have to increase your class sizes,” says Booi. So how do you avoid this? “The answer is you put it in contracts. And once you have it in contracts, all of a sudden the board has a case, and they say ‘We can’t raise class sizes.’ The pressure then shifts to the provincial government.”
Even if teachers offer near-unanimous agreement that small classes are better, what does the research say?
Alberta Education’s 2019 review cited a comprehensive study from 2008 conducted by the Canadian Education Association, now renamed the EdCan Network, called “Class Size Reduction: What the Literature Suggests About What Works.” Alberta Education was extremely selective in what it chose to share from this particular report, observing only that “how and why reducing class size works, and under what conditions it works, are all underexplained.”
That wouldn’t necessarily be the most salient part of EdCan’s report for all readers. Another quote from the same report: “As a result of our review, we are left with the understanding that class size reduction is a useful initiative in combination with other factors when certain practical and instructional issues are taken into account.”
If students were a homogeneous group and always came to school well fed, well rested and sufficiently prepared emotionally and socially to devote themselves to learning all day, big class sizes wouldn’t be such an impediment. But this simply isn’t the reality. The Edmonton Journal’s Janet French did a major investigation into class sizes in 2019. Among other striking findings, she reported that the number of English language learners (ELLs) in Edmonton public schools had gone from 7 per cent to 23 per cent over the prior 14 years. This is part of the complexity that teachers currently face.
And the complexity of classrooms is increasing not just in Alberta’s biggest cities. “Aaron” is a 34-year-old teacher in his second year of full-time teaching math and science to Grade 8 students in High Level. His class sizes for the 2022/23 school year were, in his words, “half decent,” with no class bigger than 25 students. But overcrowding had already radically transformed his school year. He had been slated to be an inclusion teacher, providing extra help with numeracy and literacy skills to students falling behind. Then his school received 100 more students than expected. Aaron was reassigned to regular teaching duties to help reduce class sizes.
“If you’re in a classroom where you have 35, 40-plus students, it sure feels like a crisis,” he says. “Our ability as teachers to deliver a curriculum in a way that is inclusive of different learner types and different abilities is dramatically reduced.”
Getting extra support for students that need it is also becoming harder. I talked to a teacher at an Edmonton high school, one of several who raised the issue of the onerous worksheets she is required to fill out for every ELL. These are the “Alberta K–12 ESL Proficiency Benchmarks,” which, under the UCP government, became a lot more time-consuming for teachers. Imagine a refugee child from Ukraine who speaks no English arriving in an Alberta school system. The worksheets must still be completed and the student’s attempts at essay-writing annotated in order to prove to Alberta Education that this student requires additional funding. These worksheets must be filled out even if the student is Canadian-born, though this doesn’t unlock any extra funding.
ATA president Jason Schilling told me, “Over half the respondents to our fall 2022 study believed the timelines for speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy or psycho-educational assessments for any of their students will take at least six months to be completed and possibly not at all within the school year.”
“Karlie,” a 43-year-old teacher in Edmonton with over a dozen years of classroom experience, has a message for Albertans who have children or grandchildren in local public schools or who understand the importance of public education generally. “I don’t know if this is too controversial to say, but the kids are sad,” she says. “They want more attention. They want help. They want to matter. Some of the kids are in crisis and are not being seen. Or they’re not in crisis, but they should be having their work entered into writing competitions, and they’re not being seen in that way. They don’t need extra help, but they need to be challenged. They can’t be either with big class sizes.”
Laurence Miall is the Edmonton-based author of Blind Spot (NeWest Press, 2014) and writes on politics and culture for various publications.
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