A Short History of K-12 Public School Spending in British Columbia, 1970-2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at fifty years’ worth (1970-2020) of public K-12 education expenditure data from the Canadian province of British Columbia. It asks if spending has increased or decreased in this period and examines the causes and correlates of spending changes. Previous research has tended to assume that spending has decreased during this “neoliberal” period. However, historical and empirical research in this article gives a much different picture. K-12 public education spending in British Columbia – adjusted for inflation – is 250 percent higher in 2020 than it was in 1970. Meanwhile, enrolment in 2020 is only 110 percent of 1970 enrolment. The main cause of spending growth is increase in the number of teachers the system employs, which depended in no small part on the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF)’s successful attempts to negotiate class size and composition rules. Other causes of spending growth are provincial and district spending priorities. Successive provincial governments have tried to rein in education spending by legislating cost controls on district spending and teacher contracts but have seldom achieved reductions for long. Spending increases and attempts at cost control are at best only linked partially to governing party ideology, with right-wing and left-wing provincial governments both initiating years of increases and cutbacks. More empirical research is needed, especially into spending’s effects on educational equity and quality, to complete the picture of education finance in British Columbia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".