March 3 , 2007

Raising Literacy by Changing Politics

"We simply do not believe that British Columbians would consider leaving 1,000,000 of our fellow citizens behind to be a 'great goal for a golden decade'."
Minority Report of the Select Standing Committee on Education, Douglas Routley, MLA
Deputy Chair, Select Standing Committee on Education, February 2007

NDP members of the Select Standing Committee on Education have made a major step in changing how politics is done in BC. They have challenged the government's performance measurement for one of its "five great goals". The first goal is to: "Make B.C. the best educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent." The performance measurement for literacy in the Campbell government's Strategic Plan is to improve BC's international rank with respect to the Program for International Student Assessment, and to make BC rank first in Canada. In their Minority Report, NDP MLAs Doug Routley (Vice-Chair) (Cowichan - Ladysmith), David Cubberley (Saanich - South), Rob Fleming (Victoria - Hillside) and Norm Macdonald (Columbia River - Revelstoke) wrote:

The NDP MLAs criticized the Majority Report in strong terms:

The Minority Report noted that "a one percent gain in the provincial literacy rate of B.C. will boost the GDP by $1.6-billion." The NDP MLAs thought that fact should have focused the committee's attention on addressing literacy as a higher priority with performance measurements that would contribute to reducing illiteracy. Policy analysts everywhere stress that what gets measured gets done.

The reason the Minority Report changes how politics is done in BC is that it is the first significant report from the Official Opposition that uses the framework recommended by former Auditor General George Morfitt to specify goals, objectives and performance measurements. Politics in BC is usually driven by how the daily news can be used to make the government look good or bad. Rather than taking a broad overview of policy, what may be isolated incidents are frequently used to characterize government performance. The approach that was built into the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act with its requirement for a Strategic Plan and Service Plans is to force government to say what it is trying to accomplish and how it will measure what it is doing. The Act then requires annual reports on the measurements. Under the Campbell government there are glaring gaps in the measurements that are specified. For example, the Service Plan for Health doesn't specify infant mortality as one of its performance measurements; the Service Plan for the Ministry of Children and Family Development doesn't use the performance measure of how many children served by the Ministry are re-abused or re-neglected. An opportunity exists to advance public policy and to hold the government more accountable by devoting much more effort in political debate on what government should set as its goals and how those goals should be measured. In its Minority Report, the NDP MLAs have done that by calling for progress on reducing illiteracy to be measured in absolute rather than relative terms by reducing the number by 20% per year.

The Minority Report doesn't stop at challenging the government's performance measurement. It also specified actions that can be taken to meet a higher standard:

It is worth reading and comparing the Majority and Minority Reports of the Select Standing Committee on Education. Every goal and performance measurement in government needs to be scrutinized in a manner similar to what has been done on the issue of literacy. Doing that would raise the level of political and policy debate to a standard that would make all British Columbians proud.