A response to Michael Zwaagstra’s “B.C. test scores plummet despite spending increases on schools”
Michael Zwaagstra wants you to believe that British Columbia spent generously on its public schools and received nothing in return, that unions are self-interested actors inflating a crisis for their own benefit, that the real culprits behind declining PISA scores are a progressive curriculum and the absence of high-stakes exams. His argument, published by the Fraser Institute with the confidence of a think tank accustomed to audiences who will accept a chart without interrogating its axes, depends entirely on your ignorance of what happened to BC’s education system between 2002 and 2016—and on your willingness to mistake a thermometer for a furnace.
The baseline is the lie
Zwaagstra’s central claim is arresting: spending on BC public schools rose 46.9% nominally from 2013/14 to 2022/23, or 9.3% after adjusting for enrolment and inflation, yet PISA scores declined. More money in, worse results out. Case closed.
Except the 2013/14 baseline he selects falls squarely within a period when BC’s education system was operating under legislation the Supreme Court of Canada would subsequently strike down as unconstitutional. Between 2002 and 2016, the Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark Liberal governments systematically dismantled public education through legislation that stripped class size and composition protections from teachers’ collective agreements, eliminated targeted funding for students with disabilities, and gutted thousands of specialist positions—special education teachers, counsellors, librarians, speech-language pathologists. The BC Teachers’ Federation fought this overreach through fifteen years of litigation, winning a Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2016 (British Columbia Teachers’ Federation v. British Columbia, 2016 SCC 49)—with Justices Côté and Brown dissenting—that forced government to reinstate the illegally removed contract language. The provincial budget allocated $376 million annually to meet the obligations of that decision—rising to approximately $400 million per year as costs mounted—and even that figure addressed only the restoration of conditions that existed before the 2002 deletions, inside a system whose needs had compounded dramatically across sixteen years of neglect.
Zwaagstra measures spending growth from the floor of this destruction and declares the increase adequate. This is like measuring a person’s recovery from starvation by noting they gained weight, while declining to mention they remain thirty pounds underweight.
The Institute for Public Education has calculated that if British Columbia maintained education spending at the percentage of GDP it allocated in 2000, current grants to school districts would increase by $3.8 billion—from $6.754 billion to $10.552 billion annually. That represents a 56% increase, restoring funding to previous provincial commitment levels rather than expanding beyond what BC historically considered appropriate. The 9.3% real increase Zwaagstra brandishes as evidence of profligacy is a fraction of the remediation that sixteen years of sustained funding suppression demands.
The PISA scores tell a story he will not read
The decline in PISA scores from 2012 to 2022 maps with devastating precision onto the period during which BC students received their entire education under the conditions created by legislation the highest court in the country would find unconstitutional—legislation that stripped the staffing protections, class composition limits, and specialist positions that make learning possible for diverse classrooms. The 2012 baseline captures students already damaged by a decade of stripped contracts and eliminated supports; the 2022 results capture students whose learning unfolded inside classrooms where specialist teachers had been cut, educational assistants were shared across impossible caseloads, class composition limits were routinely exceeded, and disabled children were being sent home because the system lacked the resources to include them.
Zwaagstra presents the spending increase and the score decline as though they should move in lockstep, as though dollars poured into a catastrophically degraded system should produce immediate measurable returns in the same way a factory upgrade increases widget output. The spending increase during this period was absorbing a deficit—hiring back the professionals who had been eliminated, restoring the infrastructure that had been allowed to decay, beginning the long and unfinished project of rebuilding institutional capacity after sixteen years of policy-driven destruction. Expecting PISA scores to rise while the system was still stanching its wounds reveals either a fundamental misunderstanding of how educational investment works or a deliberate refusal to acknowledge it.
Zwaagstra also neglects to mention that PISA score declines occurred across most Canadian provinces and across numerous OECD countries during this period, which somewhat complicates his tidy provincial narrative.
The curriculum grievance reveals the politics
His claim that BC’s redesigned curriculum focuses excessively on discrimination—his examples are residential schools, the Chinese head tax, and wartime internment—reveals the Fraser Institute’s actual objection, which is ideological rather than pedagogical. These are foundational events in Canadian history, events whose intergenerational consequences shape the country’s legal, political, and social landscape to this day, and the suggestion that teaching them constitutes a distraction from “real” academic content is a political position wearing the costume of educational analysis.
The curriculum redesign was developed through extensive consultation and aligns with competency-based frameworks adopted by high-performing jurisdictions internationally. Reasonable people can debate implementation quality, the balance between content knowledge and inquiry-based learning, the adequacy of teacher preparation for new pedagogical models. Dismissing the framework because it centres equity and justice—as though the history of colonisation and racial exclusion were elective rather than essential knowledge—tells you everything about the Institute’s commitments and nothing about the curriculum’s merit.
The exam argument serves the Institute’s product line
Zwaagstra attributes declining performance partly to the removal of high-stakes provincial exams, arguing that students are less motivated to take courses seriously without exams counting toward their final marks. The research literature on whether high-stakes standardised testing improves learning is deeply contested; what such testing is consistently associated with includes narrowed curriculum, teaching to the test, elevated student anxiety, and the systematic disadvantaging of students whose cognitive profiles, sensory environments, or life circumstances make timed written examinations a poor measure of their knowledge.
The Fraser Institute’s institutional commitment to standardised testing is worth noting here, given that test scores constitute the raw material for the Institute’s school rankings—a product they market aggressively and which generates considerable media attention. The removal of provincial exams reduced the data available for those rankings. Their concern about the absence of high-stakes assessment is, at minimum, partly a concern about the viability of their own output.
What Zwaagstra will not name
The article performs an extraordinary act of erasure, the kind of omission that reveals its architecture more clearly than anything it includes. Zwaagstra names the BCTF and CUPE as self-interested parties advocating for more funding. He names the Eby government as the entity responsible for fiscal decisions. He names the redesigned curriculum and the removed exams as culprits.
He does not name Gordon Campbell. He does not name Christy Clark, who as education minister in 2002 introduced legislation enabling districts to operate for-profit business companies—part of the broader transformation of public education into a vehicle for fiscal efficiency whose downstream consequences the Supreme Court would later address. He does not name the BC Liberal governments whose sixteen years of constitutionally impugned education policy produced the conditions his PISA data documents. He does not mention the Supreme Court decision at all. He does not acknowledge the $340 million annual inclusion-funding shortfall the BCTF has documented, the BC Ombudsperson’s 2025 systemic investigation into the exclusion of students with disabilities from public schools, or the estimated 4,760 incidents of exclusion BCEdAccess documented through parent reporting in 2021/22—a figure that rose to nearly 5973 the following year.
In 2023–24, provincial funding covered only about 72% of what school districts actually spent on inclusive education, leaving a $340 million gap that districts absorbed from other programs or simply left unfilled. Educational assistants earn poverty-adjacent wages for ten-month work years while superintendents collect base salaries in the mid-$300,000 range—with total compensation packages approaching half a million dollars when pensions, benefits, and vehicle allowances are included. Specialist services operate at negotiated ratios—one school psychologist per 1,800 to 2,000 students, one speech-language pathologist per 1,250 to 1,400—that permit brief assessment and recommendation but structurally prevent the sustained therapeutic relationships research demonstrates as necessary for meaningful progress. School buildings generate predictable sensory dysregulation through fluorescent lighting, industrial acoustics, and overcrowding, then interpret the resulting distress as behavioural pathology requiring management.
The children subjected to these conditions—the ones on shortened days, the ones whose playgrounds were closed as collective punishment for one disabled child’s sensory-seeking behaviour, the ones whose regulation support was refused because it required labour the funding model rendered impossible, the ones whose families left Canada because American schools offered more support than BC’s—those children also took the PISA tests whose results Zwaagstra deploys. Their scores are in his data. He has no interest in asking why they struggled.
The structural function of the argument
The Fraser Institute article operates as a precise inversion of accountability, performing at the level of public discourse the same scapegoat mechanism that operates inside schools when a playground closes because one autistic child sought ice. It takes the wreckage produced by the very austerity policies the Institute championed for decades—policies of tax reduction, deregulation, fiscal restraint, public-sector contraction—and repurposes that wreckage as evidence that public investment itself is futile. The argument’s circularity is its genius: defund the system, document the resulting collapse, then cite the collapse as proof that funding was irrelevant.
Zwaagstra’s prescription—reverse the curriculum changes, restore high-stakes testing, stop spending more money—amounts to a recommendation that BC treat the symptoms of austerity with more austerity, that it address the consequences of defunding by ensuring the conversation remains permanently fixed on anything other than funding. The Fraser Institute has spent decades arguing that public education requires market discipline rather than public investment, and this article is a faithful expression of that commitment: a document engineered to redirect your attention from the furnace that set the building on fire toward the thermometer that measured the heat.
BC’s children deserve an honest accounting of what was done to their education system and by whom. This article offers them the opposite.
Note: I refuse to link to Fraser Institute, but you can find Zwaagstra’s article by searching for “B.C. test scores plummet despite spending increases on schools”
