Efficiency fetish—the worship of doing more with less—manifests in British Columbia’s education system as a relentless pursuit of cost-cutting metrics, process streamlining and staffing reductions, all while underestimating the human cost borne by students, families and educators; this ideology elevates quantitative outputs over the qualitative conditions that sustain inclusive, trauma-informed learning environments. www2.gov.bc.ca instituteforpubliceducation.org.
Recognizing efficiency fetish tactics
In BC schools, efficiency fetish tactics take the form of leaner staffing models driven by per-student funding formulas that incentivize district boards to do more with fewer teachers and support staff; these austerity pressures have contributed to critical shortages of educational assistants and specialist staff essential to supporting students with disabilities and complex needs. www2.gov.bc.ca vancouver.citynews.ca
At the policy level, programs that require time-intensive relationship-building—such as restorative practice or individual learning plans—are dismissed as luxuries rather than necessities, deemed too “inefficient” despite evidence that they reduce exclusionary discipline and improve outcomes for neurodivergent students instituteforpubliceducation.org.
The cost of efficiency fetish
When districts cut positions or collapse programs to meet arbitrary efficiency targets, students lose more than services—they lose the very supports that enable them to learn and thrive; Inclusion BC’s literature review on effective service delivery highlights that without adequate staffing ratios and flexible funding, children with support needs are excluded, restrained or siloed in segregated settings, undermining their right to belong in neighbourhood schools inclusionbc.org. Similarly, the Representative for Children and Youth’s 2024 “Room for Improvement” assessment documents how children in care face exacerbated educational inequities when time-consuming but indispensable interventions are deprioritised in favour of cost-saving shortcuts rcybc.ca.
Strategies to counter efficiency fetish
To challenge this ideology, policymakers should embed equity-weighted metrics into the provincial funding formula—allocating additional resources for classrooms with higher proportions of students requiring specialised supports—thereby realigning “efficiency” with meaningful inclusion rather than mere head counts bctf.ca rcybc.ca.
Boards of education must also publish transparent reports on how efficiency gains are reinvested in student-centred services, enabling parents and advocacy groups to hold decision-makers to account. Professional associations like the BC Teachers’ Federation and CUPE BC can leverage collective bargaining to secure staffing minimums and safeguard time for collaborative planning, mentoring and individualised instruction—practices often sacrificed in the name of leaner operations. Finally, communities can demand provisional pilots that guarantee scale-up and protection against budgetary rollback, ensuring that no trial program becomes a tool of perpetual postponement masked as “cost efficiency.”
Conclusion
Challenging the efficiency fetish means refusing the false promise that doing more with less serves students; instead, we must insist that true efficiency in education be measured by the depth of support, the resilience of relationships and the equitable outcomes achieved—metrics that honour every learner’s right to dignity, safety and opportunity.
