While Canadians believe strongly in public education, a report Friday revealed only six per cent feel their schools would score an A, while the proportion of Canadians who feel confident in the system has slipped dramatically from numbers gathered in 1984.
Still, the Canadian Education Association's Public Attitudes Toward Education study showed that even though fewer than half of Canadians (45 per cent) now express confidence in their schools, more Canadians (60 per cent) feel satisfied with the school system in general.
Back in 1984, when the CEA first asked Canadians to assess their confidence in community schools, more than three-quarters of Canadians felt confident.
The dramatic decline in confidence in 23 years, combined with an upward trend in satisfaction, suggests that Canadians believe school systems are improving but don't believe in the sustainability of those improvements, the non-profit group said.
Asked to evaluate the quality of their local elementary and secondary schools, one-third of Canadians awarded C grades, 42 per cent felt their schools performed at a B level, but only six per cent thought their schools deserved top marks.
The proportion of A grades has remained unchanged at six per cent for the past 17 years.
The combined B and C grades make up 75 per cent of the respondents, which CEA Chief Executive Officer Penny Milton said raises the question of whether it is enough for Canada to settle for an "average" public schooling system.
'Appetite for change'
"There is clearly a public appetite for change in the way we do school," Milton said in a release, adding that schools aren't making the grade for native children, communities advocating for black-focused schools and parents of children with disabilities.
There were some positive signs from the report, however.
As far as teachers are concerned, Canadians in all regions (70 per cent) shared a high level of satisfaction with the job teachers are doing, with people in the Atlantic provinces being the happiest (78 per cent) with the work of their educators.
There is also a strong commitment among Canadians for public education, clearly represented by the 72 per cent of Canadians who believe provincial governments should direct more funding to it.
Most Canadians (56 per cent) also said they were willing to pay more taxes for public education, regardless of whether they had children or not. These numbers were up from 1984, when only 46 per cent of Canadians said they would pay more taxes for education.
The CEA's survey was based on a random telephone sampling of 2,441 adults across Canada with and without children enrolled in an elementary and/or secondary school. The margin of error was not provided.
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