BCBusiness

bcbusiness.ca he breaking point came on a June afternoon in 2014. Tracey Axelsson, a Vancouver mother of two, happened past her daughter's bedroom where she was playing with a playmate. "Why is our teacher so mean to you?" she overheard the young friend ask. Axelsson's ears perked up. "She's always yelling at you." Axelsson knew their Grade 3 teacher well, and she believed the woman was kind and a good teacher. "I'm sure it wasn't yelling, but nagging," she says. And yet, this young classmate was picking up on whatever was happening in the classroom. Axelsson's daughter has a mild atten- tion disorder. "She is extra everything. Her mind is going a million miles a min- ute," explains Axelsson. She believed that the girl was only learning half the content and was frequently bored. She worried that if her daughter didn't get the support during elementary school to understand her learning style and develop strategies for focusing, she wouldn't have a chance in high school. The problem, as Axelsson saw it: the circumstances of the public sys- tem made it impossible for even a good teacher to provide the support her daughter needed. With 28 students and few resources, her teacher was preoccupied with behaviour manage- ment. "I don't want my daughter to be oppressed in the classroom," she says. "But I also don't want her to be a dis- traction to others, and in a class that size I couldn't guarantee those things weren't going to happen." So Axelsson enrolled her daughter in Westside School, at an annual cost of $10,000, where she is in a class of eight kids. Five years ago, Axelsson would have never guessed she would have a child in private school; she describes herself as a staunch supporter of the public education system. And yet she is part of a growing group of parents who are opting out. In the past decade, pri- vate school enrollment has grown by 14.6 per cent while public schools have seen their numbers drop by 10 per cent. Private schools—which supporters pre- fer to call "independent schools"—now educate 12 per cent of students in B.C., up from 4.3 per cent in the late 1970s. For many proactive parents, the deci- sion to go private is about filling a need where the public system failed. Take, for example, Toran Savjord, a Squamish father of four children between the ages of eight and 14. His watershed was real- izing school administrators were pow- erless to hold teachers accountable. "[Administrators] told me that I wasn't the only parent complaining, as if that would make me feel better," he recalls. "Unions have handicapped administra- tors. At the same time, great teachers don't get rewarded." And so, Savjord—who had a central role in establishing private Quest Uni- versity in Squamish and is now vice president of operations there—decided to start his own school along with two other enterprising parents. (Co-founder David Greenfield is an entrepreneur and developer instrumental in creat- ing the Sea to Sky Gondola.) The new school is designed to engage students with hands-on learning and weekly full-day field trips to study geography at Elfin Lakes or Shakespeare at Bard on the Beach. Coast Mountain Academy opened last year with 15 students. This September the school attracted 70 stu- dents—who pay between $13,000 and $15,000, depending on their grade—fill- ing its current space. Like Axelsson, Savjord supports public education (he still coaches bas- ketball at the local public high school). "I just got too frustrated with my inabil- ity to do anything," he explains. "When you get a town with a lot of indepen- dents, you get better public schools. It nudges them out of complacency." espite the experience of parents like Axelsson and Savjord, B.C.'s education system is, by most metrics, judged among the best in the world. According to the highly anticipated Program for International Student Assess- ment ( PISA) conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 15-year- old British Columbians rank above education heavyweights Finland and Germany and are on the heels of Singa- pore and Shanghai. Students here are better readers, scientists and problem solvers than their peers anywhere else in the country. (B.C. comes second only in math, to Quebec.) There is also less disparity in B.C., with the gap in achievement between high- and low-per- forming students smaller than the PISA average—suggesting that, regardless of ability, most students do pretty well. Still, our assumption that private school students per- form better academically is so strongly held that it even has a name among educators: "the private school effect." And, at first glance, B.C. students' performance on standardized exams supports this belief. The largest gap is in Grade 7 numeracy: 81 per cent of pri- vate school students met or exceeded standards while only 60 per cent of public school students did in the 2010/11 academic year. That gap nar- rows in high school. Pass rates on most Grade 10 and 12 exams are similar, with the public system edging out the private system on Essentials of Math (the lowest- level math course). But the story gets more convoluted when we begin to ask why private school students do better. Repeated research shows that socioeconomic factors and parent involvement have a major impact on learning outcomes, and the effects start early. A recent study by Stanford psychologist Anne Fernald found that by age two, children from affluent homes have 30 per cent more vocabulary than children from low-income families—simply because their parents have more time to speak 58 BCBusiness January 2015 Our assumption that private school students perform better academically is so strongly held that it even has a name among educators: "the private school effect." And, at first glance, B.C. students' performance on standardized exams supports this belief

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