From: clamen@CS.CMU.EDU (Stewart Clamen)
Subject: Re: Bla, bla
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
	<CLAMEN.92Jul20233913@BYRON.SP.CS.CMU.EDU> <mede.711843101@cunews>
Reply-To: clamen+@CS.CMU.EDU
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 01:09:11 GMT
X-Posted-From: byron.sp.cs.cmu.edu
X-Posted-Through: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

In article <mede.711843101@cunews> mede@alfred.carleton.ca (Meghan Ede) writes:

   RE: Schooling in Quebec

   I am suprised that no-one has mentioned economics.

   In Canada, school taxes are based on property values, which
   are based, roughly, on income.  It is important for all school
   systems to ensure that relatively wealthy people live in the area
   to support the local school boards.

   In Quebec, up until fairly recently, the English controlled
   amounts of money quite out of proportion to their population,

True.  They were mostly businessmen, while the French Quebecers were
farmers, clergymen, or lawyers.

   and managed to restrict this money to their relatively much
   smaller school poplultions, further exagerating the economic
   differences between school boards.

Yes.  It used to be the case that, when paying your property taxes,
one could specify whether you wanted your dollars to go to the
Protestant or Catholic school boards.  However, what school your
children attended had nothing to do with what school board you
targetted as the recipient of your tax dollars.

I am pretty sure that the regulations have been changed, and public
schools now receive provincial money based solely on the number of
(legal) students they have.

   Schools are more expensive to run in French because of the supplies.
   Textbooks have a much smaller market, and with the lack of a previous
   generation of scintists, usually must be translated or imported.
   Quebec is trying to build a sufficient group of academics in a wide
   range of disciplines to be able to provide its own textbooks.

   Students in English schools will take the easy way out and teach
   science in English, rather than doing the hard work of developing
   a significant library of French research material and textbooks.
   It is important therefore, to ensure that enough people study all
   subjects in French to both create a critical mass in those fields
   and to create a demand.

   Experiments in immersion orf "bilingual education" have proven to be
   very poor ways to achieve this critical mass. Science at the 
   University of Ottawa, for example, is an English discipline, even
   when supposedly offered in french.

There are far more students (English OR French) then there are
students at University of Ottawa.

   These economic explanations for some of the decisions of the
   Quebec government are open for comment, but if accepted, lead
   the way to new approaches to Steve Potter's problem.

You haven't considered the serious reduction in the number of students
due to the decline in the birth rate, which might be a factor in your
economic analysis.


--
Stewart M. Clamen			Internet:    clamen@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science		UUCP: 	     uunet!"clamen@cs.cmu.edu"
Carnegie Mellon University		Phone: 	     +1 412 268 2145
5000 Forbes Avenue			Fax:	     +1 412 268 5739
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA
Xref: sparky can.politics:5460 can.general:3499