The True Cost of a Free Lunch

The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) has just released The Cost of a Free Lunch: The real costs of the Pascal early learning plan for Ontario, a thoughtful analysis of how much more it will really cost to introduce full-day kindergarten throughout the province. Although the Pascal report estimated the incremental cost to be just under $1 billion a year, the IMFC thinks that a more realistic estimate would be an additional $1.5 to $1.8 billion annually. The discrepancy arises because, unlike the Pascal report, the IMFC takes into consideration the higher salaries of certified teachers, the probability of higher operating and capital costs, and the increased bureaucracy. In addition, the IMFC identifies six cost alerts that have the potential for spending overruns: the risk that early childhood educators will unionize and achieve higher salaries; the likely need for heightened security in schools; the possibility that full-day kindergarten will attract additional special-needs children; the as-yet-ignored cost of feeding the children; the chance that the ratio of younger-to-older kindergarten children will increase; and the probability that some teachers will need additional training.

The IMFC report points out that “if, instead of implementing a province-wide system, Ontario decided to send that money directly to parents of four-and five-year-olds for them to use at their discretion, it would represent at a bare minimum, $9,199 dollars per child annually.“ This calculation is done on the basis of the IMFC’s lower estimate and ignoring the possibility of cost overruns.

School for Thought takes the position that even this huge expenditure would be justified if it made it possible for all children, especially disadvantaged children, to succeed in school. The trouble is, though, that public education’s poor track record makes it very unlikely that it will be able to meet such a challenging goal. Why would we expect an organization that currently offers programs that are at best mediocre to suddenly pull a rabbit out of a hat and start delivering excellent full-day kindergarten? The chances are very high that Ontario taxpayers are about to be saddled with a very expensive program that doesn’t come close to living up to its extravagant promises.

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