Rick Lowe
When I read that Mr. Perry Christie, leader of the Opposition PLP said they "have been calling for the nation to double our investment in education and training" I knew I would have to dig a little below the surface.
When we do, we learn for example that in the eight years of government budgets from 2004/2005 to 2011/2012 the country has spent almost $2 billion on education. This includes funds spent on, The Department of Education, The Ministry of Education, The College of The Bahamas, The Bahamas Vocational Technical Institute, The Simpson Penn Centre for Boys, The Willamae Pratt Centre for Girls and The Department of Archives.
In 2012 spending on education totalled $276.2 Million for 16.42% of the governments total budget of $1.7 Billion.
So how does this compare with other countries in the world? Believe it or not, when compared to the USA, Sweden, Canada, China and Japan, The Bahamas ranks second in expenditure on Education. See chart below.
Bearing in mind we do not know exactly what other nations have included as educational expenditures, if we compare the spending on The Department of Education, The Ministry of Education, The College of The Bahamas, The Bahamas Vocational Technical Institute alone, we'd still rank second at 16.1% of spending.
Based on the raw numbers, spending is obviously not the problem as we rank 8th when compared to 27 other countries in the world as shown below.
The questions the Opposition should be posing are:
- Why is the country not getting value for money in education?
- Why are the average grades D-?
- Who is responsible for the poor performance? and
- How do we begin to get value for money?
To suggest doubling the budget will help improve education for our children is not worth the paper the newspaper article was written on.
If you have a few minutes read on for an interesting interactive article comparing how countries spend their money on Health, Education and Military. Click on the image below to visit the web site for much more detail.