Tuesday, July 10, 2007

A tale of two numbers

  • $980: funding that schools in Ontario received per ESL student in 2004/2005
  • $245: average personal spending on English-language tutors in South Korea in 2006

Details:

According to a report by the Auditor General of Ontario, schools get $225 million (all figures in Canadian dollars) in funding for ESL students. That works out to about $980 per student. In contrast, Korea with a population of about 72 million people spent $17.7 billion on English-language tutors last year. That works out to $245 for every Korean man woman and child. For tutors.

2 comments:

Thomas Hammerlund said...

I don't mean to sound rude, but I don't really understand what you're getting at here.

Brett said...

I was trying, apparently too obliquely, to show how terribly underfunded ESL education is in Ontario. Korea's GDP per capita is about half of Ontario's. English in Korea might be important, but in Ontario it's crucial. The Ontario number is total funding, for books and teachers, etc. In Korea it's just for tutors. And presumably not everyone in Korea is paying tutors.

The point is that Ontario's public education system seems to put less importance on its immigrant students learning English than individuals Koreans do on learning it themselves.