(B)ecause skills, rather than schooling per se, drive economic growth, attention to the school system's output is the place to start. All governments should produce publicly available indicators of student and school performance based on standardized skills tests. The benefits include stronger incentives for education providers to improve outcomes, and increased competition and accountability throughout our school systems.
Increased accountability, by all means. But standardized testing isn't the way to get there, unless one's idea of accountability is to create incentives to teach to a test (or worse) at the expense of a genuine education. And the standardization is particularly out of place if the goal is actually to allow people to develop diverse skills, rather than merely to ensure that they can all pass one test in order to graduate.
Fortunately, the article quickly makes up for having gone astray:
Second, because people move across provincial borders, provincial governments have less incentive to invest in educating people who may move away. A good way to compensate for this would be to partly allocate federal transfers according to provinces' investments in education.
Third, it's vital to invest in the skills of adults who are already part of the work force. The pace of technological progress creates new skill requirements in the labour market; demographic trends will tend to reduce the relative role of one's initial education to the overall process of accumulating skills. Better incentives for firms and people to pursue job-related training and lifelong learning - particularly measures targeted at people with very low skills - would generate greater economic rewards.
The second idea is a particularly ingenious one. One of the great frustrations for smaller provinces (and in this case Saskatchewan is definitely included in that group) is putting a large amount of funding into education, then watching that investment translate into jobs a province or two away. And for those taking this as Alberta-bashing, think no such thing: based on my experience at least, Alberta too loses a great number of well-educated young workers to B.C. and Ontario. The question is simply one of making sure that an undeniably beneficial investment gets rewarded.
While adult education is a slightly less radical idea, it's an equally desirable one, particularly in focussing on added training for people in unskilled jobs rather than polarizing into either university education or supports only for the unemployed. Especially considering the desperate need for tradespeople (in Canada and elsewhere), an investment to allow more people to pursue such a career path is bound to have good results.
Unfortunately, the first idea is probably the one with the most appeal from a governmental standpoint, since it can be legislated as a pure control grab without any funding or contentious resource transfers. So the best we may be able to hope for is to get the good with the bad.
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