Opinion | VSB, Please Do Better When it Comes to Surveys
VSB
The Vancouver School Board’s recent Multi Age Cluster Classes (“MACC”) and Budget surveys, for a lack of any better phraseology, are poorly worded.
Despite running the budget survey for six school years, it has failed to provide clear questions, answers, and ways for clear, informed responses.
According to the Pew Research Centre, “it is important to ask questions that are clear and specific and that each respondent will be able to answer,” something the VSB failed to do in their budget survey. Despite many of the questions having simple structures, it failed to address the views of the public in a specific manner. One must call into question articles of the sur vey obtained from the Budget Development 2022-2023 Engagement Summary Report such as “Indicate your support for re-allocating funds from one area to increase another,” which does not specify which areas of funding are cut, and can have serious consequences for VSB funding of programs.
A lack of specifics can also result in difficulty interpreting the statements given, as is the case with question four of the survey. The District, possessing nine depar tments, is home to a variety of staff and employees ranging from counselors, to janitors, to accountants. A simple “indicate your support for staffing” does not offer the level of nuance and complexity required for staff across the district. Support for staffing can be interpreted as ‘support for understaffed positions’, ‘support for pre-existent staff’, ‘support for staff recruitment’, and many more. With questions like these, the school district has failed to provide adequate understanding and context to the citizens of Vancouver.
Leading questions can be dangerous and sway public opinion.
Conceived judgement to a survey that is meant to capture public opinion. For a public institution, it is paramount that the general public’s voice be heard in surveys, through trustees, and events of public engagement. Wording questions in ways that are nonspecific and leading fails to capture the views of the community and the people whom public education is meant to serve.
This is not the first time they created a misleading survey.
In January-February 2022, an aspect of the VSB’s Multi Age Cluster Class (MACC) sur vey posed great alarm in survey creation, most notably the duration descriptions for the proposed Gifted Education Centres.
Within that section of the survey, a positives and negatives char t was made for the proposed lengths of the GECs, namely four, six, and eight weeks long. The descriptions for four weeks and eight weeks were provided with pros and cons, but the description for six weeks only listed the positives.
After investigating the MACC revisioning and the paper which seemingly justified the duration in a previous Nest article, the six-week GEC time length has been proven to be disinformation.
In a survey that sought the public’s input, was published by a government entity, and made for a democratic system, inadequate representation of survey material should not be tolerated.
As obtained from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of a survey is “to view or consider comprehensively”; this comprehensive view is hampered by a failure to provide unbiased, impartial evidence for the surveyee to consider and judge.
While the surveys’ aim is in the right place, the way they are created and described can undergo change. Instead of using words such as ‘support’, the VSB can incorporate starters such as ‘what do you think about...”. This would help to ensure that the questions do not become leading questions and sway the public’s opinion. Additionally, proper provision of the positive and negative impacts of a decision should be put on the survey to help users create thoughtful responses.
The VSB needs to uphold its democratic obligations through surveys, but in a way which does not involve poorly worded questions and misleading tables.