Something isn’t adding up. Every year the provincial NDP government makes announcements they say are going to strengthen our schools and improve education in the province. And every year things get worse and worse.

In fact, since the NDP came into government, the education outcomes for our students have been going down. They dropped from near the top in Canada, to the middle to the bottom.

Last week the results of the 2013 Pan Canadian Assessment Program were released. The program randomly tests 32,000 Grade 8 students. To be clear, this isn’t some international organization from outside of Canada measuring how our students are doing, this is a Canadian comparison done by Canadian ministers of education. And the results, well, they weren’t very good.

The Manitoba students that were tested finished last in math, last in reading and last in science compared to all other provinces in Canada. It doesn’t get any worse. To be clear, this is not the fault of the students who were tested. They are responding to the test with the knowledge that they have been provided. And it’s not the fault of our teachers who are forced to use the curriculum that they are given by the NDP provincial Department of Education. This is a failure of the education system that has been designed and managed by the NDP for the past 15 years.

Of course, NDP Minister of Education, James Allum, tried to blame every other political party for these results. And when it was pointed out that none of the Manitoba students tested had ever been alive for anything but a provincial NDP government, he quickly tried to come up with other excuses. And then he rolled out an “action plan” to improve things. The exact same action plan that the previous NDP minister’s of education rolled out in the face of poor results.

All of this might have made for interesting political theatre except there is something fundamentally at stake with these results. A generation of Manitoba students are being let down by a system that is failing them. Many are graduating high school and then struggling in post secondary education because they were not adequately prepared. It’s not fair to these young people and it can be devastating to our future potential as a province.

Years of NDP education initiatives like a no-fail policy or not deducting marks for late assignments or poor report card formats (as only a few examples) have failed our students. Because the results were not broken down by Division or region (the NDP refused to provide these comparisons), it is difficult to know how young people in different areas of Manitoba compare. But the message is clear, Manitoba students as a whole, despite annual announcements by the NDP, are falling behind their Canadian counterparts. Our young people and our province deserve much better.