Does Alberta spend the least, per-student, on public schools? Maybe not. But it's definitely down there

You might not expect the Alberta Teachers' Association and the Fraser Institute, a right-leaning think tank, to agree on much.

But there is one thing that both organizations independently concluded: Alberta spends the least, per student, on public schools of any province.

"For the fourth year in a row, our province has landed squarely at the bottom of the national list for per-student funding — and the gap between Alberta and the national average continues to grow," the ATA said in a recent release.

The Fraser Institute came to the same result in a report it published last year: "In 2012/13, Alberta had the third highest per-student spending among the ten provinces. Ten years later, the province ranked last in the same category."

Both organizations used Statistics Canada data to come to these conclusions.

But Statistics Canada, itself, urges caution when interpreting its data in this way.

That's because precisely calculating per-student funding for public schools across every province in a consistent and comparable manner is a trickier than you might expect.

The federal agency does its own calculations on per-student funding, but it lumps private schools in along with public schools. It also applies a lot of behind-the-scenes calculations to make sure its comparisons are as apples-to-apples as possible, both between provinces and internationally.

The StatsCan figures put Alberta near — but not necessarily at — the bottom, in terms of per-student spending for primary and secondary education, including private schools, in the most recent year for which this data is available.

OK, so what about public-school funding, specifically?

Statistics Canada doesn't break that out from its total per-student calculations.

For years now, the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) and the Fraser Institute have been making their own calculations for public schools only, using a variety of published StatsCan datasets.

But officials with StatsCan told CBC News it's actually impossible with the available public-facing data to precisely calculate per-student funding for public schools and make truly accurate comparisons between provinces.

So we can't say with certainty that Alberta's per-student funding for public schools is the lowest, but what we can say is it's among the lowest and there has been a general downward trend in education funding in this province.