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This is the way the year ends, not with a bang, but a whimper!

6/28/2014

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My heart goes out to the thousands and thousands of students and teachers who had the last two weeks of the school year taken from them as a result of the current labour dispute between the BCTF and the BC Provincial Government. The fact is, it never should have happened. No, this is not a commentary on the issues dividing the two sides in the latest round of negotiations, it is a question to the leadership of the BCTF - "What were you thinking?"

If you are a teacher's union, the end of the school year is about the worst possible time to play your trump card of going on a full strike. To begin with, although you leave parents scrambling around, it is only a two week inconvenience. Summer was coming anyway and people were already organized with camps, family holidays and childcare arrangements. They simply had to move up their plans or make some short-term adjustments to their work schedules. Contrast that with an open-ended disruption in service in September or October. No alternatives, and no end in sight mean that parents and caregivers put far more pressure on government to end things sooner rather than later. Not so now. As of Monday, the teachers' strike will drop out of the headlines and, short of a settlement, will not reappear until late August. The BCTF has effectively given the government two months of breathing space.

Secondly, the union entered the strike apparently unprepared to manage it. Much like Pauline Marois in Quebec or Andrea Horwath in Ontario, the BCTF precipitated a crisis for its members without really thinking through the consequences. For example, who triggers a strike with a virtually empty strike fund? This is a pretty cavalier attitude towards the well-being of its hard-working and dues-paying membership. They were sent off into the summer missing a chunk of their income with no immediate prospect that their money will be there in September. It is a sign of the seriousness of this situation that has put the issue of a "signing bonus" as a sticking point in the negotiations. The union is scrambling to have the government pay teachers back the money that their leadership lost for them. In addition, although there has been a torrent of moving and meaningful comments by teachers and parents on social media about their frustration and sadness at the way things have worked out, the union (and the government) have continued to post and re-post the same tired old tweets. I for one am sick of seeing both the BCTF negative funding bar graph (we get it folks!) and the government's weird "earth and moon" sustainability graphic (I hope that no-one got paid for designing that one!). If you want to sway public opinion, you need to have a sequential, progressive campaign strategy, not just be a one-trick pony!

Finally, as everyone knows, no matter what the spin, the real issues centre around salary and working conditions. Behind closed doors, in all my years of teacher contract negotiations, on both sides of the table, I have never heard either side refer to the quality of education, or of the needs of students, except in financial terms. "Class size and composition" means more jobs and better working conditions to one side, and higher costs with fewer efficiencies and lower productivity to the other. There are no principles at play here. As anyone who has sat behind those closed doors will tell you, it is all about spreadsheets and budgets, the rest is rhetoric.

So, the question that you have to ask yourself is, what leverage did the BCTF think that it had to deciding to pull the plug in mid-June? 

One elementary teacher friend of mine told me that she felt that it was secondary teacher driven. Their year was virtually over anyway with only exams left to proctor and mark. There was a general perception (misguided as it turned out) that the spectre of cancelling provincial exams - which were eliminated altogether in 1967 in Ontario without a ripple - would galvanize the government to action. That pretty much fizzled out and a watered down version went ahead as planned. The other sabre - being rattled this weekend - is the shutting down of summer school. If there was any indication that this job action is not really about kids, that might be the clearest one. The future of the most vulnerable and at-risk students in the province is being played as the final bargaining chip. It is a sad commentary on how far we have sunk.

It is my hope that with summer, the twitter war will cool off and the two sides can quietly hammer out a deal. No-one should be so naive as to think that the philosophic issues being debated in public will be resolved at the bargaining table but maybe some kind of agreement can be reached that will allow teachers and parents to have a few years of labour peace when they can focus back on the business of teaching and learning.

The unfortunate and mostly unintended consequence of all of the heated debate about the quality of education in British Columbia over the last six months has been to severely undercut parental confidence in the ability of the public education system to meet the needs of their child. Whatever happens at the bargaining table, or through the courts, it will be years before any of the staffing issues so central to the social media campaign can be effectively addressed. In the meantime, the message from our teachers and their union leadership is that students are being poorly served in our classrooms. That more than anything else will cloud perceptions of the quality of our public education system for years to come.

Just another victim in this all too toxic dispute.

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A plague a' both your houses! 

6/6/2014

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Given my background as a Superintendent and school board negotiator dealing with teacher unions in Ontario, many parents and teachers have asked me what my take is on the current job action/lockout which is disrupting the education of BC students.

To begin with, let me declare my bias. I believe that education is an essential service and that labour disputes should be settled with binding third party arbitration - no strikes, no lockouts.

Having said that, I have both walked the picket line as a young teacher embroiled in a two month strike against the Metro Toronto School Board and, as a Superintendent, have locked out secondary teachers who, we felt, put students at risk through a series of rotating strikes in a largely rural school district.
The real difficulty in teacher/government negotiations is that the two sides speak a different language. The government is focused on financial affordability and sustainability and the union is striving to improve salaries and working conditions for its members regardless of cost. It is pretty basic union/management stuff. Where it gets confusing for the general public and often for both teachers and politicians is that the public conversation is not about dollars or workload, but rather it always claims to be about kids. 

The rallying cry is this current dispute is about "class size and composition". The union wants classes capped at a certain level and the number of children with identified special learning needs to be limited in each class. This would seem to be a straightforward request which should, in theory, improve the learning environment for all students. However, the counter-argument is equally compelling. The government points out that setting a class size maximum can result in two unintended outcomes. The first is that secondary students may be unable to enrol in certain courses that they want or need because the class is full. The second is that elementary students may be unable to attend their local school because a certain grade level is at maximum and have to go somewhere else where there is room. On the surface, you might think: "Well, just split the class." It seems simple enough. However, let's take the example of a class cap of 22 students, and, when the 23rd child arrives, you split the class into two groups of 12 and 11. The school district must then hire about 1.33 FTE faculty to teach the new cohort. The cost of adding that one student becomes between $60,000 - $110,000 depending on the qualifications and experience of the new staff members. Multiply that scenario times the number of grades, schools, and districts across province where this might happen and you can see why a government, looking at limited resources, might shy away from this potentially bottomless pit of potential cost.
Class composition is a similarly confused and confusing issue. As Gary Mason noted recently in the Globe and Mail:

[Class size and composition is] certainly an area where figures can be manipulated to bolster the cause of one side or another. For instance, the union will say that the number of classes with four or more [Special Needs] students has grown from 9,559 in 2006-7 to 16,163 in 2013-14. Within that number there are 3,800 with seven or more. On the surface, that looks deplorable.
But the government says, wait: The clumping together of students with IEPs is intentional. Rather than have educational assistants spread out over a number of classes to help these students, it was determined that a far more efficient method of dealing with this challenge was to group more of the kids together. And there is evidence that this is what the government is doing. The number of classes in BC with three special needs students or fewer in them has gone from 56,305 in 2005-6 to 51,857 in the current school year - a drop of 4,448.

Compounding the whole problem is the fact that the class size and composition conflict is currently before the courts. It is highly unlikely that any collective agreement will address the issue substantively while both sides are waiting for a ruling. Consequently it really comes back to salary and benefits.

The unfortunate part of the equation is that both sides have publicly staked out their positions. Neither side wishes to be seen to climb down. For the government, they have to account to local school districts, parents, and ultimately the tax-paying electorate; for the BCTF they have to explain to their members why their losses in pay and disruption in their lives didn't get the results that they were promised.

Absent actually negotiating an agreement, the government doesn't want binding arbitration because it means that an outsider will determine provincial budgets; for their part, the union may want the government to bail them out by legislating a settlement so that the province remains the "bad guy" and they can continue to play the victim card. Either way, it doesn't play out well for the students of the province.

No wonder many parents and students are turning to Shakespeare and quoting Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet:

A plague a' both your houses! I am sped.





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    Dr. Jim Christopher is recently retired Head of Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School and Maplewood Alternative High School in North Vancouver. A parent, author and long-time teacher, and educational administrator across Canada, he has been actively involved in the drive to differentiate learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

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