staffroom confidential

The rise and fall (?) of the BCTF

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 01:15:00 +0000

Just over one year ago, BC teachers returned to class from what was the longest teacher strike in Canadian history. Teachers, upset with over a decade of deteriorating funding and particularly with large and complex classrooms, were unwilling to accept a contract offer which simply maintained the status quo. In one of the highest strike mandates in the BCTF’s history, they chose to strike.

This was not something new for BC teachers. In fact, this was the third strike in a decade. Teachers walked off the job for two weeks in 2005, and for three days in 2012. Teachers in BC have also refused to administer standardized tests, been on various types of work to rule for multi-month periods, and conducted a wide variety of local actions to push for various improvements. It is not for nothing that the union has a reputation for militancy.

On one level, the longest teachers’ strike in Canadian history is a testament to the determination of teachers to win a better deal both for students and themselves as workers. But to truly learn the lessons of a decade of fighting neoliberal austerity, we need to take a realistic account of the many signs of weakness throughout the most recent strike. I believe it is fair to characterize the outcome as a loss – after five weeks, the government essentially starved teachers out, and the resulting contract was little different from what was on offer prior to the strike. The key issue of class size was not resolved. The signing bonus was a small fraction of lost wages. The wage gain was half a percent. Disappointingly, the contract term of six years gives government a free hand to pursue more corporate education reform with little room for teacher resistance. Many teachers understandably wonder if the strike actually improved our bargaining position and I suspect future strong strike mandates will be harder to attain. I also believe it is fair to say that this most recent strike shows significant weaknesses not only in the BCTF strategy, but also in the internal democratic decision making processes that influenced how the strike progressed.

While the BCTF is often lauded as one of the most militant unions in the province, and is even referenced by newly reformed teachers unions in the US such as the Chicago Teachers Union as a source of inspiration, the most recent strike calls into question whether that militancy is in fact on the wane. It is a pressing issue both to have a realistic assessment of the strike, and also to understand the processes within the union that have changed. Specifically, like the CTU, the BCTF is a union in which a left wing, ‘grass roots’ caucus sought and was able to win power of the union. But the trajectory of the union in the fifteen years since should act as a warning to the dangers of seeing electoral success within the union as the most important factor in influencing the union as a whole.

THE 2014 STRIKE

The 2014 strike began as work to rule campaign. Teachers refused to administer province wide tests, attend staff meetings, do lunchtime supervision. When teachers increased pressure with rotating full strike days, the government responded with what they called a partial lockout. Teachers’ pay was reduced by 10% and teachers were told to leave school property during non-instructional time. Frustrated with the lock-out, teachers chose to fully withdraw services in late June. The initial two weeks created limited pressure as the government was able to win a case at the labour relations board declaring secondary school marks an essential service and the BCTF instructed teachers to comply.

From the start of the walkout, the leadership of the BCTF viewed the strike as short term. At general meetings, the message was always that we would have a deal by the end of June. Early on, they had to acknowledge that the strike fund could only provide three days of strike pay. The union, in effect, constructed artificial deadlines that set specific expectations in teachers minds. Rather than prepare for the worst, the union promised the best. In tandem, the union, very early, both moderated its package, and called for mediation. To teachers, this was sold as a way to appear moderate and win parental support. But the leadership drastically underestimated the staying power and strategy of government.

No deal came in June and requests for mediation were rebuffed. In late august, government announced they would provide $40 a day childcare stipends for parents if the strike continued into the fall. While ridiculed by the BCTF leadership (and others) as a cynical ploy, there is no doubt that the tactic was effective in buying the government time to let teachers lose significant amounts of pay. By the middle of September, after three months without pay, many teachers were feeling very financially insecure.

Meanwhile, at a delegated provincial meeting, the union decided to remain on strike, but with no specific plan of action. The BCTF executive committee met during the first week of September, while the strike resumed, and decided to hold a membership vote on a call for binding mediation. Many teachers viewed this as a rather bizarre decision. It was fairly clearly simply a media tactic rather than a real engagement of members in decision making about the course of the strike. No further provincial meetings were called, and no mechanisms for input into the strike strategy were available. Unsurprisingly, the government rejected the proposal.

In the third week of September, five weeks into the strike, teachers were advised a deal was in process. There would be closed door round the clock meetings, but no details or information was shared. It was only after the deal was signed, and the vote completed, that Canada’s national main stream newspaper, the Globe and Mail, ran the exclusive story of how Canadian Labour Congress leader Hassan Yusuf orchestrated a private meeting between Christy Clark and BCTF president Jim Iker. The meeting produced the outlines of a very tepid deal – a way out for the BCTF leadership. Wages remained essentially the same as the government offer in June. Class size – the most important issue on the table – was addressed through a class size fund that effectively meant a repetition of the shell game that previous funds were known to be – money given in one form, but taken in another through reductions in core funding. On the contentious issue of how to deal with a court victory should the class size issue be subsequently won by teachers through an ongoing court battle, the government agreed only to re-open the issue prior to the term end of the agreement. Teachers winced as premier Christie Clark appeared on television gloating of the six year deal within the terms of the public sector mandate.

BC teachers are no strangers to job action. In 2005, teachers were on strike for two weeks, and in 2012, for three days. Yet despite this being our longest strike, it wasn’t our most militant or most confident. In 2005, teachers struck after government imposed a rollover contract through legislation. The 2005 strike was very high stakes and very remarkable, because one day into the strike the government went to court and received a contempt order. Teachers were in violation of the law. Yet teachers remained on the picket lines for two full weeks. Although the strike ended with mediation, teachers never asked for mediation. Instead, government used it as a way out of what because an increasingly impossible situation as the spectre and reality of solidarity strikes from other public sector unions loomed. The union was consistent in saying we would not hand over control of bargaining to a third party, and although we eventually did, we entered the mediation process in a far superior position. All of these factors led to what was arguably a moderate win in very difficult circumstances – $20 million for the teachers pension fund, significant wage increases for teachers on call, and the reintroduction of very limited class size limits via legislation, in the form of Bill 33. Moreover, the pressure from the strike I believe also impacted the subsequent negotiations, in 2006, which resulted in wage increases that outpaced much of the rest of the public sector.

INTERNAL UNION DEMOCRACY

The internal union processes in 2005 looked considerably different than those of 2014. The discussion of the need to defy back to work legislation began at provincial delegate meetings as early as 2004. Motions came from locals and individuals for actions to prepare the membership for a fight. Even the issue of a potential sell out from leadership was addressed by the delegates prior to the strike. By 2004, two other unions in the health care sector had had their strikes called off by union leaders after government intervention. Concerned that teachers should make this decision themselves, delegates successfully passed a motion that would require a full membership vote to end job action, not just to ratify a contract.

Sadly, in 2014, this new constitutional rule was misused to force an early vote on a deal when members had only hours to actually look at it. Frustration at the short time frame for ratification was widespread. This was combined with straight out misinformation. For example, the BCTF, in a message to all teachers and in the media, claimed that the new teacher fund would mean 850 new teaching positions. This was an unrealistic and misleading estimate. The BCTFs own research on the previous classroom ‘fund’ showed that it was a shell game. The new money simply replaced other money taken away through taxes on school boards such as medical plan premium increases, carbon taxes, and zero inflation budgets. In a subsequent research report, published six months after the end of the strike, the BCTF reported a net loss of 9 teaching positions despite the new education fund. Perhaps the epitome of the change in the BCTF was the way information was communicated to membership. Most membership meetings consisted of a video live-stream projected in a hockey arena to thousands of teachers directly from from BCTF President Jim Iker. This was hardly a mechanism to allow bottom up decision making, engagement or activism.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RANK AND FILE ACTIVISM IN THE BCTF

Why was there such a change in tactics and strategy, and diminished democratic participation of the BCTF membership? The BCTF and its local unions have a long history of militancy. The very first teachers in the British empire to strike, were in Victoria, BC, in 1917. A province wide strike took place in 1971 to push for pension improvements. In 1987 teachers won full legal bargaining rights and in the late eighties and early nineties waged three fantastic rounds of bargaining with local school boards that won hundreds of provisions including class size limits. Teachers played a central role in the provincial solidarity movement of 1983. During this period of radicalism, two internal caucuses developed. Teachers viewpoint took a variety of progressive positions such as advocating for full unionization. Its composition was purposefully grassroots members and the caucus name was a reference to the viewpoint of teachers in opposition to that of administrators, who were in the union at the time and often held many of the union’s official positions. Viewpoint was counterposed to ‘TUF’ – teachers for a united federation, who arguably represented the status quo, or a more conservative and bread and butter unionism. Members of TUF tended to dominate the BCTF executive committee.

During the eighties and nineties, Teachers Viewpoint functioned as an effective, grassroots activist rank and file organization and organized on the convention floor for many democratic reforms in how the union functioned, as well as for a wide variety of social justice issues.

But a significant change took place in the mid-nineties that disrupted teacher bargaining. In the mid 1990’s, in response to the perceived successes of public sector unions in the late eighties, an NDP government imposed a scheme of provincial bargaining with the Public Education Labour Relations Act (PELRA). All BCTF locals, who up until this time had negotiated locally with school boards, were forced into a single provincial bargaining unit controlled by the provincial federation. While no doubt there were other factors in play in the erosion of grassroots organizing (this was, after all, the period of growing neoliberal attacks on all types of bargaining), this proved to be a death blow to the rank and file-ism that had developed within union locals who bargained directly with school boards. While rank-and-file organizing doesn’t depend on bargaining structures, it is, nevertheless, significantly more difficult to build rank-and-file networks amongst a membership of 40,000 across a massive geographic area than in a local of a thousand within a single city. A bargaining team of five chosen province wide is significantly more remote from the membership than one chosen from the local high school that teachers see in the staff room or at least in the local union hall.

The changes were immediately evident in the first round of provincial bargaining in 1998. This round was significant for two reasons. Firstly, it created a rift between the BCTF and other provincial public sector unions, because the BCTF accepted a government imposed zero wage mandate thereby setting the stage for other public sector unions to do the same. In exchange, teachers did negotiate province wide provincial class size limits. The second important feature of this bargaining round was the way it was conducted in closed door meetings directly between BCTF president Kit Krieger and government. This lack of democratic process and transparency lead to the defeat of the ‘TUF’ caucus and Kit Krieger lost the presidency.

At about the same time, Teachers Viewpoint shifted to a focus on electoralism within the union with the aim of winning control of the BCTF executive. Viewpoint members formed a new electoral caucus, Coalition, which ran a full slate for the executive positions.

Coalition managed to win the BCTF Executive for over a decade, from the late nineties, right up until the 2013 elections. Teachers Viewpoint, although formally in existence, now does little other than act as electoral support for Coalition. Through the 2000s, the position of the Coalition caucus, while remaining in favour of strike action, has consistently moved more and more towards alternative strategies in the face of an openly neoliberal government – namely the courts and support for the NDP in the hopes of changing government.

During this period, government used every tool available to smash the power of the BCTF. In 2001, it enacted essential service legislation which severely limits teachers right to strike. In 2002, it unilaterally removed the provincial class size limits from teacher collective agreements. In three rounds of bargaining (2001, 2004 and 2011) it used back to work legislation to end job action. Once, during this period, teachers stood their ground and stayed out on strike despite the imposition of fines for what was deemed “illegal” strike activity. These two weeks of militancy, in 2005, were in no small measure the result of many members of the Viewpoint caucus engaging in rank-and-file organizing to push for action regardless of the legal threats. Two decades of organizing and a militant orientation provided a coordinated group who argued successfully at provincial meetings for the necessity of action. The result was a strike that ended when government came begging to the union for mediation and the first contract with an openly hostile government that included some improvements.

Yet the 2005 strike did not fully address the single most fundamental issue – the reinstatement of class size limits. Instead of staying on the picket line in 2005 for as long as it took to win back class size, the BCTF pursued an extended court battle over the legality of the contract stripping. Initiated in 2002, the court battle has yet to be determinative now in 2015. Having won twice at the Supreme Court of BC, a recent loss at the BC Court of Appeals has meant a further request for appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada is in process. During this time, an entire generation of students have been through Kindergarten to graduation without class size limits in place.

Concurrently, the union has also focused heavily on a provincial electoral strategy. Although officially non-partisan, there are deep ties between the layer of leadership and staff in the BCTF and the NDP. Both David Chudnovsky, who beat Kit Krieger in the late nineties, and Jinny Sims, president during the 2005 strike, went on to represent the NDP in government as a provincial MLA and federal MP respectively. Couched as an issue oriented approach – make public education a vote determining issue – the millions of dollars appropriated from the strike fund over four provincial election campaigns did little to even convince the NDP to take pro-teacher positions in their platform. The provincial NDP has still never committed to reinstating the class size limits to the collective agreement nor even to ending the practice of publicly funding private schools.

In the lead up to the 2005 strike, there was a healthy debate within the union about what strategy was needed to regain class size language. The initial response in 2002, a one day strike immediately following the enactment of Bill 28 which stripped the language from the collective agreement, was often ridiculed, as failing the test to be the “first day” of action as opposed to the “one day” of action which it turned out to be. It was this sentiment, along with the grassroots organizing developed through the previous two decades, that enabled delegates to win the argument and votes in 2005 to stay out despite the union finding itself in contempt of court.

LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE

Looking back, 2005 was a high point. It was the organized work of militants to win arguments at the floor of general meetings. It was a layer of local activists within schools and local meetings who won a vast majority of teachers to the position that we should defy back to work legislation and a court order. Yet since that round of bargaining, despite a commitment to striking and remarkably high strike votes, the leadership has advocated caution. And the network of militant activists has all but disappeared.

With each successive strike, the union has exhibited more caution and less militancy. With no organized rank and file movement from below, militants did not win a plan of strike action in 2012 in response to Bill 22 when the government imposed a collective agreement. Instead, teachers went back to school and engaged in a frustrating and divisive work to rule campaign. And in the most recent strike, despite staying out for a significant period of time, teachers were instructed by the union to concede on practically every opportunity to create pressure. This included agreeing to abide by a Labour Relations Board order to submit final grades, refusing to picket third party sites such as school construction, failing to picket out CUPE members during the lunchtime lock-out, and failing to picket or disrupt provision of services to international students. Rather than look for ways to increase pressure on government, the union appeared desperate to end the strike as quickly as it could by seeking mediation. Moreover the union’s new style of “member engagement” was typified by the mass meetings in hockey arenas where several thousand teachers would sit silently as they watched president Jim Iker deliver a message via live-stream broadcast. As one teacher aptly put it, “I might as well be at home watching on my own TV”.

What are the lessons to be learned? For teachers in BC, it is that we will need a new grass roots rank and file movement both in the teachers unions and across public sector and private sector unions if we are to build the kind of actions and solidarity necessary to push back on neoliberalism. And for anyone in the labour movement, it is yet one more prescient example of why labour activists need to orient toward building rank and file momentum. This means working on campaigns that engage working members to get active to win improvements rather than focusing on what the leadership of our unions are or are not doing.

Just more teacher bashing: Deconstructing the Ontario report card debacle

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 00:22:00 +0000

This post appeared first on rankandfile.ca Please visit if you haven't already - an excellent source of labour news you won't find anywhere else.
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The mainstream media wasted no time this week to engage in a round of teacher bashing at the news that some school boards would not be issuing report cards in response to teacher job action. Teachers, who are in a work to rule campaign, have produced reports but are not inputting the data into computer systems. Apparently, and unsurprisingly, school principals and administrators just didn’t want to do this extra work, so they cancelled the reports. While these boards have now relented and agreed to produce the reports, the incident provides an opportunity to look at they dynamics of the teacher job action and reflect on why and how both parents and workers should be standing up for teachers.

Across Canada, the US, and even in large parts of the rest of the world, public school teachers have been on the front lines of the fight against austerity. Teachers tend to be highly unionized, are typically a female dominated workforce, work in one of the last standing mostly public institutions (along with healthcare), and play a key role in the transmission of social values to the next generation. All these features make teachers a ready target for neoliberal austerity measures. Where better to smash unions, privatize, instil individualistic and pro-market ideas and put women in their place?

Ontario’s teachers, just like in BC last year, are fighting the austerity agenda. They want smaller classes so they can provide better services, they want to maintain their incomes and purchasing power, they want to stop government legislative interference and they want the autonomy to do their job in the interests of their students.

As Barrie teacher and activist Gord Bambrick describes:

“The main objective as I understand it right now is to stop a total contract strip. Bill 122 was created last year to allow bargaining on two levels, locally with school boards and provincially with the provincial government.

On the provincial front, we are fighting now to protect our working conditions and students’ learning conditions, especially around the issues of class sizes and teacher workload. The Ontario Liberal government, headed by Kathleen Wynne and Education Minister Liz Sandals, is pressing for the removal of class size caps and a significant increase to teachers’ duty time. They also want to continue wage freezes imposed by legislation in 2012.

The school boards want to remove protections around teacher prep time and school hours, giving principals more authority to delegate tasks. The boards would also like to change the teacher performance appraisal process and conduct external assessments of students. This, of course, significantly undermines teacher professionalism.”

Deconstructing the report card issue, we can see all of the standard teacher bashing tactics at play. Teachers tried to take full strike action, but were ordered back by the labour board. So they have chosen a job action designed to minimally impact student learning and maximally impact the functioning of school boards. They have provided assessment of their students, but not in the format usually required.

In response, managers (principals) and senior managers and even some school trustees made the decision to simply not do the extra work and blame teachers for not producing the reports. This exposes the presumption that it is reasonable to ask teachers to do more and more work (every extra student in a class is hours of marking time), but not those at the top ends of the hierarchy. It also shows that some layers of management are all too happy to publicly blame teachers when they themselves are not willing to do the job. A remarkably similar thing happened last year during the BC teacher strike when teachers refused to mark provincial exams. The ministry took the written response questions out of the exam to save administrators having to do the marking, despite the fact that teachers were on full strike and administrators were sitting in empty schools.

In addition to showing how government and media use the blame the teacher narrative to distract us from the real issues at play, the report card spat also highlights a more subtle, but equally important feature of the global education reform movement being imposed by neoliberals everywhere.

Both in Ontario and previously in BC, when teachers refused to complete report cards they were careful to continue to provide genuine assessment of the progress of learning. As the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario stated, “teachers have fully assessed your child’s progress”.

In BC, when report cards were not issued, teachers invited parents to speak in person about their child’s progress and many sent home anecdotal remarks directly to the parents, but not in report card form. In Ontario, teachers have submitted progress reports to principals to review and provide to parents. The reality is that teachers are doing what most parents want and expect – a genuine and thoughtful reflection on how their child is doing in school. In my district in BC when we did not provide formal reports there was only a single parent complaint out of 19,000 students.

Yet the corporate education reformers balk at the idea of no formal report going home and into the database. It is not teaching and learning that is central, but the ranking and sorting function that data driven reporting provides. The function that report cards should provide is communication to parents about their child’s learning successes and struggles. But all too often they become first a training ground for children and parents to rate each other and later for employers and post secondary schools to accept or reject them. Like standardized tests, they become a tool to privilege the privileged and stream the rest back into the socio-economic category from where they came.

When it comes down to it, formal report cards don’t matter. What really matters are the teaching conditions in schools and the communication with parents to enable students to meet their potential. My favourite quote this week came from parent Erika Shaker, who put it like this, “when it comes to the delay or absence of this year’s report cards, I would like to make something clear. I. Couldn’t. Care. Less.”

I asked teacher and activist Gord Bambrick how parents and workers can show support to teachers and oppose the divisive message from the government. He said it clearly:

“It’s hard for parents and other concerned citizens to cut through the disinformation coming from the government and mainstream media. Teachers are usually characterized as selfish ‘hostage takers’ despite the fact that they are fighting to protect children’s learning conditions. I would encourage citizens to speak up against the austerity agenda whenever they get the chance – in the blogs, on social media, and with a letter to their trustees and MPs. They could also get out and show support at the many protest activities that will surely be coming this autumn.”

Solidarity key to protecting public education

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 00:50:00 +0000

Hundreds of parents, teachers and students will be protesting education cuts in BC on Sunday. Families Against Cuts to Education is hosting the protests in five BC communities after yet another round of budget cuts for school boards and increased costs surreptitiously delivered through increases to BC Hydro rates and Medical Services Premiums. This, when BC already provides $1000 less per student than the Canadian average for per pupil funding.

The parent initiated rallies are inspiring to see after so many years in which government has fostered divisions between parents and teachers. There is no question that if we are to push back and actually make improvements in our schools, we will need the solidarity of parents and teachers together. This has been undermined due to the "blame the teacher" narrative propagated by government and some sections of the media. But ironically, the latest education legislation of the BC Liberals targets three different sections of the education community. Bill 11 attacks student privacy rights, the independence of locally elected school boards, and the autonomy of teachers to identify and organize their professional development. Combined with a budget that required $29 million in "administrative" cuts - what Christy Clark called "low hanging fruit" - the stage is set for a united response against both the legislation and the budget cuts.

Interestingly, the three components of Bill 11 each, in their own way, demonstrate a different arm of the neoliberal monster.

The changes to student privacy comes in the wake of a fundamental shift in the treatment of student data in the province. The failure of the notorious BCeSIS - the first attempt at a province wide student data collection system - led only to an even larger and more pervasive system, about to be implemented this fall. MyEducationBC will centrally store student data and will collect significantly more information than previous student information systems. The shift to a centralized system, while not explicitly mandates, has been in practice when the BC government refused to accept an alternative proposed and developed by the Saanich school board. Thus every district in BC will be contributing to the "big data" collection of student information. MyEducationBC has more data fields, will be on more computers in more Districts, and will potentially allow massive student data collection by the government. Like other government data collection systems, it is unclear what this information will be used for. As critics point out, these systems violate the basic tenets of privacy protection - collect only what you need, identify your uses prior to collecting data, allow access only in proportion to a genuine need to have access. Student records are thus potentially becoming part of the mass surveillance structure of the 21st century. Bill 11 sets up the legal framework to enable it.

The second component of the Bill involves new mechanisms for government to directly interfere and control the actions of school boards. It is a direct attack on local democracy and is designed to instill caution in Trustees. While the government has always had the ability to remove an elected board (and indeed did so recently in Cowichan), the new powers permit them to mandate specific actions (selling school lands?) or to require a "special advisor" to interfere with and report on the functioning of the board.

This attack on local democracy is not surprising. Boards have become more and more vocal about the impacts of underfunding on the operations of schools. The Cowichan board had the courage to submit a deficit budget that demonstrated the actual needs of students. A number of boards have tacitly endorsed the BC Teacher Federation campaign to ask parents to opt out of the annual standardized tests (FSA) by sending information to parents and accepting without questions their opt out requests. When local democratic structures are actually used to push back on corporate education reform policies, the neoliberal BC Liberals feel the need to shut it down.

The final section of the Bill impacts the ability of teachers to choose and determine how and what type of professional development they engage in. New rules will require specific activities that have been approved by the Ministry. This feature of the Bill is one more in a string of policies that seek to narrow what teachers teach and how they teach it. Christy Clark has long advocated a streamed, vocational style of school system where the primary focus is basic literacy for those who struggle, vocational training for the mass of students in industry specific areas, and access to a university stream for the privileged few. The Ministry has already mandated that one professional development day per year focus on trades training. No doubt there will be a distinctive slant to the type of professional development deemed "acceptable" under the new legislation. As Sheldon Wolin describes: "Privatisation of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations". Teacher professional development is one small piece of the process of shaping coming generations.

Neither the recent budget cuts nor the new legislation come in a vacuum. BC's education system is being massively reformed. There have been more than a dozen Bills over the last decade that have fundamentally shifted how schools operate. We will need to see beyond the lack of funds and to the more fundamental questions being raised by these changes. Bill 11 is one more in a long line of legislative changes that seek to privatize not only the sources of revenue for schools, but the ways in which schools run and the type of schooling they do. It is one more in a long line of structural changes that undermine public control of schools, the role of public schools in providing equitable access to education, and indeed the very content of schooling. This is all the more reason we need parents and teachers and students and citizens out in the streets demanding change.

Bill 11 - Is the BC government privatizing and seizing control of teacher professional development?

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 18:46:00 +0000

Yesterday the BC government introduced Bill 11 - new law that will, among other things, change the system of teacher professional development in BC. Without any consultation with teachers or their union, the BCTF, the government is legislating a new system of authorized continuing education that may be required to maintain teacher certification.

Not surprisingly, having been rebuffed by the BC courts twice with unilateral changes to teachers' collective agreements, the government is trying a different tack. Leave the collective agreement provisions in place, but add new restrictions through the regulatory framework. Having failed to bargain teacher professional development changes, the government is turning to its tried and true formula: legislate.

The new provisions will depend to a large degree on the accompanying regulations, which of course are not yet known. But the basic framework of the new system looks fairly familiar. It appears to be modelled on the type of mandated professional development requirements that have been put in place for other regulated professions, such as lawyers and nurses. In these frameworks, a certain number of hours of authorized activities are required, sometimes along with a professional development plan, self-reflection, or peer review. What is not yet clear is to what degree the profession itself (teachers) will have control over the authorization process, if any.

The current system of teacher professional development is highly autonomous and predominantly public. While there are teachers and others who run businesses to sell professional development services and materials, most teacher professional development is conducted teacher to teacher, at school, or in non-profit teacher led organizations. In BC we have a system of Local Specialist Associations for the different teaching areas who put on large conferences annually where teachers share new practices. We also have many regional conferences hosted by teacher associations on a non-profit basis. Finally at the school level, most school based professional development activities are organized and run by a professional development committee at the school. Outside speakers are brought in when expertise beyond the teaching profession is required for specific topics, such as to learn about development disabilities.

The system that the new legislation appears to envision, which is modelled on other regulatory professional development frameworks, is considerably different. Like just about everything the BC Liberals do, it is market based. Each individual teacher will have their own private professional development requirements, and will go out to the professional development marketplace to find courses and webinars and activities to fulfil the requirements. I would certainly hope that the major events that currently take place, such as the provincial conferences, will be authorized as approved activities. But it isn't at all clear that less formal school or department based activities, or even individual teacher activities such as reading education journals, will be authorized, or what type of bureaucratic hoop jumping might be required to get authorization. If the process is cumbersome or the approval system ideologically driven, it will open the door for an increase in for-profit professional development services to replace teacher driven activities. In other words teacher credential-ling requirements could be used to force teachers to become the customers of an expanded teacher professional development industry.

The second major concern is the influence of the approval process. The legislation as introduced gives government the power to enact an approval system of its choice. Who approves and what is approved will be key to the degree of coercive control the new scheme represents. If you do not yet have the same degree of scepticism as many teachers about how bad this can be, check out this short video of a test preparation professional development session from the Chicago Public Schools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAy3vJn4pbs&feature=youtu.be In the worst case, the approval process could mean direct interference from the Ministry or government or school Districts or Principals into the topics, format and delivery of teacher professional development in a highly prescriptive manner. Rather than teachers identifying their own professional needs based on the subjects they teach, the students they serve and their own individual areas of growth, someone else will be making that decision for them.

Parents protest BC's education budget cuts

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:07:00 +0000

Parents and education supports will be out on April 12th protesting the latest round of cuts to BC's education budget (details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1550717231856110/). Below is a post I wrote for rabble.ca outlining the cuts and swift responses from parents and Trustees. As Boards develop their budgets for next year, we are now hearing how these cuts will impact our school districts.

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Parents and teachers continue to be in a state of shock since the B.C. Liberals announced yet more cuts and expense increases for B.C.'s beleaguered school districts. Teachers were on the picket line for five weeks last summer with parent support to try to address the funding crisis in B.C. schools. B.C. students currently receive about $1000 less per student than the Canadian average. This in a province with a budget surplus.

The strategy of the B.C. Liberals has been privatization by a thousand cuts. This budget follows the usual pattern. There is an outright reduction of $29 million this year and another $25 million the following year. But in addition, there are across the board cost increases that will significantly impact board budgets. For example, there is a four per cent rate increase to Medical Services Plan premiums, which the school boards pay on behalf of employees, and there will be another round of BC Hydro increases. There is no allowance for inflation, and there are continued cuts in capital funding, at a time when many boards are now experiencing increasing enrollment.

The government had plenty of input about what is needed to restore adequate learning conditions. Teachers have been very clear that unless class sizes and lowered and funding restored for students with special needs, we will continue to fail to meet the needs of our most vulnerable students. A parent petition prior to the budget release urged the government to meet the recommendations of their own finance committee. It called on government to provide funding increases, stating:

"In their report, the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services noted that evidence indicates current funding is insufficient to cover the operating costs of public education and recommended an increase. Citizens of B.C. are calling on Premier Clark to do the right thing and remedy the underspending on B.C. education, especially now, when the province is in a state of budgetary surplus. We cannot afford to continue to erode public education through underspending."

Reaction to the budget has been swift and critical. The Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council issued a press release commenting: "To the extreme disappointment of Vancouver parents and parents throughout the province, the 2015/16 Budget announced yesterday (February 17) does not raise public education funding to an adequate level; on the contrary, it provides far less than adequate funding, and requires further cuts by school boards who have already faced more than a decade of cuts".

Notably the budget did include two increases. The first was a very small credit for teachers who coach extra-curricular sports or music activities. They will be entitled to a tax credit worth up to $25. Not only does this in no way offset the costs and time put in by teachers who volunteer to work with children, it also blatantly chooses to target one group of teachers while ignoring those who tutor after school, purchase supplies with their own money, or run other types of activities such as board game or chess clubs.

More insidious, however, is the $30 million increase to independent private schools -- almost exactly the amount being cut from the public system in the first year. This follows a decades long trend of shifting resources from the public to the private system. B.C. private schools can receive 50 per cent of the per pupil funding grant and as they continue to flourish, the amount of the education budget going to private institutions keeps increasing. Enrollment in private schools now accounts for 12 per cent of the student population.

Thus, in education, as elsewhere in B.C. budget 2015, the news was the same -- increased funding for the wealthy and more cuts to services for the rest of us. So much for families first.

The courts have acknowledged the right to strike: Now it's time to strike

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:25:00 +0000

Trade unionists across the country were delighted to see the Supreme Court of Canada finally recognize a constitutional right to strike. The landmark decision overturned legislation impeding the right to strike, and acknowledged that the right to strike is a form of freedom of association. The decision also recognized that legislative interference in the right to strike gives undue power to employers, who already have the upper hand in bargaining. Justice Abella wrote in her judgement: “In essentially attributing equivalence between the power of employees and employers, this reasoning, with respect, turns labour relations on its head, and ignores the fundamental power imbalance which the entire history of modern labour legislation has been scrupulously devoted to rectifying.”

This comes as welcome relief, particularly to public sector workers and workers in parts of the private sector, such as Air Canada, who have been subject to repeated government interference. Indeed it may provide some relief to unions that are habitually legislated back to work or worse, have had contracts imposed by legislation. As Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz have noted, Canadian governments might say that legislation is a last resort, but in practice follow a doctrine of permanent exceptionalism. Every strike is deemed special enough to require government interference.

Yet it is a mistake if those of us in the trade union movement think this is a panacea. Laws and legal challenges do not win gains for workers. They may influence the environment in which workers’ struggles take place, but no court decision will turn the tide of neoliberalism. To do that, workers need to use the right to strike - big time.

It is no secret that for about thirty years the labour movement has suffered one defeat after another. The approach to this downturn in struggle by unions has largely taken the form of trying to minimize concessions. A placard from the 2004 rallies against the BC Liberal government summed it up with the slogan: "These cuts are too deep." As if small cuts are OK.

It is also no secret that we need an upsurge in the labour movement more than ever. Growing inequality, gutted social services and regressive tax changes are completely eroding most workers’ quality of life. Middle income earners are disappearing, poverty is rising and the division between the super rich and the rest of us is continuing to grow. As a social force, unions are one of the best antidotes to challenge and confront these effects of neoliberalism.

The courts have recognized the right to strike, the challenge now is to use that right. What the courts acknowledged is that the strike is the ultimate and most powerful tool that workers have to confront the unfair advantage of employers under capitalism. Only when workers successfully strike can they win gains -- be they wage increases, health and safety measures, or even gains to the social wage such as maternity leave or paid sick days.

The last time workers made significant gains was during the upsurge of the 70s and 80s. Public sector workers, in particular, made terrific inroads in improving wages and benefits and the social wage to large numbers of workers. They won legal rights (including the right to strike), they won important social justice battles, such as pay equity, and they reduced the level of inequality in society. Unions did this by striking, and striking often. Numbers of strikes were high, numbers of strike days were high and numbers of workers participating in strikes were high. This meant that employers were scared -- scared that one strike would be the catalyst for more.

That last upsurge came in the wake of growing social movements -- the women’s movement, the fight against the Vietnam war, the Black Power movement. But arguably we are beginning to see signs of growing social movements again today. Idle no more, #BlackLivesMatter, the fight to increase the minimum wage, the disgust with Stephen Harper, the raised awareness of rape culture and gender oppression -- all are signs of an increased politicization across society. These conditions create an opening for workers to argue for much more militant action by their unions.

A change will not come without some struggle, and re-learning some lessons and refashioning our organizations. The recent BC teachers strike is a case on point. After a decade of facing legislative intervention, teachers were not really prepared for a long battle. Our strike fund was low. We were shocked by a partial lockout. We were not ready for the government tactic of trying to starve us out. We were used to three day strikes.

The broader labour movement will also need to re-learn the levels of solidarity needed to win. It will not be enough to send solidarity greetings or even to loan money. We need to re-learn the use of coordinated bargaining and sympathy strikes, and we need to repair broken relationships based on employers attempts to divide us. Most of all, many unions will need to stop looking to legal strategies, expensive advertising campaigns, or trying to elect a friendly government, and instead start actively employing labour’s most powerful weapon: the right to strike.

What could a Canadian Syriza do?

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 02:23:00 +0000

It has been so inspiring to see the Greek people reject austerity and vote in a government committed to radical change. And what is so radical about Syriza? They want to do something pretty much no other government on the planet has committed to: put people first.

Given the drastic impacts of the austerity program imposed on Greece, it is not surprising to see people so fervently reject yet more of the same. One quarter are unemployed, and of those still with work, average earnings have plummeted. It is frightening to imagine one’s own household with one lost job and the other wage down thirty percent. No wonder in these conditions the Greeks are now measuring statistics such as who can no longer afford electricity to heat their homes.

It is early days for Greece, and no doubt there will be disappointments along the way, but how refreshing to see this morning’s news: they are halting the sale of the state owned port, and stopping plans to privatize their power corporation.

For most Canadians, austerity has not been so drastic - yet. But it has been hard to have much hope in a country where child poverty is on the rise, wages are stagnant or falling, public services are clawed back and privatized, and the only hope on offer from government is the false promise of oil wealth by degrading our environment.

I am happy that the federal NDP has finally put out a few platform proposals that are genuinely progressive - a promise for $15/day childcare and an increased federal minimum wage. But this comes after two decades where the NDP, like its European social democratic counterparts, has pretty much bought into the "austerity light" form of social democracy. And even these proposals are being accompanied by the usual soft right policies supposedly meant to attract a centre-left electorate. Just today they announced a plan to give small businesses a tax break, which economists say will mostly help families earning over $150,000 a year. What little the NDP has put on the table is, frankly, too little too late.

Imagine instead what a Canadian Syriza could do? Here’s my starting list:

immediately restore home mail delivery and expand services provided by Canada Post
reject all environmentally destructive pipeline projects and work to nationalize the energy industry
eliminate public funding to private schools and private health clinics and then incorporate private services back into the public system
institute a guaranteed minimum income
invest in new public transit infrastructure
expand the health care system to include drugs, optical and dental care
provide free public childcare
eliminate tuition for post-secondary institutions
tax the rich

Sound crazy? Every one of these ideas has been proposed by not so radical people in some part of the country. What we don’t have is a political party articulating them as policy.

Many look to the NDP to be that party. I don’t think that will happen. After many attempts, such as the New Politics Initative of the early 2000s, I don't believe it is possible to change the NDP from within. And interestingly, that isn’t what happened in Greece either. The traditional social democratic party, PASOK, supported austerity until they were so unpopular they collapsed. It took a new party, built on the strength of anti-austerity activism, to put a genuinely social democratic agenda on the ballot. Spain is following the same trajectory, with the incredible rise of the brand new Podemos party, built on anti-austerity left wing politics, and rooted in social movements.

Now I don’t happen to believe that Syriza, or any social democratic party that doesn’t challenge the underlying contradictions of capitalism, will ultimately succeed in creating the world we need. But unlike the Blairite practices of most social democratic parties in the west, Syriza is a step in the right direction.

Standardized testing: a pillar of privatization

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:33:00 +0000

It's FSA season again. Every year in British Columbia, every student in grades 4 and 7 has their regular classroom schedule put on hold for two weeks while they complete the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) -- a collection of standardized tests mandated by the provincial government.

Every student, parent, teacher and citizen should oppose these tests. There is a litany of reasons for this, but top among them is the role standardized tests play in the very destruction of public education itself -- by privatizing a public service. Masquerading as a test for system quality, they are in fact an instrument of system change, and not change for the better.

The origin and rationale for standardized testing dates back to the cold war. As early as the 1960s, the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP), funded with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, was promoting the use of standardized exams for comparison of states and districts. The so--called "need" for testing was ramped up in the infamous report A Nation at Risk, published by the U.S. government during the Reagan administration in 1983. The report insisted that America's schools had to do better to fend off the Soviet threat.

As an international phenomenon, testing was promulgated by the OECD in the 1990s. It developed the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, as a way to measure member states and compare their education systems. Since this time, member states of the OECD have been only too happy to comply. State-wide testing was mandated federally in the US through the notorious No Child Left Behind act. BC has the FSAs. Ontario the EQAO.

BC's province wide standardized exam system has been in use since 1974, but it has changed over time. The first testing program, administered in grades 4, 8 and 12, was called the Provincial Learning Assessment Program (PLAP), and was a replacement of IQ tests. The results of the PLAP were not published but rather used internally for curriculum review and to manage the school system. But in 1984 the BC government decided to publish the results of Grade 12 provincial exams and by 1998 the Fraser Institute published its first ranking of BC schools. In 2002 the BC Liberals abolished the school accreditation system altogether and now relies on Accountability Contracts from each school district to ensure school quality. These documents, produced by school boards, in turn rely heavily on FSA test scores and are of dubious quality. All FSA results are now routinely made available by government on their web site and the Fraser Institute publishes rankings annually. Media outlets gleefully report on the best and worst schools.

Thus the FSAs, like standardized testing in many jurisdictions, has morphed in the last half century from a mechanism designed to internally review the quality of an individual education system, to a comparison tool to rank schools and districts.

The changes that took place are not accidental. They are part and parcel of the usual fare of neo-liberalism: deregulation, defunding, market based provision of services, and privatization.
How does this work? In today's BC school system, a parent can pick up the Fraser Institute rankings and use them to choose a school. Because we no longer have closed school boundaries based on neighbourhoods, they can register their child in the school of their choice. As their child progresses, they have access to a litany of special programs, such as Sports Academies and International Baccalaureate, many of which provide enhanced services through additional fees. Of course it is some parents choosing to do this -- typically immigrant families and low income families simply send their children to the neighbourhood school. Many districts are therefore experiencing a form of "white flight" out of inner city schools.

If you were Milton Friedman, one of the intellectual architects of neo-liberal policy, you would look at this happily as a variant of what he called school vouchers. Acknowledging that even in the free-est of markets, the state has a role to play to ensure basic literacy levels, he advocated that all parents receive a voucher for their state education allowance with the ability to use it at the school of their choice. Now admittedly in Friedman's world, these schools would be privately administered, but the mechanism for parent choice (testing and ranking), the market of schools, and the additional resources provided through school fees all mimic the Friedman model. The virtual school voucher is the provincial funding that follows a child to attend the school of their choice.

The US has taken the testing craze a few more steps. Not only do they have an insane battery of tests (at least two every year from grades 3 - 8), but they have attached high stakes to these tests so that every aspect of the school system becomes "accountable" to a test score. If a school does badly, close it. If a teacher doesn't improve student test scores, fire the teacher. If universities graduate new teachers whose students do badly, shut down the teacher preparation school.

Unfortunately, the test scores mostly reflect one thing -- the socioeconomic status of the student writing the test. The inevitable result, therefore, is that it is poor (and disproportionately black) students who are losing their teachers and losing their schools. It is no accident that the first jurisdiction to have no public schools remaining at all is New Orleans.

We can learn from our neighbours to the south, where a growing anti-test movement is sweeping the country. We have the opportunity to scrap the testing and ranking before it completely takes over our public school system. If you are a parent, please withdraw your student from the FSA. If you are a teacher, please work with your colleagues to encourage parents and others to refuse to take the tests. If you are anyone else, work with teachers and parents to end the testing mania and advocate for a school system administered by and for the public.

This article has also appeared on my rabble.ca blog

Badass Book Review: The Future of our Schools, Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 17:07:00 +0000

Badass Book Review: The Future of our Schools, Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner

Since the massive public sector upsurge in the 60's and 70's, teachers unions in the US have been in a long steady decline in power. Only very recently, with the 2012 Chicago teachers strike, have we seen any resurgence in teacher union power. Why is this?

Weiner presents an overview of the pitfalls of teacher unionism and what teachers can do to revive their organizations. For any teacher anywhere, frustrated by the untenable working and teaching conditions we now face, this book is essential reading. She describes the project well in a way any teacher can relate to: "The best way to explain what the union should be is to describe what it should not be, which is like most schools: hierarchical and paternalistic." Sound familiar?

Weiner herself has a long tenure in the teaching profession and with teacher unions. She therefore brings real expertise to an analysis of the history of teacher unionism in the US and the prescription for more effective unions. Key to her understanding is a focus on rank and file activism and social unionism. While she is using US examples and history, the global nature of the education reform movement means that her arguments are really relevant for any teacher, anywhere.

Social unionism is a type of organizing philosophy that contrasts with another historic trend - business unionism. In Weiner's approach, social unionism has two key elements. The first is to adopt a set of issues and bargaining objectives that reach beyond traditional "bread and butter" demands like wages and pensions. This has traditionally meant objectives such as smaller classes and more recently the fight against standardized testing. She argues, rightly, that in a public sector context, these bridges with the community are essential to creating the social power necessary to win. Weiner writes, "One essential change from what occurred in the 1960s and 1970s is that we must now reach out to allies to ask how they think the union might use its legal and political power, including the right to negotiate legal agreements, to improve schools....It's critical that teachers understand that we are in a greatly weakened position, and parents, students, and community activists are being courted quite seductively by our opponents."

If you are a teacher in the BCTF, you might think we already do this - we are a social justice union. But I believe Weiner is arguing for a more organic and connected form of working together. While we have, in BC, approached bargaining with a view to improved learning conditions, we have not seriously engaged with some objectives that are clearly a high priority for parents, such as playground equipment and seismic upgrades. We have instead sought out parents as allies to our objectives.

The second critical component to social movement unionism (which I think distinguishes it from social justice unionism), is the requirement to have grass-roots, rank and file activism and democratic control of union decision making.

"Often union members assume someone else - anyone else - will run the union, and it will, somehow, continue to exist. Their perception and passivity are supported by the leadership's conception of the union. Perhaps without realizing it, members and leaders accept the "service model" of unionism that predominates in US labour. In this model, sometimes referred to as "business unionism," the union is run like a business and exists to provide services including lower rates for auto insurance; benefits from a welfare fund; pension advice; contract negotiations; and perhaps filing a grievance. Officers or staff make decisions on the members' behalf. The union as an organization functions based on the assumption (generally unarticulated, unless it's challenged) that paid officials know best about everything. They're supposedly the experts. Often they conduct negotiations in secret, reporting back only when a tentative agreement has been reached. Then members have the legal right to vote on whether the contract should be approved. But other than voting on a contract and electing officers every few years, members are passive."

I'm sure this description speaks to many trade unionists, not just in teacher unions but throughout the labour movement. And while there may be aspects that are more or less true in any given union, we need to be always reminding ourselves and encouraging as much member democracy as possible in every situation. This is not just about fetishizing democracy, it is actually needed to create powerful unions that can win.

Finally Weiner touches on a number of issues that can divide us, such as race and gender, and focuses on some that are very particular to teaching. One is the "nurturing" aspect of teaching, and to what degree teacher unions should "defend schooling's social purposes and teaching's nurturing aspects". The social union perspective guides her conclusions: "The struggle to create schools that are caring makes teachers allies of parents in creating places in which we want to teach and children want to learn. Putting forward an ideal of a caring school reframes the debate about our working conditions, explaining our needs as workers and professionals in human terms."

Given the struggle we are in to defend public education and to push back on corporate and privatizing reforms, this book is a timely guide on how to revitalize our unions so that we can not just stop the tsunami of neoliberalism, but actually make gains and improve our schools.

Badass Book Review: Raising Expectations & Raising Hell, by Jane McAlevey

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 16:22:00 +0000

Book Review: Raising expectations (and Raising hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, by Jane McAlevey

It's been a tough couple of decades to be a trade unionist. Since the early nineties, with Paul Martin's cuts to transfer payments, through the Mike Harris's assaults, to the BC Liberal's ripping up contracts and the Harper Tories legislating them, it seems increasingly hard to find strategies that win.

Yet paradoxically, since about 2011, there has been a notable upsurge in progressive movements: teachers in Wisconsin, the squares of Egypt and Turkey, the world wide Occupy movement, the Maple Spring, Ferguson, and Burnaby mountain. These are just a handful of the recent uprisings against neoliberalism. Clearly, dissatisfaction with the status quo is rampant. So why can't workers seem to harness this same energy?

On the worker front, the last three years in Canada have been pretty dismal. The wholesale dismantling of Canada Post, the ongoing decline of union density, increasing government intervention in contract negotiations, forced restructuring of bargaining units, tepid, long contracts mediated by Vince Ready, two tier contracts, attacks on pensions, Bill C-377, the list goes on.

Enter some optimism in the form of Jane McAlevey. During a period of general union decline, the mid 2000's, she worked in one of the toughest right to work states to build strong unions and win good contracts. Her book provides not only a much needed dose of excitement, but also many lessons to rebuild worker power everywhere.

She takes us on a personal account of her journey through the world of the SEIU. Having come from the student and social movements, she brought with her a philosophy perfectly suited to trade unionism - an analysis of power. And she correctly sees power rooted directly in the worker. Although she only quotes Marx once, the book is a glowing example of the need for workers to take and build power themselves.

The main section of the book describes her fight in Nevada to win new certifications and new contracts in public and private sector hospitals. For any trade union activist, the little details will be an enjoyable read, and full of practical ideas to implement yourself. My favourite, and what I sense was the most powerful, was the use of very large worker bargaining teams. She describes in detail how the Nevada local built up the strength to force a thousand member, cross workplace, bargaining team on a powerful, intransigent employer.

Along the way, she outlines some very important lessons for trade unionists: the weakness of legal strategies; the importance of what she terms "whole worker" organizing, but what could be called a form of social movement unionism; the weakness of craft organizing and the sectionalism it inspires; and the dreadful and counter productive turf wars of the union bureaucrats in their endless fights for power from each other, instead of the bosses.

Every argument is made in straight forward, concrete terms. This again is especially useful for those hoping to win these same arguments in our own unions. For example, she describes the dangers of "elite" craft unions by comparing the nurse-to-patient ratios won in California, by a nurses only union, to those won in Nevada, where the whole hospital is in one local under one contract. Comparing the two, she notes: "But in our CHW contracts, we also won language prohibiting management, as they implemented our new nurse-to-patient ratios, from cutting non-nurse positions. This difference is crucial. Because the California Nurses Union was only fighting for the elite workers, the intent of the California law [to create nurse-to-patient ratios], when it took effect, was grossly undermined by hospital bosses, who gutted their ancillary staffs to pay for the additional nurses they were required to hire." This same story is played out all the time to the detriment of us all.

There are a few ideas and opinions that will be thought provoking, to say the least. One is her attitude towards the grievance process, of which she is extremely critical. However this has to be taken in the context she found herself in - one where grievances are used by bureaucrats to build internal political power within the union. Nevertheless, as some critics have written, the grievance process is also often used as a potent tool along with organizing and many moribund unions suffer from filing too few grievances, not too many.

Also potentially controversial is her opinion on minimum wage organizing, which she considers a diversion from the immediate task of building the strength and power from a union's base outward in stable workplaces. But it is worth thinking hard about what she is saying, particularly as we have seen the same phenomena here at home. The BC Federation of Labour's $15/hour campaign is absolutely worthwhile and an important fight that needs labour's support. But given the many battles labour is facing it is arguably a tangential focus away from building genuine worker power within existing unions to win gains for our members through real solidarity and action. Moreover, workers' ultimate power is the strike in the workplace, and the yet the minimum wage campaigns have been predominantly politically based.

The one area where I do think McAlevey veers from a genuinely rank and file approach is her lack of focus on internal union democracy and acceptance of staff models of organizing. Despite her insistence on building worker power at every step, she nevertheless still sees and does this through initiation by paid organizers. Arguably, when things eventually fall apart, one factor is that not enough energy has been spent on building internal democratic processes so that the new worker leaders are able to withstand the massive onslaught from the bureaucracy to quash their power. She aptly describes the new confidence workers develop in confronting management, but not those within their own union impeding their grass-roots control. Ultimately, workers have to transform their own unions themselves, not with outsiders.

Nevertheless the book is undoubtedly a welcome breath of fresh air in a landscape where many worker activists are feeling downtrodden and unable to win. It provides both the inspiration and concrete organizing examples to inspire any activist committed to winning a better world through the power of their union.

BC's Site C Dam - Another stack in the LNG house of cards

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Wed, 17 Dec 2014 01:05:00 +0000

The BC government announced today that they were going ahead with an $8.8 billion commitment to build BC's largest dam - "Site C". A few (even on the left) believe we should support Site C, as a large, green public energy infrastructure project. It is important to understand that that is not what this is.

Critics of the project consist of most of the province that isn't involved in the building and resource extraction industry. First nations oppose the project. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the BC Union of Indian Chiefs was one of the first to condemn the decision. The flooding will destroy a number of First Nations sites and is actively opposed, with law suits pending. Local communities generally oppose the project, concerned about the impact of a massive influx of people in an area already experiencing growth. The nearest municipality of Fort St. John cannot currently handle an increase of so many workers and would face strains on public infrastructure such as schools and hospitals and other public services. The residents of the 5500 hectares of fertile farm land that will be flooded obviously oppose the project.

Yet the approval should come as no surprise given the Premier's unbreakable allegiance to her ill-fated plan to make BC wealthy (or should I say some BC businessmen wealthy). This was her smoking gun in the most recent election.

On almost every metric, this project makes little sense. BC does not currently need the energy and perhaps never will. That was the sentiment of the first two decisions of the BC Utilities Commission in 1982 and 1989 which was effectively shut out of this round of decision making.

The project is estimated to cost $8.8 billion, but will realistically be closer to $10 - $20 billion given the history of costing for large government projects. To put this in perspective, just this week the very same government said it couldn't afford to pay for adults to upgrade their high school coursework to pursue post-secondary opportunities because the $20 million was too rich. This project could probably pay for smaller class sizes, free childcare, and housing all our homeless. Or how about programs to address the highest poverty rate in Canada?

While hydro electrical power may appear "clean", many believe the real purpose of the dam is to support the proposed Liquefied Natural Gas projects the Premier is so desperately trying to attract to the province. First, they introduced a tax rate of only half what they proposed during the election (which sadly had the support of the NDP as well). Now, they are providing an external energy source to support those projects, should any of them ever proceed. This project might appear to be a large, green, government infrastructure project, but the LNG component makes it more like government's part of a public/private partnership to develop natural gas extraction. This means a net increase in consumption of energy, including dirty energy.

Site C is just one more component of the public infrastructure needed to "entice" (publicly subsidize) the LNG industry. As I reported previously, the provincial mandate in education - both high school level and for colleges - is to target funds into trades programs designed to fast track students as quickly as possible into resource jobs. The trajectory of government on every front seems to have only one purpose in mind - turn BC into the next Alberta.

Lost on no one is that just as the announcement was made, the entire world is consumed with falling gas and oil prices, making new LNG investment by private interests increasingly unlikely. The Premier's entire provincial agenda is more and more looking like the last desperate attempt to win in the bursting resource extraction bubble.

The Mind of Christy Clark

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 21:39:00 +0000

My colleagues and I were somewhat perplexed at the lunch table this week to grasp the motivation behind the latest decision of the BC Liberals to end funding for adult graduates to upgrade their high school courses.

OK yes, it is obvious they want to fund less and charge more fees. But how does this fit with the grander scheme of grooming BC's youth towards a life of resource extraction? Surely getting those extra credits in Math and Science are part and parcel of the path to trades school and the LNG highway?

It is easy to forget about Christy's earlier life as Minister of Education (yes, those are dark days we educators try to block from memory). But her failed attempt to overhaul the graduation program provides some insight into the broader program she is pushing today.

Back in the early naughts, Christy tried to create a fully streamed graduation program, complete with eight distinct pathways and different degrees. Starting in grade 10 (age 14 or 15), students would choose a pathway and each would lead to a different place - be that university, vocational school, or perhaps right out into that service sector job at Walmart. At the time, she denied that this was a form of streaming, yet the proposal came at the same time as the introduction of provincial exams starting in grade 10 - essentially a high stakes barrier to some of these pathways for children as young as 14 (see BCTF report on page 8).

The original pathways proposal was never implemented, but the curriculum and graduation program was changed to reflect a similar approach. The graduation program now includes grade 10 - meaning decisions are made one year younger than the previous graduation program. Courses in key academic areas such as Math and English and Science that are included in the program include lower level curriculum which is not accepted for university entrance. For example, Math essentially has three pathways - what was first "Essentials", "Applications" and "Principles" and is now "Workplace", "Foundations" and "Pre-Calculus". Regardless of the titles, one is for graduation only, one is for vocational program entry, and one is for university entry.

Christy left government shortly after these changes. During Gordon Campbell's tenure, the focus of government education disruption was somewhat different. Entranced by technology and the Global Education Reform Movement, Campbell's year were more closely aligned with the project for 21st Century Learning (see my critique here). But Christy is back and her original vision has come with her, albeit with a heavily shifted focus not to any old vocation, but towards vocational training primarily in the trades and resource sector. Thus the government has mostly abandoned Campbell's BC Education Plan (whatever it was), the "vision for 21st Century Learning" from the BC Technology Council, and replaced these with the BC Skills for Jobs Blueprint.

If you haven't had a look at the Blueprint yet, you should. It aims to redirect students from a comprehensive senior secondary program into a trades training program that will merge seamlessly from secondary school to college. Many of the pieces are already in place, and a student can already begin their trades training in Grade 10 and be taking dual credit courses at college in Grade 12 and be ready to work shortly thereafter. Passport to Education grants, which gave some grants to graduating students and were applicable for all subjects, have been replaced with much larger grants covering only trades programs.

Like every other Christy policy extolling the virtues of "choice", in the case of trades training, this is nothing but a smokescreen. The illusion of choice always comes with institutional barriers that will in fact direct some students down one pathway and leave choices only for a select and privileged few. It is therefore fitting that general upgrading for post-secondary entrance is out, while the new trades path from grade 10 is in. Upgrading for adults allows for mobility between pathways - a genuine choice and opportunity.

Christy's program is noticeably similar and in line with the push by the Federal Conservatives for a national trades training system. Minister Jason Kenney recently took a delegation to Germany, where there is a long history of streaming students from age ten into either university or vocational schooling. The Jobs Blueprint promise to "reengineer training and education in BC" fits right in with Kenney's plan to "reinvent" vocational high schools.

Kenney also uses the "choice" cover for what is actually a step towards further inequality. "This is about choices for kids," he said. "Sometimes the German system is criticized as being brutal with its streaming in the secondary school system. The truth is that they're just trying to help reflect where kids' aptitudes and interests are." (Canadian Press)

Ironically Germans themselves are looking at the horrific racial and class divisions entrenched in their education system. As the Guardian reports:

"most children are streamed at the age of 10 into either the Gymnasium, a route to university; the Realschule, where mid-level vocational studies are common; or the Hauptschule, for a basic secondary education.

Inequality is rampant. Children from a privileged background are four times as likely to attend Gymnasium as a child with similar grades from a working-class home and, according to the federal education body KMK, children of immigrant families attend the Hauptschule twice as often as native children – even within the same socio-economic class." (Guardian)

What is left unspoken by either Christy or her Federal counterparts is that this is a program to relieve business of the costs of training and at the same time practically eliminate comprehensive secondary education for many students, and in particular those who are low income or who struggle in school. Unsurprisingly, aboriginal students are specifically targeted, under the guise of special grants and mentor-ship programs.

Far from choice or opportunity, this grander scheme is about putting children in their place.

School Trustees - The citizens' voice

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 20:31:00 +0000

Tomorrow is voting day for school Trustees in British Columbia. Please take the time to cast your ballot, and hopefully you've had a chance to look at some of the candidates. If you aren't familiar with Trustee candidates in your area, I strongly recommend you check out your local teachers' association, as they usually endorse candidates based on a thorough interview process. In the Victoria school District, the Greater Victoria Teachers' Association has endorsed six candidates: Edith Loring-Kuhanga, Deborah Nohr, Diane McNally, Rob Payntor, Jordan Watters and Anne Whiteaker. That's who I'll be voting for.

Voters should also consider "plumping" their vote. This means voting for ONLY those candidates you feel confident about. This increases those candidate's chances of winning. For example, if you want Candidate A to win, but you also vote for Candidate B, then Candidate B might beat Candidate A by a small number of votes and your extra vote helped make that difference. Often you get to vote for 7 or 9 Trustees, but it is really better to vote for the solid candidates you really want. Hopefully they win a majority on the Board.

Municipal elections typically have poor voter turnout, and especially for school Trustee. If you do just one more thing to help get public education advocates into Trustee positions - take five with you to the polls. Your parents, your co-workers, your siblings, your friends. Give them a ring a few hours before the polls close on Saturday to see if they've voted yet.

The teacher's strike this year highlighted the many shortcomings and dangers our public system faces. But without an active community voice and a sustained social movement we will not have the power to effect change. School Trustees who see their role as advocates, rather than mere managers, can be critical partners in such movements. The recent debate on corporate funding in schools and the response from Vancouver Trustees and Trustee candidates is one example. We need to build on this to create citizen based movements to advocate for smaller class, support for students with special needs, adequate funding, an increased schedule for seismic upgrades, proper playground equipment at all schools, new capital funding for growing communities. Tomorrow's vote is step one in this process.

Reflections on the BC Teacher Strike

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 17:16:00 +0000

Teachers are reflective practitioners. And just as we reflect on a lesson to judge what worked and what did not, we ought also to reflect on our struggle to improve the public education system. The point is not to lay blame. It is to figure out how to do it better next time.

A starting point for reflection is to judge the outcome relative to our goals. From this point of view, there is much to be done. As we return to class this week, there are still no class size limits for Grades 4 - 12. There are still no rules whatsoever on the composition of a class. Our salaries will increase pretty much in accordance with the original government proposal. Elementary teachers will have ten more minutes of preparation time. This is a far cry from the proposals tabled over a year ago, and still far from the "bottom line" of the framework proposal made at the end of June.

Teachers will still act as the shock absorbers for a system under stress. We ourselves will be the ones on medical leave from the ten percent of classes that are truly not adequate learning environments. We will continue to see teachers leave the profession. We will continue to fill in the gaps with our own resources - be that money or time. And at the same time our salaries will continue to fall relative to inflation.

We will watch as the BCTF goes back to court over the imposition of Bills 28 and 22. While this is absolutely necessary, we will no longer have the opportunity of immediate reinstatement of our class size language. Even if the courts uphold Justice Griffin's decision and reject the government's appeal, we will be teaching in over crowded classrooms until something new is negotiated, and we know what that process is likely to look like.

So what have we learned for next time?

Some commentators have suggested this deal was better than a legislated end to the dispute. In the context of our court case, I'm not so sure. A legislated contract likely would have been two years, with the same wages, and with no re-opener on the court case. The possibility would be there of immediate reinstatement of our class size language with a final court decision. A two year agreement would have us bargaining again before an election, not after one. These are the reasons the government wanted this deal and didn't want to legislate.

Others have said we had no other choice - public support would disappear. I'm not so sure about that either. The public was with us because we were fighting for classroom conditions. If we were clear that this deal made few improvements, I believe many in the public would have stayed the course. Regardless, we have a lot of work to do to build stronger alliances in our communities. Public support was good, but not overwhelming. Our relationships need to deepen and broaden. We can't only ask parents to help us when we need it. We have to be there on parent issues such as seismic upgrading, school closures, child poverty, day care and affordable housing. And I don't mean just taking the right position. We have to be there on the streets, like parents were for us.

It should have been an option to return to work but reject the deal. Unfortunately, this option was not available to teachers. There is some irony that the timing of the vote came in part due to a motion from a BCTF AGM requiring a vote to end a job action. This motion was to prevent a "sell out" from leadership at the end of a strike by stopping job action without membership consent. But it was never meant to rush a ratification vote. Teachers should have had two separate choices - do we return to work? Do we accept this contract?

Teachers had about six hours to look at the contract language. They received conflicting information about the re-opener clause (which had been settled in bargaining at least three days earlier), and about the impact of the Education Fund. The BCTF claimed 850 new teachers would be hired, but failed to mention the layoffs this spring (such as 135 in Surrey alone), or that most of those hires had already happened with the Learning Improvement Fund. This year's new money for teachers is only the amount that had been spent on CUPE staff - probably about 15-30% of the fund. Teachers need adequate time to debate and consider an agreement and they have the right to see the actual language of the contract. These are basic democratic rights that any membership should insist from their union. We need to rethink how we ratify contracts.

The government strategy of starving us out was effective. If we choose to take strike action next time, we need to think a lot more carefully about how long we can stay out. Striking at the beginning of the school year was very effective at creating pressure - especially due to the impact on International programs. Striking in June was not effective, and only added extra financial pressure on teachers. We need a properly funded strike fund. And teachers need to learn a lesson from the private sector that you should have several months savings to help you weather a longer strike. If government perceives this bargaining round as a win, which I believe they do, they will use these strategies again next time - lock outs and long strikes.

BC Teacher strike - Lessons learned

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:32:00 +0000

On the evening of the vote results, I found myself, with great difficulty, repeating the tried and true advice: "Don't mourn, organize." Because it is correct. There is much to do. And there are always setbacks and disappointments on the way to a better world.

That said, it is also worth some analysis on the strike to guide the future. Here are my thoughts.

Longest teacher strike in BC history

Despite the outcome, perhaps the most incredible thing about this strike was the resolve of teachers. Although long strikes are more common in the private sector, for a public sector union this was a very long strike indeed. Three days of rotating strikes, followed by two weeks in June, followed by almost three weeks in September. Five weeks in total. This is more than double the length of the 2005 strike of two weeks. The length of the strike showed the depth of the resolve amongst teachers.

Teachers understood clearly the severity of the issues at hand and the need for extended pressure in the context of a government that campaigned on and implements neo-liberal reforms. Teachers should be rightly proud of taking a stand and making a personal sacrifice to do so. And union leaders should take careful note that workers in British Columbia are willing to take action to stop concession bargaining and instead fight to win improvement. I hope we are at a historic breaking point from the thirty year concessionary bargaining of the North American labour movement.

The length of the strike is also important for its knock on effect. Periods of history where labour makes gains are marked by frequent strikes and by more strike days. Not every one of these strikes results in victory. But the cumulative impact changes the balance of power. Employers get nervous if they believe the risk is high. And this in turn impacts the outcome of bargaining.

The outcome

I do not believe this strike was a victory.

On the major issue, return of class size and composition limits, we failed. The Education Fund, as I've already noted, is a shell game. The money in will in short order be offset by increased costs to School Boards and stagnating per pupil funding. The "reopener" clause for government in the event of a court victory on our class size case will nullify potential gains from that win. The grievance settlement we paid for ourselves with the strike savings, relieving government from a potential liability and bargaining lever.

On wages, the government did shift slightly. In spring they removed the requirement for sick day accumulation limits to pay for wages. They also shifted the timing to put more increases front loaded. But overall, the wages remain below inflation and so this is a concessionary contract in that respect. Teachers' buying power will go down over the life of the contract.

The small increases to elementary preparation time are a genuine win, and this was a much better way to bargain the funds from the grievance settlement. These increases set a new standard in contract for elementary preparation time and this time is sorely needed. This is the only real improvement in working conditions in this contract.

Teacher teaching on call (TTOC) per day rates increased for most TTOCs, but at the expense of those at the high end of the salary scale. This is probably overall a positive step, as there is a historic imbalance in the remuneration of teachers at the beginning and end of their careers. But it does come at the cost of experienced TTOCs who will pay for the change.

Solidarity?

Many teachers reluctantly voted yes because they felt a longer strike could significantly impact parent solidarity and the sympathy of the public. This may or may not be the case. Many vocal supporters were clear to indicate that support would continue regardless of the vote and that they were behind teachers in fighting for better classroom conditions. It is also the case that every public sector strike faces a conundrum - instead of monetary pressure on the employer, a strike creates public inconvenience. The widespread, organized support of parents and the continued support in polling was one of the great victories of this strike. This, more than anything else, pressured the government. The test now will be to ensure that the teacher/parent bonds that have been forged deepen and strengthen. Ultimately this will be required to win back smaller classes.

Solidarity from organized labour is a more difficult assessment. It is first important to distinguish between the actions of the leadership of unions and the actions of individual members. Many individual union members showed great commitment. They came to our picket lines, they wrote letters, they rallied. Like parents, many actively organized in support.

The labour leadership, five weeks into the strike, offered interest free loans to teachers and the BCTF. A few individual unions gave direct donations (notably Ontario teachers who donated $1,000,000). But the majority of the "support" came in the form of interest free loans.

To me this is one of the tragic failures in this dispute, and a warning sign for workers in BC. While loans and donations are appreciated, what we need is collective pressure. BC now has a long and sad history of the union movement failing to step in with solidarity strikes when they are most needed. Two glaring examples stand out - long strikes by small private sector unions, such as the projectionists and now the IKEA workers, and public sector strikes. The failure of the BC Federation of Labour to mobilize with us is a continuation of the trend that sees joint labour action moribund. Nowhere was this more clear than during the "net zero" mandate, where there was so much reason for a joint coordinated response to a broad attack on public sector wages. Labour can and must work to support one another if we are to muster the strength needed to stop concession bargaining and regain what we have lost.

Response to Sandy Garossino

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:43:00 +0000

A number of teachers have pointed to a string of tweets by Sandy Garossino, who spoke so eloquently about the meaning of Justice Griffin's decision during our strike.

I very much respect and appreciate her support for teachers and careful explanation of the court case to the public.

However I do disagree with her analysis on our bargaining situation.

Here are my responses to her arguments:

My assessment is that what you achieved is very close to the highest negotiated settlement possible for you, if not the highest. #bced

At the decisive moments it is very normal for those who are taking risks to feel nervous, fearful and uncertain. The art of negotiation is not to blink just at this moment. Yes, this government has a very different agenda than teachers. Yes, this is an extremely difficult bargaining situation. But teachers, workers and citizens have not ever made substantial gains in easy conditions. It always takes risk and sacrifice to win improvements to public services. The history of the labour movement demonstrates that taking risks in seemingly impossible situations is what has won historic gains. The eight hour day, maternity leave, health and safety rights - none of these came easily. We are in an era of massive inequality in which the small few who benefit from privatizing public services are pushing very hard to substantively undermine public education. This isn't just in BC, it is around the world, typified in the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). It won't be easy, but we will never win if we don't try.

One of the most destructive aspects of litigation is the fantasy that there's a clear or certain path to victory & you just hv to find it.

I actually don't usually support legal strategies to make gains for public services - I agree they are limited. But the path of the tentative agreement is exactly the one government wants: Limited new monies for public education (which can be taken somewhere else...through yet more downloading of costs onto school boards); silencing the most eloquent critics of privatization and underfunding, the teachers, for five years; eliminating the need to ever implement the court case in the event government loses. I don't have illusions in a clear or certain path. But every victory requires risk and courage. If you never take that path, you never reach your goal.

Teachers: You have a LOT TO LOSE if you reject this deal and proceed directly to appeal. This cannot be overstated. #bcpoli #bced

We have a lot to lose if we do take this deal. More educational change aimed at privatizing a public system with no teacher action/negotiations to challenge those changes; More years of chronic underfunding, teacher stress and burnout and lost opportunities for children; A repeat of this bargaining round when the "re-opener" happens if we win the court case.

I am not convinced this deal is any/much better than a legislated agreement which would be the absolute worst case scenario. They cannot legislate away the court decision - it would be illegal and would hurt their case on appeal. I have no trust that the small additional dollars in the Education Fund will translate into more teachers. It is fundamentally the same as the LIF, and during the years of the LIF, teacher numbers have decreased. This is what our own union has documented.

Now is not the time to blink.

Will the Education Fund improve classroom conditions?

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 14:58:00 +0000

The tentative agreement negotiated this week includes an Education Fund which replaces the Learning Improvment Fund (LIF). Will this improve classroom conditions? Not much, if at all.

The BCTF did an excellent analysis of the failure of the LIF, which I won't repeat here. But suffice it to say there are four main problems with the LIF:

1. it is about 1/4 of the funding needed for class sizes that match our previous language
2. some of the funding is spent on non-teacher resources
3. there is no method for fair allocation
4. there is no change in how classes are organized

The net result is that after several years of the LIF, classroom conditions are worse, not better.

The new Education fund only addresses one of these issues - spending on teachers. But this is insufficient to mean the fund will help you in your classroom. Here is the cold hard truth.

Dollars

In terms of dollars, the new fund will be $80 million per year, instead of $75 million per year. The $400 million figure the BCTF is publishing is for the six years combined. So the increase is a mere $5 million dollars per year for 500,000 students. That is $10 per student per year. The same amount spent on the botched computer system BCeSIS. This is wholly inadequate. The original BCTF bargaining position of $225 million should have been our bottom line. Even that amount is far short of the $330 million removed from the 2002 legislation.

Teachers hired?

The new fund will be spent exclusively on teachers and this is an improvement. But the BCTF claim that this translates into 850 new positions per year is disingenuous. Firstly, as this REPLACES the LIF, the only new positions are those created by the extra $5 million and the funding that was previously used on Educational Assistants. In my District, the LIF was used to hire 6 additional teachers. With the changes to the Education Fund, this will likely change to 10-15. But as we have 45 schools, this means only 5-10 schools will see an additional teacher. Most school will see no change whatsover.

The supposed 850 new positions are really more like 3-400 new positions, and it is really important to understand that these positions are TEMPORARY. Both the Education Fund and the previous LIF were allocated each year on a year-by-year basis. So we will not see new additional teachers each year. Just like the LIF, we will see a couple of new hires in September who are then excess in June, and the process repeats.

Allocation of funds

As with the LIF, teachers will be consulted, but the District will ultimately make the decision. It has been an unhealthy and destructive process to have teachers and schools arguing over who should get the tiny pot of money.

Class composition

The new fund does nothing to change how classes are organized. Critically, with inadequate funds, Districts will continue to cluster students with Individual Education Plans into single classrooms and place EAs in those classes. Don't expect any changes to the number of classes with more than three students with an IEP.

In the BCTF analysis of the LIF, Larry Kuehn asks "How, then, if 500 teaching jobs were to be created by the fund, did the reported number of FTE teachers in the system actually fall by 33?" I fear with the Education Fund we will be asking the same question.

Tentative agreement - Yes or No?

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 02:48:00 +0000

Despite what I know was a herculean effort on the part of our bargaining team, I very much hope that BC teachers will vote no to the tentative agreement. After five weeks of strike, and twelve years of legal battles, this is not the deal that will restore sanity to public education and it is not a fair deal for teachers and students. Just as teachers in Saskatchewan rejected a deal to ensure a better outcome, I hope BC teachers will consider a no vote to let our team know we have to go back to the bargaining table.

Class size, composition

The agreement provided a modified LIF fund starting at $75 million per year and increasing to $85 by the last year. It is for teachers only, which will mean a slight improvement in Districts where sizeable portions were spent on Education Assistants or senior District staff rather than teachers. However, in an average size District like Victoria (20,000 students, 1,000 teachers), this will translate into about 5-10 more teachers. That is one for every five schools. To put it in comparison, Justice Griffin's judgement estimated the lost funding due to lost class size language at about $330 million in current dollars. (Read more here about the proposed Education Fund.)

I heard so many teachers speak up about the need to ensure that we do not return to over-crowded classes when the strike ends. This agreement does very little to alleviate what is the most pressing issue.

Throwing away the court victory

The agreement provides a "reopener" in the event we win on appeal our class size language. What this means is that the language returns, but is not implemented until new language is negotiated. Without the actual implementation of the returned language, there will be very little incentive for the government to bargain it back. We would essentially be back in the very same position we are in today, with government trying to bargain it out and us trying to bargain it back in. In my opinion, even if we were legislated back to work we would be in a superior position. If we won the appeal the government would then be forced to implement the language. We are thus throwing away our historic court victory and the bargaining pressure it potentially creates.

The reopener is really only mildly less offensive than E80. In both cases, we have to bargain back what was illegally taken from our contract and the government will probably never have to restore it. In fact, the "reopener" creates the perfect opportunity for government to lock us out to try and force us to agree to something far inferior.

Throwing away the remedy for the last twelve years

The agreement provides $105 million to compensate for grievances over-sized classes for the last twelve years. Using Justice Griffin's estimates, our loss is roughly $300 million times 12 = over $3 billion. I cannot fathom how $105 million is a fair compromise. The BCTF's original proposal to put this money back into the system was a more fair and productive approach. This agreement means we can no longer go to the courts for a fair remedy.

Wages

The agreement is very close to government's original offer. While I would be willing to accept this if the class size language was returned, teachers should not be taking such a significant monetary loss without the commensurate gain in working conditions. We have lost roughly 12% of our annual salary. We will not make that back in the term of the contract. With inflation now running at 2% per annum, this salary agreement is a pay cut.

Minimal improvements

There are very minimal improvements in preparation time for elementary teachers (10 minutes per week), and TTOC daily rate. The TTOC daily rate change may depend on your grid placement. It could actually be a wage loss for long term TTOCs who are above category 5 and step 7. There is also $11 million in health and dental benefits. At 40,000 members, this is $275 each. Hardly worth consideration in the context of the rest of the agreement.

What next?

There are a variety of options if we vote no. We can continue the strike. We can choose to return to work and continue bargaining. We do not, and should not, accept an agreement that doesn't meet our needs and doesn't meet the needs of students and public education. When Saskatchewan teachers rejected the first deal which had 5.5% wage increases over four years, the second deal had 7.3% increases over four years. They have said this still isn't good enough.

For us, our main issue is classroom conditions. We need to say this isn't good enough. The way to do that is to vote no.

Class composition: a human rights perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 18:55:00 +0000

Christy Clark enraged teachers and surprised many when she tweeted that class composition was one of her primary concerns. Those of us working in schools who have for twelve long years been trying to bring this issue into the public discourse thought: well, it's about time.

It was over twenty years ago that Charter rights guaranteed students with disabilities an education in mainstream classrooms. No longer would students be relegated to special schools or special classrooms. They were legally entitled to be in class with all other students and to experience the equivalent educational opportunities.

The integration of students with special needs and the subsequent increase of these students within the student population is at the heart of the "class composition" issue. In the 1990's, teachers in British Columbia negotiated limits to how many students with special needs would be in any one classroom. They also negotiated smaller classes for those with students with special needs.

The purpose was twofold. First, placing limits on any individual class ensures that the overall distribution of students is even across classrooms. This creates diverse classes in every school. It also ensures that any individual teacher has adequate time to prepare individualized lessons for each of those students.

When Bill 28 eliminated these provisions, and with additional legislation in 2002 that removed targeting funds towards individual students, school Districts responded with a practice of "clustering". It works like this. If the per student funding provides some money, and a student with a funded designation provides a little bit more money, then pool that money together, hire a single Educational Assistant, and place all the students with special needs into that class to have access to the Educational Assistant. The result is that in a school with two or three classes at one grade level, one class will have high numbers of students with special needs and an Educational Assistant while the other classes will have relatively few students with special needs and no Educational Assistant. Thus the effect of removing limits for individual classrooms is to create a system of partial segregation. There are the classes with high numbers of students with special needs and those with significantly lower numbers. Specialty programs like Academies and French Immersion can further exacerbate this distribution.

The Liberal government cynically adopted an argument put forward by the Victoria Confederacy of Parent Advisory Councils that the practice of limiting students with special needs in one class is discriminatory. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only does removing limits encourage clustering, it also impacts educations opportunities for those students in a system that is chronically underfunded.

Charter rights require that students with special needs have equivalent educational opportunities to all other students. This means that more funding and resources must be directed towards those students if required to provide an equivalent opportunity for those children. But without class composition limits, one teacher could have to prepare upwards of a dozen individual programs for a single class of students. Given the ninety minutes of preparation time per week, this simply isn't possible. Moreover, the sharing of limited resources among students and the use of Educational Assistants rather than Special Education teachers means students with individual education plans receive little if any targeted instruction beyond what the classroom teacher can provide. It is not uncommon for a student with a learning disability to have about 15 minutes per week with a special education teacher. I have met a Grade 2 teacher who prepared 18 different reading programs for her class. If a single classroom teacher has many students with individual plans, the time available for each plan and each student becomes increasingly limited.

Diverse and equitable classrooms are created when each classroom has a similar diversity within it, not when students with special needs are clustered together because of funding limitations. This is what per class limits facilitate. This is what teachers want restored to our contract. Without these limits and with chronic underfunding we are providing the exact opposite. Children with special needs who require more are receiving less: - less teacher time, less specialist time and less genuine integration.

All of this is to explain why government proposal E80 is so problematic in the current bargaining context. It eliminates limits in favour of a small pot of money with no accountability for how that money is spent. We know from experience this leads to inequities and clustering. And we know that limits for individual classrooms leads to diversity and integration.

Class size and composition - a short visual history

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 22:51:00 +0000

I put this table together today to share with parents and community members at our information forum this evening, but please feel free to share.

It is a slight simplification as it doesn't deal with exempted classes like music, classes in distributed learning, special education class, the "fudge factor" allowing overages in special circumstances and so forth.

But if you want to know the basics of how class size and composition have changed over the last twelve years through three rounds of legislation, this is an overview.

It is based on the Greater Victoria collective agreement.

Guest post - I WILL HOLD THE LINE

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 23:48:00 +0000

This guest post is from a Victoria teacher explaining to her colleagues why she is willing to hold the line in our strike.

---
Hi. My name is Dana Bjornson. I’ve been teaching Math and Physics at Esquimalt for 15 years and I’m a teach-aholic.

I am at this mic to PROUDLY say that I WILL HOLD THE LINE.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE because I am sick and tired of the children of this province being treated like crap by their government.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE for those students who need the extra help, the extra time, the extra resources because life didn’t deal them the same hand as the rest of their classmates.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE because I only have time to put out the fires and help the squeaky wheel kids and I often wonder how many of my amazingly talented introverts are falling through the cracks because I don’t have time to ask them how they are doing that week.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE for the parents on my Facebook that have practically begged me to hold the line.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE because I shouldn’t have to send my kids to private school to receive the same education I had in public school.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE because when you read the fine print on Christy Clark’s winning campaign mantra, “Families First”, it turns out she actually meant “Wealthy Families First”.

I WILL HOLD THE LINE because I have accepted “The Duct Tape Challenge.” This challenge requires teachers to stop allowing themselves to be treated as the duct tape holding this system together, then to share videos of themselves on social media actually having a life outside of school.

Now I don’t know about you, but I am pretty busy these days… raising kids, maintaining a cleanish household, usually working, binge watching on Netflix… I don’t have time to build a school in Ecuador. <but I will donate to those who do.> I don’t have the energy to paddle/cycle/run/moonwalk to raise money for social causes. <but I will donate to those who do.>

What I can do, though, is HOLD THE FREAKING LINE. We need to hold this government accountable! No more band aid approaches! No more Mrs. Nice Bjornson and NO MORE DUCT TAPE! Thank you.

Teachers - let your leadership know it is time to hold the line

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:35:00 +0000

As teachers return to picket lines in BC there is considerable discussion as to strategy and tactics for the coming weeks. I argued in my last blog post that now is the time to hold the line. Should teachers return, the pressure on government would immediately evaporate and their program to eliminate class size provisions (regardless of any future court rulings - see proposal E80) would be the only deal on offer. Teachers need to be prepared to hold the line and take the financial pressure long enough to force government to bargain in good faith.

In twelve long years never have we been in this position - with two victorious court cases and our most solid strike vote in history. Thousands of parents, students and citizens are looking to us for leadership in winning back the learning conditions we know our students deserve. It is time for resolve and commitment, despite fears, uncertainty and financial hardship. We do not want to look back on this struggle and wish "if only we had...".

To that end, it is important that teachers let their leadership know their commitment to holding the line. I would urge teachers to write to the BCTF Executive Committee (emails here) expressing their commitment to our collective action, which we voted on in historic numbers.

It is always the responsibility of rank and file members to keep leadership held to account and informed of the membership's will. Particularly at times when there may be many pressures and stresses does the rank and file of a union need to organize and ensure that the union follows the path in everyone's collective interest.

Protecting public education: Hold the line for as long as it takes...

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 00:48:00 +0000

Holding the line for as long as it takes. This should be the disposition of not just teachers, but also parents, students and citizens who care about public education.

With the latest failed talks between the BCTF and government, it is clearer than ever that the government objective during this round of bargaining is to eliminate class size language for ever and ever. And with the loss of class size language comes the permanent underfunding of public education, constant downward pressure on teacher wages, and an open door to more private schools and worsening conditions in public schools.

Let me explain.

The intransigence of government at the bargaining table is not about money. Christy Clark might say it is about affordability, but a confluence of factors have made the stakes this round especially high. Because of the Bill 28 court case, in which the courts told government that stripping class size language out of our collective agreement was illegal, the government was forced, in Bill 22, to reinstate teachers' ability to negotiate class size. Although they took actual class sizes out, Bill 22 did reinstate the right to bargain class size as of 2013. So this round it is legal for the first time. And so this round the government is intent on bargaining class sizes out. That is what proposals E80 and E81 are about - removing class size via the bargaining process regardless of the outcome of government appeals of the court ruling reinstating old class size language. These proposals allow government to nullify any contract after the final results of the court case are finalized through appeal. If the teachers win, and class sizes are back, government simply uses these clauses to negate that win. When Fassbender says let the courts decide, he is just not being honest so long as either of these articles remain on the table, and so far E80 remains on the table. (See the Tyee for more on What's Jamming Teacher Bargaining...).

Class size is the most important bargaining issue for teachers, parents, students and all working people. And not just because smaller classes are essential for quality teaching and learning (which they absolutely are). Class sizes have profound implication on the rest of the system. They are the greatest determiner of funding levels (small class sizes force higher funding). They are the biggest influence on teacher workload, which in turn impacts teacher turnover. Heavy workload and high turnover are in turn substantial impediments to quality teaching. With large class sizes and higher teacher turnover also comes a glut of teachers on the market. This puts downward pressure on wages as there are more teachers available than jobs to fill. It also leads to a scarcity of work for newly graduating teachers. Both these factors in turn lower the status of the teaching profession, which discourages new entrants into the profession. All of this opens the door to increased privatization as those who can afford better look to the private system.

One need only look to the US to see these factors at work. Class sizes in the US go up above 40 in some jurisdictions. In many schools, teachers stay an average of one year. Teachers are demoralized. Wages are so low in some states one wonders why anyone would accept the responsibility or stress for such a low level of pay. Schools are over crowded, and children with special needs receive inadequate services. Parents with money increasingly send their children to private school.

This is precisely the outcome the Liberal government has been hoping for in BC, and after twelve years, it is starting to work. Parents with money are indeed leaving the public system.

A recent article in the Tyee explained well why teachers should not return to school before we have a fair deal. We also need to prepare ourselves to stay out as long as it takes for a deal that not only treats us fairly, but protects and reinstates class sizes.

This is the key to protecting public education. And we will need parents, students and workers supporting us in this goal to make it happen. But history has shown that when we are united together, we can be successful. I have no doubt that if we hold the line, we can be successful this time too.

Ranking & Sorting - An Essential Service

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 20:46:00 +0000

What is schooling for? In the midst of a teacher strike that is now entering its second week, the BC Labour Relations Board provided an answer - to rank and sort students. Upon application from the BC government, they declared that providing Grade 12 student marks was an essential service, and on Friday afternoon, that reviewing Grade 10 and 11 marks provided by school administrators was an essential service. Also essential is the provision of provincial exams, which students wrote last week behind teacher picket lines.

I guess we already knew that time in the classroom learning was not paramount. Many Districts across BC have shortened the school year by a week or longer to address chronic budget shortfalls. Some have even adopted a four day week. So it was already evident that time involved in learning activities with teachers can be jettisoned - if it saves money. No surprise then that the government appears to have very little interest in ending the strike and re-opening schools before the end of June.

We also knew that somehow the BC government thinks that limiting the constitutional right to strike should expand far beyond genuinely life threatening situations. It was all the way back in 2001 that the Essential Services legislation made the provision of education "essential". But what is increasingly clear is that was is "essential" for government has nothing to do with educating. What is "essential" is that lists of marks are available to rank and sort students - no matter what they had the opportunity to learn and no matter how inaccurate those rankings might be. And what is also essential to government is that essential services legislation continue to erode the right to strike.

The government lockout prevented teachers from planning and marking. For the last several weeks of school, assignments were abridged, trips were cancelled, and learning activities cut short. Teachers simply could not continue to teach in the manner they do under the terms of the lockout and the severe restrictions on the working day. In my district, six out of the seven secondary schools also cancelled final course tests. In my daughter's school, the decision was made by the school administration and announced on the PA system before teachers even knew. In other words, the final month of school, which is about 20% of second semester courses, was shortened. And grading and assessment was altered - in many cases without the teacher even having any control over it.

Many teachers forced to submit Grade 12 marks on Friday did the only thing they think is ethical and honest in the circumstances - they assigned an "In Progress" mark. They acknowledged that the assessment of student work is not in relation to all the learning required in the course. They did what is a fair and accurate representation of student outcomes given the lockout's impact. One teacher I know even went further, providing a range of potential outcomes each student might achieve if they had the opportunity to actually complete the course, including final assessments.

Next week teachers will be asked to "review" a mark provided by an administrator. I don't know where these marks are going to come from. Perhaps they will be term marks from term one and will not reflect any student work completed since April. Perhaps they will come from some other magical place. What I do know is that administrators have not taught these students and have no mechanism to provide a genuine professional opinion about the level of student achievement in relation to the learning outcomes of the course. So why are they putting marks into the system? I guess because they have been ordered to do so.

At the end of the day, administrators will place a grade on every grade 10, 11 and 12 student's transcript. That grade will in many cases not reflect the student's abilities relative to the full course curriculum. But it will provide some data for someone else to make a judgement about that student. And this is ultimately what these grades are for - to rank and sort students. And apparently this is essential.

Can we afford smaller classes? Absolutely.

noreply@blogger.com (Tara Olivetree) — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 22:44:00 +0000

Education Minister Fassbender seems to have backed off his stance that class sizes don't matter. Not surprisingly, it was one of the first concerns raised at the annual general meeting of the BC Confederation of Parent Advisory Council's Q & A discussion:

Education Minister Peter Fassbender spoke to conference delegates Friday morning and was later peppered with questions, starting with this one: “How does class size not matter?”

Parents also wanted to know what his government is doing to help with complex classes, how it will protect schools threatened with permanent closure, whether the labour dispute will upset graduation activities and final exams and whether negotiations will continue throughout the summer.

There were no surprises in his answers: Class size is important up to a point, but not as important as class composition and teacher quality, given limited tax dollars, he said. Government has provided additional dollars to help with class composition challenges but it’s an issue that needs more attention, after a contract is signed, he added.*
So his back up answer? We can't afford it. And another old standby...class composition matters more. (I don't deal with teacher quality - another red herring, but read my thoughts on it here.)

Class size and class composition are inextricably linked. When the portion of the student population with identified special needs is high, the only way to create educationally sound classes is by having smaller classes. So if, for example, what is reasonable for a typical classroom is three students with special needs (the guidelines that used to be in legislation with Bill 33), but there are 8 students with special needs in Grade 5 out of 50 students, the only way to configure classes is to have three smaller classes rather than two larger ones. I'm not sure what other solution Fassbender could be referring to for class composition, unless he means segregation.

So can we afford smaller classes? British Columbians both can afford it and are willing to pay for it. The best evidence comes from an excellent report prepared last year by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. They costed this specific question, and they asked British Columbians what they thought about it.

The first thing they point out is how much tax revenue we would have for public services if only the tax cuts implemented by the BC Liberals never took place:

If BC collected today the same amount in tax revenues as a share of the economy
(GDP) as we did in 2000, we would have $3.5 billion more in public funds this year
alone. Meaning, no deficit, and the ability to invest in enhanced or even new public
services.

But they go on to look at class size and composition in particular, and what it would take to fund this with new, progressive income tax brackets for high income earners:

Two new brackets at the top: 18%
on income $150,000–$200,000; and
21% on income over $200,000

(would generate) $700 million

(which could pay for) 2,000 units of new social housing per year plus restore
K–12 class sizes, composition, and specialist teacher
staffing to levels that prevailed five years ago

Or alternatively:

Increase the current top (5th) bracket rate
to 17%, and add two new upper income
brackets: 20% on income $150,000–$200,000,
and 22% on income over $200,000

(would generate) $930 million

(which could pay for) Welfare benefit increases, a major funding increase to
the Ministry of Children and Family Development, plus
restore K–12 class sizes, composition, and specialist
teacher staffing to levels that prevailed five years ago

The CCPA backed up these policy proposals with polling to see what British Columbians think about increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, or even themselves, in order to spend on public services. Here is what they found:

The overwhelming majority of British Columbians (90%) think there should be income tax increases for those at the top. As to where those higher taxes should kick in, a clear majority (57%) says at $100,000 per year of income. A majority (67%) also think major corporations are asked to pay less tax than they should.

...

Of course it’s easy to say someone else should pay more taxes. That’s why it comes as a further surprise to discover the openness British Columbians show when it comes to potential tax increases for themselves. When initially asked a general question about their own level of taxation, most people feel they pay too much – no surprise given the cost of living challenges many wrestle with. But, when taxes are linked to concrete policies that can reduce inequality and improve our quality of life, the story changes.

Respondents were asked if they would consider paying a slightly higher share of their own income to provincial income tax (for most people representing a few hundred dollars per year) in order to help bring about 11 different policy changes. The changes included things like providing more access to home and community based health care for seniors, increasing welfare benefit rates, creating a $10 per day child care program, protecting BC’s forests and endangered species, or reducing class sizes in K-12 education.

The results are striking: 68% say they are willing to pay a higher share of their income in order to help bring about 4 or more of the 11 policies. And once again, this held true for majorities regardless of which political party people intended to vote for in the next provincial election.

- See more at: https://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/commentary/british-columbians-are-ready-thoughtful-conversation-about-taxes#sthash.jQ51lTNa.dpuf