It is always difficult to write about somebody else's labour dispute.
I am not a teacher (really) and as a university professor, I work in a different climate under very different conditions. My job involves a variety of activities - including research - that the average school teacher is not required to do.
On the other hand, a school teacher's job requires a number of activities that I never do. I do not have to supervise kids at lunch or have parent teacher interviews or participate in sports days or... well, a whole host of things that teachers do for our children and we just take for granted.
There is certainly the impression that teachers only work for five or six hours per day. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Indeed, on the Ministry of Education's FAQ site, the ministry makes the statement: "The accepted teacher work day is just over nine hours per day, which is now reduced in both length and required duties" as a result of job action.
The argument put forward by the government was that if teachers are not willing to work nine hour days, they should have their pay docked by 10 per cent. Unfortunately for the teachers, the Labour Relations Board agreed with the government.
"... Subject to the designation of essential services, the employer is free to engage in lockout activities including imposing new terms of employment in order to pressure the Union into reaching a new collective agreement" LRB vice-chairman Richard Longpre wrote in his decision.
In other words, if during a labour dispute over wages, you do not want to continue with nine hour work days or 45 hour work weeks, the employer is free to deduct some portion of your wages or, presumably, all of them.
Nice. Is the government going to cut back on the teacher's gruel ration as well?
But getting back to the notion that teachers only work five or six hours per day, the Ministry of Education recognizes that this is not the case. Teachers work long hours. Indeed, most of the teachers I know put in even more hours than the ministry thinks.
Being a teacher is a lot more work than most people realize. I certainly know that it is not a job that I would want to do. And I certainly would not want to do it in our present school system.
I have been in many classrooms over the past 20 years, and I have seen the stresses and strains that are placed on the educational process by increased class sizes during the past decade. Education Minister Peter Fassbender's contention that class size doesn't matter is simply not true.
It is not supported by research. Indeed, an Australian educator Dr. David Zyngier conducted a meta-analysis on 112 research papers about class size written over the past 25 years and found that reducing class size in the first four years of school can have an important and lasting effect on student achievement. Other researchers concur.
I have taught classes from one student to 164 and pretty much everywhere in between. I can attest that class size, even at the university level, has a profound impact on teaching. The simple reality is that with 164 students, I am not teaching. I am lecturing. That is pretty much all that anyone can do.
Teaching is an interactive exercise and with too many students - anything beyond 18 to 20 - it is very difficult to engage in interactivity. How many students in our school district are in classes of less than 20 students? How many have small class sizes throughout their entire educational experience?
The consequence of increased class sizes and changing composition has led to a decline in learning outcomes.
The OECD measures mathematics and science scores for 15 year old students every three years. In PISA 2012, Canada had slipped from fifth to 13th in the world. And while B.C. was still doing better than the Canadian average, we trail Quebec.
Maybe more to the point, when I first looked at PISA results in the late 1990s, B.C. was the effectively No. 3 in the world, just behind Finland and Japan. We don't measure up anymore.
The deterioration of our educational system might not be entirely due to increased class sizes, changes in class composition, the difficulties of the school day, teacher's wages or any of a number of factors.
Heck, it might be simple a result of too many cell phones and smart phones in the schools. But I would be very surprised to find out that the size and composition of class had nothing to do with deteriorating educational outcomes.
In the end, we would like our children to get the best education they can. Right now, that just doesn't seem to be a priority.
