Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

Background: Ontario teachers have been without a contract since the end of August. This happens regularly; strikes in teaching generally only happen when contract negotiations have gone on for several months with no progress. In this case, the negotiations have two parts: the first with the provincial team for things that are common to all teachers, and then with our individual boards of education for things specific to our own local area. At the moment, I'm discussing provincial negotiations.

Some time ago, ETFO (Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario - my own branch of the Ontario Teachers' Federation, aka "the union") signed a media blackout agreement with the provincial negotiators. This was requested by the province, and today I found out why. The blackout has been lifted, btw, and the Board of Education lost no time making its elementary teachers look like greedy bastards, intent on sinking the province financially and failing our students at the same time. (It's worth your time to read the link if this matter interests you, because I'm about to point out all the ways it's wrong.)

Here's what I found out from the union steward at my school today. She only found this out herself a few days ago, when the media blackout was lifted.

That bit about the boards of education proposing things that would improve student learning? It's a flat-out lie. The union proposed taking no salary increase at all for one of the four years - that's three percent less than the province was offering us. In return, we wanted smaller class sizes in the junior and intermediate grades (that is, a cap similar to what exists in primary but higher - the proposal was 23 for junior classes and 25 for intermediate.) We would have been willing to accept no other changes whatsoever to our existing contract. Instead, the provincial team wanted to give us the 12% raise that others negotiated, with the following strips from our contract:

1) Extra prep time would be at the discretion of principals, meaning it could be taken away at will as teachers were asked to fill in for missing colleagues. That's code for, "We're freeing up classroom teachers to be supply teachers so we can cut back on the supply list."

2) The improvements that we won at the negotiating table three years ago around supervision time would be gone, allowing for an extra 100 minutes a week of supervision duty. That's more than double what we currently have, which we fought for long and hard. What good is an extra forty minutes of prep time if it can be taken away at will and is replaced with a hundred minutes of supervision duty?

3) They wanted to add a preamble to the Education Act, stating that teachers and schools are wholly responsible for student success. Translation: they want to be able to reward teachers with extra pay in schools that are doing well, and penalize teachers financially in schools that aren't. Can we say No Child Left Behind? The result: excellent teachers would be fleeing failing schools in droves, trying to maintain their salaries, so the schools that needed their expertise the most would then be without it, and the schools where students were already doing well would get better teachers. It's a route to adding a new element of classism into Ontario's school system. I've written about this before in my POAC about treating schools as businesses. It's disgustingly discriminatory. When 69% of student achievement can be explained by socio-economic factors, blaming teachers for lack of success - when success is determined, not by each student's individual improvement from previous years but by a statistically-invalid "standardised" test - is wrong and unfair.

There were also a few strips related to capping benefits at current levels for four years, which were not a sticking point in the face of everything else, but really did add to the camel's load when looking at the whole picture.

People of Ontario: when you see in the newspapers that teachers turned down the deal because they wanted more money or things that would end up costing more money, DON'T BELIEVE IT. The union's proposal wasn't going to cost one red cent more than what the Boards were proposing. The Minister of Education agreed with that. It's the provincial team negotiating on behalf of the boards of education who turned down an agreement that fit within the provincial framework, allowed for a smaller pay increase than was being offered, and respected previous negotiations. We don't want more money. We DO want to be respected for our work, we DO want to protect ourselves from being unfairly blamed for being unable to rewire students' brains, and we DO want to keep the benefits we've negotiated for in good faith in past rounds.

I want to see my union getting its message out. I want to see editorials that explore both sides fairly - because I believe the truth reflects better on teachers than on the boards. I want to see the union respond to the slanders that have already begun in editorial boards, asking why teachers aren't making salary concessions. We are. Now it's up to the boards of education to accept them, and bargain in good faith.

Edit: Here is ETFO's breakdown of what happened in the negotiations.