Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

Canadians need to watch this and pass it on, especially if you live in Ontario.

The federal election isn't the only one on the horizon. There's a provincial one too, and that one will hit very close to home for teachers. The Conservatives are laying low, attempting to slide in as the only choice in the face of dissatisfaction with the current Liberal government. The probability of labour unrest, the likelihood that we will lose gains made over the last number of years, the likelihood of increased testing and decreased teaching - all of it is strong with a Conservative government.

This short essay describes the negative and unlooked-for (but easy to predict) effects of attempting to marry measurement of results with paying people for achieving them. Someone needs to forward it to the U.S. Department of Education, and to a variety of state departments of education. It's a clear, concise explanation of why merit pay is an absolutely abysmal idea, guaranteed to result in poorer outcomes for the students most in need of better ones. It's in the context of the British health care system.

Toronto: the vote on the left was split several ways, while the vote on the right was concentrated on one right-wing ideologue who got the ear of the suburbs by promising an end to corruption and a drastic reduction in social services that the suburbs use less anyway. Want to know how it is that a country where most people lean to the left of centre manages to keep electing these clowns? Here's how: there are so many good ideas and decent people on the left that people can't settle on just one, and with a first-past-the-post system, it means the right-wing guy with less than a majority often comes up from beind.

All of which boils down to one thing: it's time for voter reform in this country. A ranked ballot would be an improvement, for example. Rob Ford did not - quite - have a majority of the votes.

Hamilton: Oh, puh-LEASE. Bob Bratina? Really, Hamilton? The a.m. talk radio personality from the eighties with a rep for a short temper and a thin skin during his seven years on council? Don't blame me if City Hall continues to get nothing done, while we continue to miss out on money and services from a provincial government fed up with trying to get us to make decisions. The best thing about Bratina is that his platform boiled down to, "Can't we all just recognize how much we have to offer each other?" I appreciate the "let's all just get along" message - I'd just rather see it coming from someone else.

I didn't really follow any other race closely. How'd it go in Ottawa? I know that race was being closely watched.

A U.S. court upheld the expulsion of a counselling student who could not reconcile her religious belief that being gay was immoral with her ethical requirement to counsel anyone who needed her help. There's at least one similar case elsewhere in the country, and if it gets decided differently, the matter could very conceivably go to the Supreme Court.

Kudos to cereta for this one.

Stolen from a new friend whose LJ handle I haven't quite sorted out in my head yet.

Full-day kindergarten, learning hubs, and extended parental leave are all here, and I think the vision is fabulous.

Nevertheless I have some reservations.

First, I think combining Early Years centres with schools and kindergartens has the potential to be excellent for kids. I'll be waiting to see how my union responds to this, because so far, they've been against the idea of full-day kindergarten unless it's staffed by their own members. I can see why - ECE workers do not have the training in literacy and assessment that a certified teacher has in Ontario. The only reason the government would like to put ECE workers into that job is that they're an awful lot cheaper. In Ontario, ECE is a two-year community college course, versus teaching's average of five years university. As a result, ECE workers top out at about the salary where teachers start.

The second big problem is physical. Kindergarten and early years centres need classrooms with bathrooms and sinks and water fountains right in the room, and for the early years centres, probably an area that meets Department of Health regulations for preparing snacks. Even schools that have empty rooms don't have rooms that are set up like that. Expanding kindergarten from half-day to full-day requires us to double our space for kindergarten classes, and portables won't cut it. Even empty rooms in most schools will need significant modifications to meet criteria. The result is obvious to me: the schools that are going to get this first are the new schools, the ones that have been built with the knowledge that this was coming down the line and have the extra space with its amenities already accounted for. That means schools like ours - medium needs, small, old, and around the corner from a Catholic school that has all the amenities and has an Early Years centre already - are going to be at the bottom of the list for improvements. I'd be surprised if our school sees this before 2015, with the way the government is hemming and hawing about money.

The last thing I would like to see would be a change to parental leave to allow extended leaves to be taken half-time, rather than full-time as they are now (and as this report suggests.) I know a fair number of people who would be better off working half-time for a few years when their kids are small, rather than going back full-time the minute their leave runs out, but the option doesn't exist. What if that extra six monthe they're suggesting could be spread over a year of every-other-day or half-day work? I'm sure I wouldn't be the only parent thinking that would save my soul alive.

Though the report doesn't detail how, there's also a suggestion to make the early years centres and possibly early kindergarten a year-round thing. The biggest stumbling block to this is probably the teachers' contracts; the second-biggest stumbling block is, again, physical plant issues. Summer downtime is when maintenance is done on school buildings. I think they could probably make this work by using ECE workers for non-school days and certified teachers for the rest. But it will be both tricky and expensive.

Every conservative government I'm familiar with in North America occasionally brings up the issue of school choice - that is, the right of students and parents to choose the school that best fits their values and will give their kids the best education. The mantra usually includes several elements of a moral conservative and economic conservative standpoint: the problem of religious education; the idea that competition provides a motivation to improve; and that engagement increases with the level of choice.

( Cut for length. )