RETHINK HOW WE BARGAIN WITH TEACHERS

      5 Dec 2012 Ottawa Citizen

 Rethink how we bargain with teachers

      Lorne Rachlis is former director of education at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

 Why do we have schools? It’s not a hard question. Surely it is to educate our children so they can become confident, fully functioning members of society. In order to achieve that, we want teachers from prekindergarten through Grade 12 who are compassionate, caring, knowledgeable people who genuinely like children.

Part of that education is learning how to be team players and team leaders, learning how to learn, learning how to research and form opinions, and learning how to question. They learn these things through the curriculum but also by participating in sports and drama and bands and choirs and other clubs. Our children grow up so quickly and the world is so complicated. We want them to graduate from our public school system well prepared for what they do next.

The public elementary and secondary teacher unions don’t seem to agree with me on why we have schools. When extracurricular activities are deemed by teachers and their unions to be voluntary activities which can be readily withdrawn as a warning shot across the bow to their employers and parents, when marking report cards, attending department and school meetings, leading field trips, meeting with parents, and attending professional development sessions are deemed by teachers and their unions as outside of their job description so they can stop them at any time — it seems to me they believe schools exist to provide their members with the best salaries and working conditions they can negotiate, whether or not it disrupts their students’ education and parents’ lives.

Teaching is a stressful profession requiring, among other things, knowledge of curriculum content, evaluation skills, patience, time and people management skills, understanding of the learning process, and the ability to individualize instruction in a classroom with children of different backgrounds and abilities. In recompense, Ontario teachers have been very well treated under the Liberal government. Classroom teachers receive automatic pay increases for the first 10 years of their employment. Cost of living increases are added on top of that. Classroom teachers with 10 years under their belt and no other responsibilities earn upwards of $100,000. There are 194 teaching days in the year, so there are 171 days that teachers are not required to be at work, including March Break, Christmas Break, July, and August. According to the Education Act, teachers are required to be on duty 15 minutes before and after the instructional day, which itself is five hours long. A high school teacher is assigned three classes to teach each semester, and a school day has four classes scheduled. Actual teaching time then is just under four hours. So the current dispute cannot be about the money or the hours of teaching time, can it?

I cannot argue with the claim that teachers’ collective bargaining rights as currently constituted are being abridged. What I do argue with is the position that these rights are inalienable. If teaching our children is important (and teachers are well rewarded for doing so), then I maintain that teachers should not be allowed to withdraw services. Teachers in other jurisdictions, Manitoba for example, do not have the right to strike, but there is an arbitration process in place that has been working well for years.

The provincial government mandates the curriculum, limits class sizes, and sets student achievement targets. Since school boards lost their right to levy local taxes, it is the provincial government that sets the local tax rate, collects the money raised from the municipalities, and hands it back to the school boards through a complicated formula system. And although current legislation requires each school board to negotiate with its union locals, the provincial government has for several rounds of bargaining set the financial parameters for settlements and has rejected local settlements that do not comply with the rules it has set. This convoluted bargaining system has evolved over the past decade. It is a patchwork of solutions that invites school disruption and leaves school boards helpless in the crossfire between powerful provincial teacher unions and the provincial government.

Let’s remember why we have schools: to educate our children in a caring learning environment. It is time to rethink and redesign what is now a dysfunctional bargaining system. Printed and distributed by NewpaperDirect | www.newspaperdirect.com, US/Can: 1.877.980.4040, Intern: 800.6364.6364 | Copyright and protected by applicable law.

Letter to Editor published in Globe and Mail Saturday August 25, 2012

A pair of letters in the Aug. 23 edition caught my eye. The high-school teacher wrote that he has two post-graduate degrees and doesn't get paid a cent for either of them - I doubt if either of them has any direct impact on his students. He says he does not get paid for supervising sports teams and clubs - everyone knows how important these are to students; extracurricular leadership should be both a criterion for hiring and a part of every high-school teacher's work load. And he refers to unpaid summers - regular contract teachers who earn upwards of $90,000 should consider two months away from work as vacation, not unpaid time.

 

Trustee Howard Goodman is right, though. Proposed legislation regarding how teachers are evaluated and how supply teachers are assigned seriously reduces school boards' ability to manage their systems.

Lorne Rachlis
Former Director of Education, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board

CBC Ottawa Morning interview 7:20 am 10 July 2012

http://www.cbc.ca/ottawamorning/2012/07/10/shaking-up-the-school-board/

OCDSB Board of Trustees is Dysfunctional

 CURRY AND DENLEY ARE RIGHT – THE OTTAWA-CARLETON BOARD OF SCHOOL TRUSTEES IS DYSFUNCTIONAL

 Published in The Ottawa Citizen 9 July 2012

See also 5 July 2012 http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/need+school+boards/6902869/story.html

Cathy Curry (recently resigned OCDSB school trustee) and Randall Denley are right. The OCDSB board of trustees is dysfunctional. The trustees generate a tremendous workload for its professional staff through endless meetings, ineffectual consultation processes, and a surfeit of committees. While I don’t doubt that most school trustees are earnest and want to do good for the students whose education they are required to provide, the board as currently constituted is not capable of doing so.

What qualifications do you need to oversee a $700 million annual budget spread over 150 schools and 10,000 staff?  To run for office you need to be a Canadian citizen, not be in jail or a judge, and be at least 18 years of age. No experience necessary.

How are school trustees chosen? Trustees are elected every four years at the fall municipal election. About half of the electorate vote in municipal elections, and only half of these vote for school board trustee. So most trustees are either acclaimed or chosen by 10 to 15% of the electorate. How do they get elected? The biggest factor is name recognition which is why incumbents usually get re-elected. Position on the ballot is another factor. Since many people who vote for trustee do so without knowing the individuals or the issues, a candidate has an advantage by being at the top of the ballot, less advantage if you are second on the ballot, and a bit less if you are at the bottom of the ballot. Those in the middle are disadvantaged. Since ballots are arranged in alphabetical order, having a family name starting near the beginning of the alphabet helps you get elected.

Being a school trustee at the OCDSB pays you $15,000, which is not bad for attending two board meetings a month during the school year. But most trustees turn this into the equivalent of a full time job. In addition to the two decision-making meetings per month, there are ad hoc, advisory and standing committee meetings. There is a trustee meeting just about every weekday evening of the month. To be knowledgeable, you also have to read, understand and absorb the hundreds of pages of documents generated by the staff every month, be seen and involved by attending school council meetings in your constituency as well as other school events such as concerts and graduation ceremonies, and read and respond to hundreds of emails and telephone calls. Although trustees have no individual authority (they exercise authority only as a corporate body through bylaws passed in public formal sessions of the board), they can exercise considerable individual influence both with school staff and with senior officials.

Trustees elected to the conservative former Carleton Board of Education, a board that relied to a large extent on provincial grants, tended to act as a policy making body and left the day to day operation of the schools to the professional staff. Trustees at the affluent and independent-minded  former Ottawa Board of Education, who, with its rich tax did not rely on provincial grants, tended to get themselves more involved in the application of the policies they passed, in other words in administrative tasks. Since the amalgamation of the two boards into the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in 1998, with the provincial government removing trustees’ right to set the local school tax rate and with the government taking more and more direct control over funding, curriculum, and contract negotiations, there has been less and less rationale for having school trustees and less work for them to do. To compensate, trustees followed the former OBE example and have taken on more of what used to be administrative work.

Denley is right – the past 14 years have seen more single issue grass roots advocates elected to the board who have as their motivation wresting control from the bureaucrats. This is not democracy, it is anarchy. Hydro boards no longer exist. Hospitals, colleges and universities do not have boards elected at large. The responsibility of providing education to 75,000 students is too important to be left to people who have no experience in policy making, financial management, and who fundamentally do not understand or who do not want to understand the role of an elected board to provide general policy direction and oversight to the professional staff.

Given the monumental changes in public education in recent years, a review of school board governance in Ontario is overdue.

Lorne M. Rachlis, M.Sc., Ed. D.

Retired Director of Education, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and

FormerSchool Trustee Candidate