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.
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their unions to be voluntary activities which can be readily withdrawn as a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.
