Moving Paradigms

Images by Julia Macrae:  @Julia_MacRae

For weeks now teachers have been receiving newsletters from the Ministry of Education that tell us in one way or another how important schools are for students. After the first few I started to get a visceral reaction whenever I saw one in my Inbox.  I couldn’t quite articulate why until the latest newsletter stated:  

Global research tells us that school closures disrupt the learning process and long-term outcomes of students. The adverse effects can go beyond learning loss and include implications like food insecurity or loss of access to health services that can be potentially harmful for students. As educators, you play a significant role that reaches beyond the classroom in children’s lives …

This one was the last straw.

To explain the impact of these newsletters, we need  a second definition for the term ‘gaslighting’.

The original meaning refers to emotional abuse where the victim is made to question their sense of reality.

What the Ministry of Education is doing is more like political gaslighting.

It’s as though teachers have not struggled for decades to get the attention of governments about the needs of students in schools.

As though we did not forgo salary increases in order to ensure there was class size and composition language in our contracts so that students would get the supports they needed.

As though we did not spend 14 years in a legal battle with the government to regain the class size and composition language that was stripped from us.

As though we have not decried the uselessness and emotional cost of the Foundational Skills Assessments that the BCNDP promised, while in Opposition, to end.

As though our hearts don’t break every day we are told there are no Education Assistants for our students who desperately need them.

As though we don’t keep food in our classrooms for our hungry students.

As though we have not been spending hundreds of dollars each  year on classroom supplies.

As though teachers have not held fundraising campaigns to provide what students need.

As though we don’t know that the shortage of counsellors leads to more suffering for our students.

As though we don’t know about the years of waiting for our students to see a School Psychologist.

As though we did not have to mount media campaign after media campaign for the past 20 years pointing out the needs of students in schools.

As if we have not been begging for years for our students to be funded at least to the Canadian average.

And now it’s someone’s job at the Ministry of Education to create newsletters telling us how important schools are for students?

We’ve been saying this for decades!

The Ministry of Education needs to stop politically gaslighting teachers and instead prioritize funding in schools.

If  public schools in B.C. are important for:

• the economy
• the mental health of children
• the social-emotional needs of children
• the education of children

why are they funded like this: 

Instead of publishing newsletters about the importance of schools, fund public education as though students’ well-being truly matters.

And stop gaslighting us.

Dear John,

In the spirit of the season of peace and goodwill, let’s talk about being friends again, shall we?

But first you’ve got to reconfigure BCPSEA.

Their actions as your bargaining agent with teachers do not reflect progressive values about public education. 

I would have expected a BC Liberal government to demand concessions at the start of bargaining, not you.

I would have expected a BC Liberal government to continue Foundation Skills Assessments, certainly not you, after the many years you agreed with teachers about the FSA’s inefficacy. 

It’s the style of the Fraser Institute to promote ideas like the prevalence model of funding, turning students’ learning needs into probability statistics.

The last thing I expected was all this from a BCNDP ministry of education. 

And then there’s the matter of our Supreme Court of Canada win.

For 14 years you stood by our side as an ally in our legal fight against the stripping of our Constitutional rights. 

Fourteen years!

And then, when teachers won, instead of acknowledging that struggle, you claimed the court-ordered hiring of 4,000 new teachers as your government’s idea.

That hurt. 

A lot.

It hurt so much that for the longest time we did not want to even look at our win from your point of view: your new government was saddled with the bill for the actions of all BC Liberal governments since 2002. You had to spend a billion dollars to clean up the mess that you did not make.

I now acknowledge that, and the spending on seismic upgrades, the opening of new schools.  Smaller class sizes and more schools are good BCNDP achievements for public education in our province.

But, can we talk about being the lowest paid teachers west of Quebec?

Can we talk about recruitment and retention with a bargaining agent that shares our values of public education being a sacred trust, of public education being the heartbeat of every community, of public education being about all of our futures?

These are values we believed you shared with us, the teachers in public schools in BC. They do not seem to be the values shared by the current configuration of BCPSEA.

So, in this time of season turning, of endings and of new beginnings, let’s be friends again … after you’ve realigned BCPSEA with BCNDP values.

With best wishes for the season,

Lizanne

In the classrooms at my school, students who get a $60,000 car for their 16th birthday sit next to students who walk an hour each day to and from school because bus-fare is an unaffordable expense. Students who go home to their own bedrooms equipped with the latest technologies, collaborate on projects with students who don’t have a bed to call their own. And students who struggle to read a sentence in the third language they’ve had to learn grasp desperately for meaning when their fluent peers speak. 

The conceit of public schools is that our classrooms will somehow be the levelling space of these stark socio-economic differences through the provision of an equitable education.

Teachers who spend an average of $1600 on classroom supplies each year do so in the hope that the right resources will magically bridge the chasm between what is funded and what is needed. 

Stories of families who have had to sell their homes in order to pay for learning supports for their children are heart-wrenching. Now just imagine what happens to those children whose families have no such assets, whose parents are simultaneously battling the legacies of colonialism and poverty.

Because public schools are often the only places where marginalized people can access support, insisting on classroom composition language in teachers’ collective agreement should not be seen as a luxury the government cannot afford.  Especially not a government boasting about billions of dollars in surplus. 

It’s astounding that a government that launched a Poverty Reduction strategy to great fanfare continues to ignore calls for more funding for public schools, the very places where the 20% of children who live in poverty in BC get their only meal most days. 

This BCNDP government has also made announcements to boost spending on mental health services even while the concessions it’s demanding from teachers would mean a decrease in the number of counsellors available for students in many schools. 

It makes no sense. 

In their latest survey of donors to their party, the BCNDP promise that they want to “build a better province”. 

How is funding students at $1866 below the Canadian national average going to do that? 

John Horgan’s plan to ‘build a better B.C’ clearly does not have public school students in mind.   

As a party in power, there must be at least 50 ways you can make billions of dollars disappear from where they’re supposed to be: delivering services to people. You could go the brutish route of Doug Ford in Ontario and slash billions from public health and education services.

Or could do it the Christy Clark way, smilingly, while she introduced legislation that would effectively remove four billion dollars from education funding over 15 years.  

This latter strategy is a rather legally cumbersome way to disappear education funding though. It took the BC Liberals a lot of maneuvering through the legislature and the courts over a long period. And in the end, the Supreme Court called foul.   

Besides, mimicking the BC Liberals shenanigans could not be your first choice because you campaigned on a platform to fully support public education, not to undermine a collective agreement with teachers. Definitely would not look good.

You’re in a tricky situation because you spent 15 years in Opposition, criticizing the short shrift that teachers and students in public schools were getting from the previous government. Over and over again you promised that you would do better, provide more funding, and fully support students with special needs.

But the accountants have declared that keeping your promises would cost about a billion dollars more than you have currently allocated for students’ education. That’s a lot of money. You have other priorities.

Back in 2001, when you last formed government, education funding comprised 20% of your budget.  But things have changed.

You know that in 2019 there are fewer households in BC with children and that education issues are not a top priority for most voters who are more concerned with housing and the economy.

But you can’t  just blatantly state that there’s not enough money for education.

Your base would be enraged. They voted you in on your public service platform and they want to see results.

To be fair, you have increased funding by 12.4% for Level 1 Special Needs. That’s good news for 570 students. Level 2 funding (affecting 22,352 students) was increased by 4.1% and Level 3 Special Needs funding was increased by 4.6% for 8,390 students.

But for most students in the public education system, there was a funding increase of 0.6% or $45, keeping BC students shortchanged by $1,866 below the national average.

You are well aware that there are thousands more students who need learning support. They’re the ones who fell through the cracks over the 15 years when a lack of school psychologists meant that waits for a diagnosis averaged 3 years. A lifetime in a child’s development.

You know that your meagre funding increases do not even begin to address the impact of inflation on costs.  

But $5.7 billion is such a big number. It sure looks like it should be enough.

You hope that parents don’t notice that the money allocated for education is actually only  11% of your total 2019/20 budget. They might begin asking questions about why you don’t invest more in students.

This would be an awkward question to answer.  You know for your political image that you need to make it look as though you are increasing funding, even though you have no intention of doing so.

So, you announce that a group of experts will review the funding model. Thanks to the Supreme Court win, most parents are well aware that the model was drastically changed in 2002 and so they will have some familiarity with what was lost.

And, through the work of  parent advocacy groups, many parents will also know that what was restored still left too many gaps for too many students.

You do not include a single teacher on the funding review panel.

It would be inconvenient for teachers to be represented there where they could remind everyone of how, throughout your tenure as the Official Opposition, you consistently agreed with teachers when they called for significant increases in funding .  

You could do without teachers raising a ruckus when they discover your plan to implement a funding model that will essentially turn students into statistics.

You know that many parents may not have the time to study the details of the new funding model. You know that some may feel intimidated by convoluted statistics and you know that you will need a slick way to get the public to think that prevalence funding is the way to go.

You hope against hope that parents don’t read about the suffering of students with special needs wherever prevalence funding has been implemented.

You know that terms like “accountability” and “equity” are popular with the public.

You don’t want any of your supporters to remember that “accountability” is exactly the reason Christy Clark gave for stripping teachers of their contract, leading to the loss of 2500 teachers within the system.

So long before you begin bargaining with teachers on a new collective agreement you start a stealth marketing campaign, ensuring that there is a widespread belief amongst the public that the current collective agreement with teachers is the reason that students are falling through the cracks and not getting the services and supports they need.

The message is spread that the newly-restored class size and composition language in the collective agreement is too restrictive, that it hamstrings school districts in their provision of services to students.

The Funding Model Review Report, in support of this message,  has more than one misrepresentation of the collective agreement.

You do not publicly correct that.

You would like parents to believe that if only teachers were more innovative, and more flexible, all students could have their learning needs met.  You want parents to believe that it’s not the lack of funding for supports that’s the problem: it’s teachers’ lack of flexibility, creativity and empathy.

You would prefer that the public not know that teachers gave up salary increases from 1988 until 1994 in exchange for the establishment of minimal supports for students.

You would prefer the public not to know that the concepts of inclusion and integration are not new to teachers. That their commitment to inclusion goes far beyond any government policy.

You’d rather the public believe in the prevalence model even though it abdicates your government’s responsibility for delivering the public service of education to all students in public schools, regardless of learning difficulties.

You don’t want the public to ask questions about who collects the data that the prevalence model demands.  You don’t want the public to ask about what parameters will be used to interpret the data.

You don’t want the public to know that “trends” in public education are hardly ever captured by statistics.  If they were, thousands of parents would not be clamouring for more schools to be opened in areas where “statistical trends” decades ago predicted that no schools would be needed.

You don’t want the public to know that the map is not the territory, that no amount of statistics gathering can replace what teachers know is happening in their classrooms to students whose names they know.

But teachers can let the public know.

There are at least 50 ways to show parents what’s actually happening with education funding.

Just as in a shell game, those who watch carefully know under which cup the object is.

We’ll show parents where the billions disappeared.

Watch.

In a recent article, candidate for Burnaby school board Laura-Lynn Tyler Thomson is quoted as saying  that she was scared and cried every day when she attended a school in the Arctic where, as “the only white, blonde girl”, she “stood out like a sore thumb”.

When most of the dolls on the toy store shelf look like you, when entire rows of magazine covers have faces that look like you, when people who look like you have occupied multiple positions of power and influence for centuries, it takes a convoluted cognitive sequence to see yourself as a victim of the descendants of people who were starved to death and treaty-tricked out of the land you live on.  

It’s not really convoluted though. It’s just regular racism but with a particularly Canadian nicety:  implied, not stated.

Given what Tyler Thomson has said about her experiences in the Arctic, what can the 3% of Burnaby’s student population who identify as Aboriginal expect from her if she was elected trustee? Probably not any acknowledgement of the role of education in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action.

Students who identify as trans or queer are supposed to expect that she will “love them to pieces” even while she denies their right to be educated about what all humans have in common: a sexual orientation, a gender identity.

As a teacher I’m curious about what Tyler Thomson means by us not being trained “to help students dealing with gender identity”. 

Does she mean that teachers should ignore the 2016 directive from the B.C. Ministry of Education that  “all B.C. school districts and independent schools are required to include specific references to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in their anti-bullying policies”?

Does she mean that teachers are not trained to create safe learning environments for all students?

Does she mean that teachers should ignore the fact that “lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are seven times more likely than heterosexual youth to attempt suicide” ?

How exactly does one teach “manners, reading, writing and arithmetic” to students who are feeling unsafe?

How does one reduce bullying without educating students about human rights?

There is nothing ideological about teaching students that all humans have a sexual orientation and a gender identity just as there is nothing ideological about teaching students that all humans have a brain and a heart.

Some brains are different, some hearts are different. Sometimes one’s biological identity matches with one’s gender identity. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Why would anyone not want youth to know this?

Why would anyone, let alone a school trustee, want to deny students access to information that would reduce discrimination and increase safety, respect and acceptance in schools?

What purpose is served by keeping students ignorant of what it means to be a human with a sexual orientation and a gender identity?

Voters in the October municipal election should ponder these questions when they make their choices for school board trustees.

Schools should be safe places for all students.

All students.

No child should feel scared at school.

Not students who are the descendants of the First Peoples to occupy this land.

Not students who are blonde or brown or bisexual.

If you don’t believe that, you should not be running to be a school trustee.

Dear Minister Fleming,

I wish I could also experience the optimism you expressed in your recently published op-ed but I’m burdened by the memory of my dashed hopes over the past school year and also quite distracted by the absence of any acknowledgement of the work of teachers to ensure that our province continues to be a “world leader in education”.

I know that you are quite familiar with the work that teachers do because you had been the education critic since 2013 when you were appointed education minister in July 2017. I was thrilled when that happened because finally there was someone who did not have to be convinced about what teachers and students needed. You had regularly raised our concerns at the Legislature and had made compelling arguments for the needs in our public education system. Your appointment felt like we teachers were finally within sight of the finish line after running an exhausting marathon.

When you said there were urgent priorities we expected you to aggressively move to recruit teachers as soon as you occupied your new office in Victoria.  But when the new school year began, recruitment of teachers seemed to have slipped off the urgent list because hundreds of students started the year without teachers.  Although 3,700 teachers were eventually hired, there were too many students who had had to wait over 100 days before they had a teacher assigned to them.

On your watch, there were months of lost learning opportunities for students who had been eager to begin learning on the first day of the school year.

That this happened took us by surprise but we hoped that things would get better.

When 2018 was already a few months old and we were still waiting to benefit from our Supreme Court win through the full implementation of the Memorandum of Agreement, we suppressed our frustration. It was like we had won the race but could not claim a trophy because there weren’t enough teachers teaching on-call to relieve those who had been working through their prep time for months. 

While we were desperately trying to cover the gaps created by a shortage of teachers, we were also being expected to implement the new curriculum. 

Because you’ve listened to us for so many years, you must not have been surprised by one of the key findings of the Curriculum Change Survey: implementation of the new curriculum has been extraordinarily demanding on teachers. As one teacher who participated in the survey said:

I just want to note that I spent hundreds of hours developing content and instructional materials this year.  I work part time and spend most of my days off working on school materials.

Surely you see that the continued teacher shortage coupled with a lack of supports for the new curriculum leaves teachers in an untenable situation?

It’s bad enough that we are not provided enough time to learn this massively changed curriculum, but we are also expected to teach the new curriculum with outdated textbooks and without the necessary equipment.  

We don’t quite know what to say to students who notice their parents’ name in their social studies or science textbooks.  

We are told by principals that we should consult “the Internet” for learning resources.

Particularly distressing is that after so many years of listening to us talk at our meetings about how underfunding was impacting our students, you did not included a single teacher on the Funding Model Review panel. 

Not a single teacher.

I had a kind of déjà vu experience when I listened to you recently on the CBC Early Edition interview of 20 August 2018.  During that interview, I was dismayed that you dismissed concerns about outdated resources by saying that there may be “some anecdotes” of old textbooks but that most schools have what they need.

I wonder where your information comes from when the Curriculum Change Survey shows that teachers rate their access to necessary instructional materials at a 4 on a scale of 0 – 10.  

More and more these days you sound just like our previous four education ministers who often shared their enthusiasm for new technologies without demonstrating any clear understanding of the challenges of the infrastructure of our classrooms or the composition of our student populations.  Did you forget all the concerns we expressed about this when you were listening so intently at our meetings?  

Last September I was looking forward to you turning your criticisms of the previous government into actions that would dramatically change what our students had had to endure for 16 years.  

But then, on your watch, students with special needs have had even less support than they did before you were Minister of Education. It’s unlikely that that awful situation is going to be much different this year given that there are currently over 100 unfilled positions in the same school district, days before the start of a new school year. 

Perhaps you can understand why I can’t share your optimism?

It’s because I remember the past year quite differently. 

While I try to overcome my disappointment in your Ministry, I will continue to work hard to ensure that my students get the best education possible.

It’s what teachers do.

Still hoping,

Teaching BC