A hard lesson in public education is being learned in one of the most unlikely places, the Canadian East Coast province of Nova Scotia, better known by license plates emblazoned with the motto “Canada’s Ocean Playground.” The earth has shaken. That province has just survived its first protracted teacher dispute and the first teachers’ strike in the 122-year history of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union.
Here’s the backstory and a few questions raised by the bitter, divisive teacher dispute — where there are no clear winners and the provincial school system with 400 schools, 118,000 students, and 9,300 teachers shows few signs of recovery.
After 16 months of negotiations, three rejected teacher contracts, a 6-week work-to-rule, and a one day province-wide strike, Nova Scotia’s Stephen McNeil Liberal government finally brought the teachers’ dispute to an end. Under Bill 75, the province’s 9,300 unionized teachers were legislated back to work on February 22, almost a week ago.
With Nova Scotia Teachers Union supporters in the streets, the province’s reputed ‘Education Premier’ made a rare and startling admission: “decades” of education policy errors – including his own – had contributed to a full-blown education crisis. Limiting teacher salary increases to 3% over 4 years was a key factor, but somehow did not factor in his thinking.
Reversing the former NDP Government’s education cuts helped catapult the Liberals into office in October 2013, and it was not supposed to work out this way.
Since 2013, McNeil’s government had invested almost $59-million in P-12 education to restore the depleted “learning supports” model. Reducing Grade 4 to 6 class sizes, hiring 59 math mentors, reactivating 114 Reading Recovery teachers, and adding more math and literacy supports simply band-aided the system’s endemic, festering problems.
Now the Premier was conceding that his own rather scattered “classroom investments” had “missed the mark.” Yet, amidst the education chaos, it appeared to be happening again.
Frustrated and angry teachers, emboldened by a few thousand placard-carrying NSTU protesters, came before the N.S. Law Amendments Committee not only seeking to block the back-to-work legislation.
They were also demanding immediate cures for a whole raft of legitimate complaints: a broken inclusion model, ‘no fail’ social promotion, chronic absenteeism, ‘do-over’ student assessment, increasing violence in the classroom, bulging high school class sizes, time-consuming data collection, and managerial excesses eroding teacher autonomy.
Concerned Nova Scotia parents and teachers are both demanding immediate correctives without really addressing the structural sources of what American social planner Horst Rittel once termed a ‘wicked problem.’
A wicked problem is one that defies quick fixes and proves difficult or impossible to solve for a variety of reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the range of people and opinions involved, the prohibitive costs of resolution, or the complications presented by its interconnected nature.
Today’s school system is the product of a steady, repetitive stream of ‘progressive’ curriculum initiatives, overlaid since the mid-1990s with managerial reforms such as student achievement testing and school quality accreditation.
The P-12 public school system, like most in Canada, is now completely riddled with contradictions. Curriculum innovations are almost constantly at odds with new system demands for managerial efficiency, student testing, and public accountability.
Curriculum and pedagogy or favoured teaching practices tend to support student-centred learning and incredibly labour-intensive practices, such as differentiated learning, authentic assessment, and ‘coding’ special needs students with ‘adaptations’ and individual program plans.
School authorities, ensconced in the Education Department and regional boards, now impose many external mandates, almost always delivered “top-down” on principals as well as classroom teachers. Vociferous complaints about “data collection” are code for the groundswell of school-level resistance to the system-wide imposition of technological initiatives (Power School and TIENET) or time-consuming provincial tests.
Inclusion is a ‘wicked problem’ of the highest order. While the vast majority of parents and teachers claim that “the current model is not working,” they persist in believing that investing more in the regular classroom will make things better for special needs students, including those with severe learning challenges and complex needs.
Class composition not necessarily class size was the biggest concern of Canadian teachers in the Canadian Teachers Federation 2012 national survey, but it took a teacher contract upheaval to get Nova Scotia teachers finally talking out of school. Most are clamouring for more “learning supports” rather than holding out for a more permanent fix – a total re-engineering of Nova Scotia special education services.
After sixteen months of negotiations and three recommended agreements, the Bill 75 settlement will likely survive a court challenge. That was NSTU lawyer Ron Pink’s preliminary assessment. Unlike the Nova Scotia context, much of the British Columbia Teachers Federation decision turned on the B.C. government’s aversion to bargaining and arbitrary removal of class size and composition limits.
Establishing provincial commissions or committees to address inclusion and classroom conditions cuts little ice with frontline teachers, accustomed as they are to conflicted mandates and pointless paper exercises. Hashing out “working conditions” with or without an arbitrator is met with understandable skepticism.
Switching premiers every four years has not worked, so far. Education ministers come and go, but the so-called “iron cage” of education, protected by layers of bureaucracy and regulation remains essentially unchanged.
Looking for a better path forward? Be bold enough to: Go to the root of the “wicked problem” and do not settle, once again, for watering the tree and rearranging the branches. Get on with undoing the failing program initiatives and rebuilding the system from the schools-up for the sake of today’s students.
What are the hard lessons to be learned from the Nova Scotia teacher dispute? How well are students served when Work-to-Rule ends, only to be replaced by Work-to-Contact? Will other education authorities study the conflict in order to avert similar consequences? Who will be the first to stand up and tackle the “wicked problem” of internal contradiction and self-defeating policy initiatives?
Some problems have a NS flavor but the province seems hit with every crisis going in education making for something of a oerfect storm.
Integrated lass rooms are demanded by patents of special needs kids and this is no longer ‘mild LD’. The parents feel aggregated classes are an early educational death sentence for their children. They have a deep belief / hope that integrated placement will ‘fix’ their kids. Just try to convince them otherwise. Bring your Kevlar vest.
There is zero evidence to show differentiated learning works but lack of evidence cuts little ice these days. The principal will simply place the child who doesn’t know the alphabet in grade 4 and tell the teacher to “make it work”.
Even radical reductions in class size make little difference in these situations. Ask any teacher if they would rather have 35 kids that can be taught more or less the same lesson or 15 kids at 5 wildly different levels. They will all choose option one.
Very sadly individual rights are destroying the collective learning experience.
I am on record many years as a de-streamer as much as possible but when integrated students are not just ‘behind’ but have severe learning problems severe health issues there are limits to integration where literally nobody benefits.
We all know that NS suffers from falling commodity prices and the teachers are part of a broader public sector but ever NS teacher will also be aware that Ontario teachers just got 4% over 2 years pushing half of the teaching force over the Sunshine threshold of $100 000 per year.
If McNeil actually believes that ORDERING teachers to do voluntary activities he is painfully naive. Yes NSTU can not coordinate this and even small groups cannot coordinate this but he should expect a sharp drop off in volunteerism and it will be semi-permanent especially for older teachers. There is lived experience in this area. No speculation needed.
Imposed contracts have a way of damaging the entire institution and it takes many years to remotivate people.
Just imagine an entire workforce who dispises their employer. Who is going the extra mile for that guy. The formerly enthusiastic become cynics, do the minimum retire ASAP and enjoy their personal life. The attitude is McNeil does not appreciate me so why am I killing myself. Let somebody else coach the team.
I largely agree with Doug.Teachers have held the Ontario system together for years and teaching has become unrecognizable and largely impossible in many places. Either classroom teachers are valued or the system chugs along in chaos.Individual rights have overwhelmed the system, although there are many parents who would welcome special classes.I expect that middle class Ont. will clamour for ‘semi-private from public dollars’ choice programmes, in the name of accountability. As Paul has suggested, many groups in the education sector have contributed to this ‘wicked problem’.
Teachers deal with groups and must first and foremost be allowed to teach. Expecting teachers to differentiate, entertain, meet every need, follow the flavour of the day, (the list is endless) has been destructive and needs to end.
I don’ t claim to have any answers; I was able to retire after 10 years of this stuff, but am surprised at the lack of comments on such a crucial post, which lays out the complex problems our society has created for education over the last 20-30 years.
Elementary teachers used to spend a career in the classroom; I cannot envision younger teachers doing this.Their anger is palpable and justified.
I’m pretty close to both teacher union leaders and grass roots teachers in 2 provinces. For many decades teachers have felt profoundly underpaid with regards to their professional standing and education. As a result their leaders have pushed a salary benefits pension loaded negotiations agenda.
Teachers have become increasingly frustrated regarding classroom working conditions easily put as class size and composition but increasingly stuff like differentiated ed and the very complex curriculum world of strands rubrics curriculum expectations and so on.
Most believe it is simply impossible to meet all of these demands so they carry around a guilt and frustration about it.
This is beginning to boil over. I hope both union and management and the political masters see this in time.
Totally agree.The guilt many feel is very real,I understand, but of course nonsensical.Putting the complexities, demands of our society, endless fads and nonsense, demolition of autonomy and responsibility on a classroom teacher should result in anger, not guilt. Unfortunately, I dont see the other groups stepping up to the plate.Teachers will remain the scapegoat.
I did not respond to this because it seems to me Doug is on the mark so what could I add of significance?
Decades ago when I worked in inclusive classrooms and did grad work with an LD specialist we talked about the challenges.
One of the challenges in this area is that parents want their children to succeed, hence 94-142 law in the US in the 1970s which shaped the field.
Of course parents want their children to succeed and rightly so.I would suggest that parents are the least of the problem. There are many other groups jostling for power, who have more influence, power or money than parents.
The contractual obligations of teachers do not adequately reflect the job description of a teacher. How many professions do people follow the contractual requirements of their job and the public does not blink an eye? A teacher chooses to follow his or her contractual requirements and it is a major news story.
The centralization of education in many provinces, at the expense of local input and discussions, has also increased the politicization of education. Education policy is a key component of provincial elections. But, a major purpose of educational policy for political parties is to gain votes and win elections, not necessarily sound and useful policies. Look at Full Day Kindergarten in Ontario, where reduction of day care costs for parents is a positive vote gaining policy, but large classes of 4 and 5 year olds is not a sound educational policy.
Matt,
I wrote a few papers on Toronto board of education politics in the 1930s and 1940s since an archive was handy when I was on the board. All trustees were identified by party including Liberals Conservatives CCF and even the Communist party who had 2 trustees. Interestingly the trustees were also all identified by their religion.
They had heated debates over supplying milk to poor kids and child care to women working in war industries.
Politics has been with us for a long time.
I agree 1000 percent Matt!