Aftermath of a Teachers’ Strike: Who Will Step Up to Tackle the ‘Wicked Problem’?

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? 

 

Read Full Post »

School Closures and Community Renewal: Where Do ‘Old School’Review Processes Fall Short ?

The annual February and March ‘School Closure Madness’ is upon us generating considerable heat amid the winter deep freeze.  School closures are dominating the local educational world in many rural and inner city school communities beset by declining student enrollments.  Whether it’s rural southern and central Ontario, the suburban GTA Region, or the villages of Prince Edward Island, parents, families and community members are fully engaged in popular movements resisting further centralization and consolidation or standing up for threatened towns, villages and neighbourhoods.

A group representing concerned citizens from across Ontario, the Ontario Alliance Against School Closures (OAASC), is  now calling on the Ministry of Education to immediately halt school closures and scrap the current wave of school consolidation. .In its October 2016 open letter to Education Minister Mitzie Hunter, the OAASC claimed that a recently revised PARG (Pupil Accommodation Review Guideline) is flawed and must be rewritten and proposed that 1) ARC reviews be immediately suspended until a democratic guideline is in place; 2) the Government of Ontario immediately put a moratorium on school closures; and 3) the Government commission a study to determine the effects of extensive school closures on the health of affected children and their communities.

One of OAASC’s leaders, Susan MacKenzie, expressed alarm at the scope of the latest school consolidation wave threatening to shutter some 600 schools, 1 in every eight schools across Ontario, seeking to save up to $1-billion spent to maintain reportedly ‘half-full’ school buildings. Back in March 2016, with the rewriting of the PARG,  MacKenzie claimed “communities lost a significant voice at the table giving school boards the freedom to ram these closures through without resistance.” “Community schools are under siege, carried by this tidal wave of closures across the province,” she added.” The revised guideline has pitted the province and school boards against our communities.”

Five schools on Prince Edward Island are now under review for closure. Since the adoption of the revised P.E.I. School Change policy in September 2016, school boards are gone and school closures have continued under a new set of legalistic rules that formalize a process pitting the Public Schools Branch against the communities they attempt to serve.

All 56 schools on the Island have been reviewed and the consolidation plan proposes to rezone or close the schools affecting 2,500 students, 700 of whom are rural children and teens. A coalition to Save Island Schools has emerged and prominent Islanders like former Liberal Cabinet member Alan Buchanan are now calling for a complete review of the grueling, divisive process and proposing constructive alternatives. Two schools on Eastern PEI, Belfast Consolidated School and Georgetown Elementary School, have responded by calling for a pause in the closure process so they can embark on a school-centred community revitalization initiative.

Two of Ontario’s leading authorities, Bill Irwin of Huron University College and Mark Seasons at the Waterloo University School of Planning, are challenging the basic financial efficiency assumptions behind school closures and essentially overlooking the social and educational costs.  Since 2012, Irwin and Seasons have been aggregating research in support of small schools and urging school authorities to embrace best practices in community planning and public engagement.  Much like my own book, Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities (2011), their work demonstrates the serious and lasting impacts of closures, including the depletion of local financial, social and human capital.

Provincial education ministers have the authority to declare a Moratorium on the School Review process, an option exercised in April 2013 by then N.S. Education Minister Ramona Jennex. The pretext then was to secure sufficient time to assess the fairness of the former process and to consider the merits of a new alternative – community hub schools.  

A Schools at the Centre community development strategy  would be far superior to the “old school” model of school consolidation. . It’s time for Education Ministers and their Departments to take the lead in shifting the terms of engagement from “threatened closures” to community-based, school-centred, rural economic and social development.

The Georgetown Conferences on Rural Renewal (October 2013 and June 2016) generated high expectations.  Hundreds of delegates  embraced the idea that you can have viable small rural schools run on an economically efficient basis and tapping into the potential of local social innovation and digitally networked local schools. Stopping the consolidation express train in PEI and elsewhere in rural Canada would allow the time to develop a comprehensive Rural Economic Development Strategy instead of simply closing schools and abandoning more rural communities.

Transforming small schools into viable, lively community hubs and incubators for social enterprise is the way of the near future.  Some small, under-enrolled schools will continue to close, but let’s hope it’s the right ones. Time will tell whether the “Old School” model of school consolidation is superceded by a new approach focusing on school-centred community revitalization.

What’s driving the relentless movement to consolidate small schools and regionalize K-12 education services? Do claims of economic efficiency or economies of scale hold any water, when all costs are considered over a five year time horizon? What’s standing in the way of community-wide planning and the re-purposing of community hub schools?  Who will be the first community to succeed in creating a fully evolved, viable and sustainable community hub school? 

Read Full Post »

School Buses and Rural Transit: What Can Be Done to Address the Rural Transit Problem?

School bus fleets remain an underutilized public resource and thousands of yellow buses sit idle for not only much of the school week, but for long periods of the calendar year. Most school districts consider those buses to be ‘school board property’ and continue to see transporting students and providing community transit as completely separate functions.  That remains the case even though rural and small town communities with aging populations are very under-served when it comes to alternatives to gas-guzzling private automobiles, vans and trucks.

While school age populations are static or declining in most districts. communities are now responding to a growing aging population about to exert profound economic and social impacts, particularly in rural areas of Canada. Senior citizens use public transit more than any other age group, and the numbers of Canadians 65 or older will grow by 25 per cent from 2011 to 2031.

Developing improved rural transit services is emerging as a critical part of planning for the future.  Two of the greatest challenges in rural mobility, whether in Northern or Eastern Ontario, or most of the Prairie West and the Maritimes, are residents’ access to healthcare, shopping and seniors’ services, since many elderly citizens are unable to drive or cannot afford a car.

One new Ontario pilot project attracting a lot of attention is the Muskoka Extended Transit (MET) initiative. While major cities look to pour millions into subway and rapid rail systems, this rural district in Central Ontario is turning to school buses to help its citizens get around. Starting on January 12, 2016, three companies will be operating school buses weekly along seven routes connecting small villages to the larger communities of Gravenhurst, Bracebridge and Huntsville in Muskoka. The initiative is being funded in part by a grant from the provincial ministry of transportation.

Muskoka’s year-round residents, numbering about 60,000, are a population much like that of rural Canada as a whole. The district also has a high proportion of seniors, with more people over 75 than under 19 years of age. Average incomes in Muskoka have slid from 91 per cent to 83 per cent of the provincial average over the past 10 years.  Two of the seven Muskoka bus routes, for example, transport seniors to Huntsville on Tuesdays, so seniors’ centres and health providers can schedule services to match demand. Other Ontario districts, such as Deseronto and Huron County, utilizing transit buses or rideshare systems, report high public demand for employment, education, and seniors’ services.

The idea of deploying school buses is one that could potentially be applied more widely in rural Canada: taking advantage of school buses sitting idle between picking up kids in the morning and dropping them back home in the afternoon. It was proposed in our AIMS research report, Education on Wheels, back in January 2015, but there was little take-up on the policy option.

Financial barriers do exist for rural transit models, since it can be difficult to justify providing a self-standing service carrying a relatively small number of passengers over sometimes long distances. The 2003 Durham Region Transportation Plan study, for that reason, recommended using demand-responsive services, including school buses, public para transit, van pools and group-chartered taxis. Of those options, school buses are emerging as the most viable for mid-day and late-afternoon route services.

Not much has happened in Maritime Canada since our Education on Wheels report. Today, one or two of Nova Scotia’s municipalities are experimenting on a small scale with using school buses, as strictly local initiatives, acting without much visible provincial support.

The Town and County of Antigonish launched their own Antigonish Community Transit service on September 15, 2014, and secured support from the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities at the November 2014 UNSM Fall conference.  Community Wheels, a public/community transit service operating in and around Chester, Nova Scotia, has used a wheelchair accessible mini-bus to provide students with after-school service to access community and extra-curricular activities. The pioneering Kings Transit Service, connecting Wolfville and Brooklyn, NS, was suspended in September 2015 after the Town of Windsor and the municipality of West Hants pulled out, resulting in a 76 per cent reduction in funding for the route.

Many communities, aside from those in rural Ontario, consider maintaining separate public transit and student transportation systems as duplicative and wasteful. Community transit can also be a safe, affordable, and convenient supplement to traditional school buses, especially for middle and high-school students.

Instead of tethering yellow buses to limited school routes, it’s time to meet the pent-up demand for services in rural and small town Canada. Muskoka’s Extended Transit service (MET) shows that it can be done on a larger, more coordinated, region-wide scale. Sharing bus services between municipalities and school boards is an idea whose time has come. It should be part of any province-wide, integrated urban and rural development plan going forward.

Why are school buses sitting idle for much of the week and calendar year when there is a crying need to provide improved rural transit? Should school districts be looking at serving the aging population as student enrollments level off or decline in rural areas? What are the added advantages of incorporating school bus services into community transit ? What’s standing in the way of sharing services, partnering with local transit firms, and collaborating across silos in the public sector? 

Read Full Post »