The rise and fall (?) of the BCTF

Just over one year ago, BC teachers returned to class from what was the longest teacher strike in Canadian history. Teachers, upset with over a decade of deteriorating funding and particularly with large and complex classrooms, were unwilling to accept a contract offer which simply maintained the status quo. In one of the highest strike mandates in the BCTF’s history, they chose to strike.

This was not something new for BC teachers. In fact, this was the third strike in a decade. Teachers walked off the job for two weeks in 2005, and for three days in 2012. Teachers in BC have also refused to administer standardized tests, been on various types of work to rule for multi-month periods, and conducted a wide variety of local actions to push for various improvements. It is not for nothing that the union has a reputation for militancy.

On one level, the longest teachers’ strike in Canadian history is a testament to the determination of teachers to win a better deal both for students and themselves as workers. But to truly learn the lessons of a decade of fighting neoliberal austerity, we need to take a realistic account of the many signs of weakness throughout the most recent strike. I believe it is fair to characterize the outcome as a loss – after five weeks, the government essentially starved teachers out, and the resulting contract was little different from what was on offer prior to the strike. The key issue of class size was not resolved. The signing bonus was a small fraction of lost wages. The wage gain was half a percent. Disappointingly, the contract term of six years gives government a free hand to pursue more corporate education reform with little room for teacher resistance. Many teachers understandably wonder if the strike actually improved our bargaining position and I suspect future strong strike mandates will be harder to attain. I also believe it is fair to say that this most recent strike shows significant weaknesses not only in the BCTF strategy, but also in the internal democratic decision making processes that influenced how the strike progressed.

While the BCTF is often lauded as one of the most militant unions in the province, and is even referenced by newly reformed teachers unions in the US such as the Chicago Teachers Union as a source of inspiration, the most recent strike calls into question whether that militancy is in fact on the wane. It is a pressing issue both to have a realistic assessment of the strike, and also to understand the processes within the union that have changed. Specifically, like the CTU, the BCTF is a union in which a left wing, ‘grass roots’ caucus sought and was able to win power of the union. But the trajectory of the union in the fifteen years since should act as a warning to the dangers of seeing electoral success within the union as the most important factor in influencing the union as a whole.

THE 2014 STRIKE

The 2014 strike began as work to rule campaign. Teachers refused to administer province wide tests, attend staff meetings, do lunchtime supervision. When teachers increased pressure with rotating full strike days, the government responded with what they called a partial lockout. Teachers’ pay was reduced by 10% and teachers were told to leave school property during non-instructional time. Frustrated with the lock-out, teachers chose to fully withdraw services in late June. The initial two weeks created limited pressure as the government was able to win a case at the labour relations board declaring secondary school marks an essential service and the BCTF instructed teachers to comply.

From the start of the walkout, the leadership of the BCTF viewed the strike as short term. At general meetings, the message was always that we would have a deal by the end of June. Early on, they had to acknowledge that the strike fund could only provide three days of strike pay. The union, in effect, constructed artificial deadlines that set specific expectations in teachers minds. Rather than prepare for the worst, the union promised the best. In tandem, the union, very early, both moderated its package, and called for mediation. To teachers, this was sold as a way to appear moderate and win parental support. But the leadership drastically underestimated the staying power and strategy of government.

No deal came in June and requests for mediation were rebuffed. In late august, government announced they would provide $40 a day childcare stipends for parents if the strike continued into the fall. While ridiculed by the BCTF leadership (and others) as a cynical ploy, there is no doubt that the tactic was effective in buying the government time to let teachers lose significant amounts of pay. By the middle of September, after three months without pay, many teachers were feeling very financially insecure.

Meanwhile, at a delegated provincial meeting, the union decided to remain on strike, but with no specific plan of action. The BCTF executive committee met during the first week of September, while the strike resumed, and decided to hold a membership vote on a call for binding mediation. Many teachers viewed this as a rather bizarre decision. It was fairly clearly simply a media tactic rather than a real engagement of members in decision making about the course of the strike. No further provincial meetings were called, and no mechanisms for input into the strike strategy were available. Unsurprisingly, the government rejected the proposal.

In the third week of September, five weeks into the strike, teachers were advised a deal was in process. There would be closed door round the clock meetings, but no details or information was shared. It was only after the deal was signed, and the vote completed, that Canada’s national main stream newspaper, the Globe and Mail, ran the exclusive story of how Canadian Labour Congress leader Hassan Yusuf orchestrated a private meeting between Christy Clark and BCTF president Jim Iker. The meeting produced the outlines of a very tepid deal – a way out for the BCTF leadership. Wages remained essentially the same as the government offer in June. Class size – the most important issue on the table – was addressed through a class size fund that effectively meant a repetition of the shell game that previous funds were known to be – money given in one form, but taken in another through reductions in core funding. On the contentious issue of how to deal with a court victory should the class size issue be subsequently won by teachers through an ongoing court battle, the government agreed only to re-open the issue prior to the term end of the agreement. Teachers winced as premier Christie Clark appeared on television gloating of the six year deal within the terms of the public sector mandate.

BC teachers are no strangers to job action. In 2005, teachers were on strike for two weeks, and in 2012, for three days. Yet despite this being our longest strike, it wasn’t our most militant or most confident. In 2005, teachers struck after government imposed a rollover contract through legislation. The 2005 strike was very high stakes and very remarkable, because one day into the strike the government went to court and received a contempt order. Teachers were in violation of the law. Yet teachers remained on the picket lines for two full weeks. Although the strike ended with mediation, teachers never asked for mediation. Instead, government used it as a way out of what because an increasingly impossible situation as the spectre and reality of solidarity strikes from other public sector unions loomed. The  union was consistent in saying we would not hand over control of bargaining to a third party, and although we eventually did, we entered the mediation process in a far superior position. All of these factors led to what was arguably a moderate win in very difficult circumstances – $20 million for the teachers pension fund, significant wage increases for teachers on call, and the reintroduction of very limited class size limits via legislation, in the form of Bill 33.  Moreover, the pressure from the strike I believe also impacted the subsequent negotiations, in 2006, which resulted in wage increases that outpaced much of the rest of the public sector.

INTERNAL UNION DEMOCRACY

The internal union processes in 2005 looked considerably different than those of 2014. The discussion of the need to defy back to work legislation began at provincial delegate meetings as early as 2004. Motions came from locals and individuals for actions to prepare the membership for a fight. Even the issue of a potential sell out from leadership was addressed by the delegates prior to the strike. By 2004, two other unions in the health care sector had had their strikes called off by union leaders after government intervention. Concerned that teachers should make this decision themselves, delegates successfully passed a motion that would require a full membership vote to end job action, not just to ratify a  contract.

Sadly, in 2014, this new constitutional rule was misused to force an early vote on a deal when members had only hours to actually look at it. Frustration at the short time frame for ratification was widespread. This was combined with straight out misinformation. For example, the BCTF, in a message to all teachers and in the media, claimed that the new teacher fund would mean 850 new teaching positions. This was an unrealistic and misleading estimate. The BCTFs own research on the previous classroom ‘fund’ showed that it was a shell game. The new money simply replaced other money taken away through taxes on school boards such as medical plan premium increases, carbon taxes, and zero inflation budgets. In a subsequent research report, published six months after the end of the strike, the BCTF reported a net loss of 9 teaching positions despite the new education fund. Perhaps the epitome of the change in the BCTF was the way information was communicated to membership. Most membership meetings consisted of a video live-stream projected in a hockey arena to thousands of teachers directly from from BCTF President Jim Iker. This was hardly a mechanism to allow bottom up decision making, engagement or activism.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RANK AND FILE ACTIVISM IN THE BCTF

Why was there such a change in tactics and strategy, and diminished democratic participation of  the BCTF membership? The BCTF and its local unions have a long history of militancy. The very first teachers in the British empire to strike, were in Victoria, BC, in 1917. A province wide strike took place in 1971 to push for pension improvements. In 1987 teachers won full legal bargaining rights and in the late eighties and early nineties waged three fantastic rounds of bargaining with local school boards that won hundreds of provisions including class size limits. Teachers played a central role in the provincial solidarity movement of 1983. During this period of radicalism, two internal caucuses developed. Teachers viewpoint took a variety of progressive positions such as advocating for full unionization.  Its composition was purposefully grassroots members and the caucus name was a reference to the viewpoint of teachers in opposition to that of administrators, who were in the union at the time and often held many of the union’s official positions. Viewpoint was counterposed to ‘TUF’ – teachers for a united federation, who arguably represented the status quo, or a more conservative and bread and butter unionism. Members of TUF tended to dominate the BCTF executive committee.

During the eighties and nineties, Teachers Viewpoint functioned as an effective, grassroots activist rank and file organization and organized on the convention floor for many democratic reforms in how the union functioned, as well as for a wide variety of social justice issues.

But a significant change took place in the mid-nineties that disrupted teacher bargaining. In the mid 1990’s, in response to the perceived successes of public sector unions in the late eighties,  an NDP government imposed a scheme of provincial bargaining with the Public Education Labour Relations Act (PELRA). All BCTF locals, who up until this time had negotiated locally with school boards, were forced into a single provincial bargaining unit controlled by the provincial federation. While no doubt there were other factors in play in the erosion of grassroots organizing (this was, after all, the period of growing neoliberal attacks on all types of bargaining), this proved to be a death blow to the rank and file-ism that had developed within union locals who bargained directly with school boards. While rank-and-file organizing doesn’t depend on bargaining structures, it is, nevertheless, significantly more difficult to build rank-and-file networks amongst a membership of 40,000 across a massive geographic area than in a local of a thousand within a single city. A bargaining team of five chosen province wide is significantly more remote from the membership than one chosen from the local high school that teachers see in the staff room or at least in the local union hall.

The changes were immediately evident in the first round of provincial bargaining in 1998. This round was significant for two reasons. Firstly, it created a rift between the BCTF and other provincial public sector unions, because the BCTF accepted a government imposed zero wage mandate thereby setting the stage for other public sector unions to do the same. In exchange, teachers did negotiate province wide provincial class size limits. The second important feature of this bargaining round was the way it was conducted in closed door meetings directly between BCTF president Kit Krieger and government. This lack of democratic process and transparency lead to the defeat of the ‘TUF’ caucus and Kit Krieger lost the presidency.

At about the same time, Teachers Viewpoint shifted to a focus on electoralism within the union with the aim of winning control of the BCTF executive. Viewpoint members formed a new electoral caucus, Coalition, which ran a full slate for the executive positions.

Coalition managed to win the BCTF Executive for over a decade, from the late nineties, right up until the 2013 elections. Teachers Viewpoint, although formally in existence, now does little other than act as electoral support for Coalition. Through the 2000s, the position of the Coalition caucus, while remaining in favour of strike action, has consistently moved more and more towards alternative strategies in the face of an openly neoliberal government – namely the courts and support for the NDP in the hopes of changing government.

During this period, government used every tool available to smash the power of the BCTF. In 2001, it enacted essential service legislation which severely limits teachers right to strike. In 2002, it unilaterally removed the provincial class size limits from teacher collective agreements. In three rounds of bargaining (2001, 2004 and 2011) it used back to work legislation to end job action. Once, during this period, teachers stood their ground and stayed out on strike despite the imposition of fines for what was deemed “illegal” strike activity. These two weeks of militancy, in 2005, were in no small measure the result of many members of the Viewpoint caucus engaging in rank-and-file organizing to push for action regardless of the legal threats. Two decades of organizing and a militant orientation provided a coordinated group who argued successfully at provincial meetings for the necessity of action. The result was a strike that ended when government came begging to the union for mediation and the first contract with an openly hostile government that included some improvements.

Yet the 2005 strike did not fully address the single most fundamental issue – the reinstatement of class size limits. Instead of staying on the picket line in 2005 for as long as it took to win back class size, the BCTF pursued an extended court battle over the legality of the contract stripping. Initiated in 2002, the court battle has yet to be determinative now in 2015. Having won twice at the Supreme Court of BC, a recent loss at the BC Court of Appeals has meant a further request for appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada is in process. During this time, an entire generation of students have been through Kindergarten to graduation without class size limits in place.

Concurrently, the union has also focused heavily on a provincial electoral strategy. Although officially non-partisan, there are deep ties between the layer of leadership and staff in the BCTF and the NDP. Both David Chudnovsky, who beat Kit Krieger in the late nineties, and Jinny Sims, president during the 2005 strike, went on to represent the NDP in government as a provincial MLA and federal MP respectively. Couched as an issue oriented approach – make public education a vote determining issue – the millions of dollars appropriated from the strike fund over four provincial election campaigns did little to even convince the NDP to take pro-teacher positions in their platform. The provincial NDP has still never committed to reinstating the class size limits to the collective agreement nor even to ending the practice of publicly funding private schools.

In the lead up to the 2005 strike, there was a healthy debate within the union about what strategy was needed to regain class size language. The initial response in 2002, a one day strike immediately following the enactment of Bill 28 which stripped the language from the collective agreement, was often ridiculed, as failing the test to be the “first day” of action as opposed to the “one day” of action which it turned out to be. It was this sentiment, along with the grassroots organizing developed through the previous two decades, that enabled delegates to win the argument and votes in 2005 to stay out despite the union finding itself in contempt of court.

LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE

Looking back, 2005 was a high point. It was the organized work of militants to win arguments at the floor of general meetings. It was a layer of local activists within schools and local meetings who won a vast majority of teachers to the position that we should defy back to work legislation and a court order. Yet since that round of bargaining, despite a commitment to striking and remarkably high strike votes, the leadership has advocated caution. And the network of militant activists has all but disappeared.

With each successive strike, the union has exhibited more caution and less militancy. With no organized rank and file movement from below, militants did not win a plan of strike action in 2012 in response to Bill 22 when the government imposed a collective agreement. Instead, teachers went back to school and engaged in a frustrating and divisive work to rule campaign.  And in the most recent strike, despite staying out for a significant period of time, teachers were instructed by the union to concede on practically every opportunity to create pressure. This included agreeing to abide by a Labour Relations Board order to submit final grades, refusing to picket third party sites such as school construction, failing to picket out CUPE members during the lunchtime lock-out, and failing to picket or disrupt provision of services to international students. Rather than look for ways to increase pressure on government, the union appeared desperate to end the strike as quickly as it could by seeking mediation. Moreover the union’s new style of “member engagement” was typified by the mass meetings in hockey arenas where several thousand teachers would sit silently as they watched president Jim Iker deliver a message via live-stream broadcast. As one teacher aptly put it, “I might as well be at home watching on my own TV”.

What are the lessons to be learned? For teachers in BC, it is that we will need a new grass roots rank and file movement both in the teachers unions and across public sector and private sector unions if we are to build the kind of actions and solidarity necessary to push back on neoliberalism.  And for anyone in the labour movement, it is yet one more prescient example of why labour activists need to orient toward building rank and file momentum. This means working on campaigns that engage working members to get active to win improvements rather than focusing on what the leadership of our unions are or are not doing.

Solidarity key to protecting public education

Hundreds of parents, teachers and students will be protesting education cuts in BC on Sunday. Families Against Cuts to Education is hosting the protests in five BC communities after yet another round of budget cuts for school boards and increased costs surreptitiously delivered through increases to BC Hydro rates and Medical Services Premiums. This, when BC already provides $1000 less per student than the Canadian average for per pupil funding.

The parent initiated rallies are inspiring to see after so many years in which government has fostered divisions between parents and teachers. There is no question that if we are to push back and actually make improvements in our schools, we will need the solidarity of parents and teachers together. This has been undermined due to the "blame the teacher" narrative propagated by government and some sections of the media. But ironically, the latest education legislation of the BC Liberals targets three different sections of the education community. Bill 11 attacks student privacy rights, the independence of locally elected school boards, and the autonomy of teachers to identify and organize their professional development. Combined with a budget that required $29 million in "administrative" cuts - what Christy Clark called "low hanging fruit" - the stage is set for a united response against both the legislation and the budget cuts.

Interestingly, the three components of Bill 11 each, in their own way, demonstrate a different arm of the neoliberal monster.

The changes to student privacy comes in the wake of a fundamental shift in the treatment of student data in the province. The failure of the notorious BCeSIS - the first attempt at a province wide student data collection system - led only to an even larger and more pervasive system, about to be implemented this fall. MyEducationBC will centrally store student data and will collect significantly more information than previous student information systems. The shift to a centralized system, while not explicitly mandates, has been in practice when the BC government refused to accept an alternative proposed and developed by the Saanich school board. Thus every district in BC will be contributing to the "big data" collection of student information. MyEducationBC has more data fields, will be on more computers in more Districts, and will potentially allow massive student data collection by the government. Like other government data collection systems, it is unclear what this information will be used for. As critics point out, these systems violate the basic tenets of privacy protection - collect only what you need, identify your uses prior to collecting data, allow access only in proportion to a genuine need to have access. Student records are thus potentially becoming part of the mass surveillance structure of the 21st century. Bill 11 sets up the legal framework to enable it.

The second component of the Bill involves new mechanisms for government to directly interfere and control the actions of school boards. It is a direct attack on local democracy and is designed to instill caution in Trustees. While the government has always had the ability to remove an elected board (and indeed did so recently in Cowichan), the new powers permit them to mandate specific actions (selling school lands?) or to require a "special advisor" to interfere with and report on the functioning of the board.

This attack on local democracy is not surprising. Boards have become more and more vocal about the impacts of underfunding on the operations of schools. The Cowichan board had the courage to submit a deficit budget that demonstrated the actual needs of students. A number of boards have tacitly endorsed the BC Teacher Federation campaign to ask parents to opt out of the annual standardized tests (FSA) by sending information to parents and accepting without questions their opt out requests. When local democratic structures are actually used to push back on corporate education reform policies, the neoliberal BC Liberals feel the need to shut it down.

The final section of the Bill impacts the ability of teachers to choose and determine how and what type of professional development they engage in. New rules will require specific activities that have been approved by the Ministry. This feature of the Bill is one more in a string of policies that seek to narrow what teachers teach and how they teach it. Christy Clark has long advocated a streamed, vocational style of school system where the primary focus is basic literacy for those who struggle, vocational training for the mass of students in industry specific areas, and access to a university stream for the privileged few. The Ministry has already mandated that one professional development day per year focus on trades training. No doubt there will be a distinctive slant to the type of professional development deemed "acceptable" under the new legislation. As Sheldon Wolin describes: "Privatisation of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations". Teacher professional development is one small piece of the process of shaping coming generations.

Neither the recent budget cuts nor the new legislation come in a vacuum. BC's education system is being massively reformed. There have been more than a dozen Bills over the last decade that have fundamentally shifted how schools operate. We will need to see beyond the lack of funds and to the more fundamental questions being raised by these changes. Bill 11 is one more in a long line of legislative changes that seek to privatize not only the sources of revenue for schools, but the ways in which schools run and the type of schooling they do. It is one more in a long line of structural changes that undermine public control of schools, the role of public schools in providing equitable access to education, and indeed the very content of schooling. This is all the more reason we need parents and teachers and students and citizens out in the streets demanding change.

Bill 11 - Is the BC government privatizing and seizing control of teacher professional development?

Yesterday the BC government introduced Bill 11 - new law that will, among other things, change the system of teacher professional development in BC. Without any consultation with teachers or their union, the BCTF, the government is legislating a new system of authorized continuing education that may be required to maintain teacher certification.

Not surprisingly, having been rebuffed by the BC courts twice with unilateral changes to teachers' collective agreements, the government is trying a different tack. Leave the collective agreement provisions in place, but add new restrictions through the regulatory framework. Having failed to bargain teacher professional development changes, the government is turning to its tried and true formula: legislate.

The new provisions will depend to a large degree on the accompanying regulations, which of course are not yet known. But the basic framework of the new system looks fairly familiar. It appears to be modelled on the type of mandated professional development requirements that have been put in place for other regulated professions, such as lawyers and nurses. In these frameworks, a certain number of hours of authorized activities are required, sometimes along with a professional development plan, self-reflection, or peer review. What is not yet clear is to what degree the profession itself (teachers) will have control over the authorization process, if any.

The current system of teacher professional development is highly autonomous and predominantly public. While there are teachers and others who run businesses to sell professional development services and materials, most teacher professional development is conducted teacher to teacher, at school, or in non-profit teacher led organizations. In BC we have a system of Local Specialist Associations for the different teaching areas who put on large conferences annually where teachers share new practices. We also have many regional conferences hosted by teacher associations on a non-profit basis. Finally at the school level, most school based professional development activities are organized and run by a professional development committee at the school. Outside speakers are brought in when expertise beyond the teaching profession is required for specific topics, such as to learn about development disabilities.

The system that the new legislation appears to envision, which is modelled on other regulatory professional development frameworks, is considerably different. Like just about everything the BC Liberals do, it is market based. Each individual teacher will have their own private professional development requirements, and will go out to the professional development marketplace to find courses and webinars and activities to fulfil the requirements. I would certainly hope that the major events that currently take place, such as the provincial conferences, will be authorized as approved activities. But it isn't at all clear that less formal school or department based activities, or even individual teacher activities such as reading education journals, will be authorized, or what type of bureaucratic hoop jumping might be required to get authorization. If the process is cumbersome or the approval system ideologically driven, it will open the door for an increase in for-profit professional development services to replace teacher driven activities. In other words teacher credential-ling requirements could be used to force teachers to become the customers of an expanded teacher professional development industry.

The second major concern is the influence of the approval process. The legislation as introduced gives government the power to enact an approval system of its choice. Who approves and what is approved will be key to the degree of coercive control the new scheme represents. If you do not yet have the same degree of scepticism as many teachers about how bad this can be, check out this short video of a test preparation professional development session from the Chicago Public Schools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAy3vJn4pbs&feature=youtu.be In the worst case, the approval process could mean direct interference from the Ministry or government or school Districts or Principals into the topics, format and delivery of teacher professional development in a highly prescriptive manner. Rather than teachers identifying their own professional needs based on the subjects they teach, the students they serve and their own individual areas of growth, someone else will be making that decision for them.

Parents protest BC's education budget cuts

Parents and education supports will be out on April 12th protesting the latest round of cuts to BC's education budget (details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1550717231856110/). Below is a post I wrote for rabble.ca outlining the cuts and swift responses from parents and Trustees. As Boards develop their budgets for next year, we are now hearing how these cuts will impact our school districts.

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Parents and teachers continue to be in a state of shock since the B.C. Liberals announced yet more cuts and expense increases for B.C.'s beleaguered school districts. Teachers were on the picket line for five weeks last summer with parent support to try to address the funding crisis in B.C. schools. B.C. students currently receive about $1000 less per student than the Canadian average. This in a province with a budget surplus.

The strategy of the B.C. Liberals has been privatization by a thousand cuts. This budget follows the usual pattern. There is an outright reduction of $29 million this year and another $25 million the following year. But in addition, there are across the board cost increases that will significantly impact board budgets. For example, there is a four per cent rate increase to Medical Services Plan premiums, which the school boards pay on behalf of employees, and there will be another round of BC Hydro increases. There is no allowance for inflation, and there are continued cuts in capital funding, at a time when many boards are now experiencing increasing enrollment.

The government had plenty of input about what is needed to restore adequate learning conditions. Teachers have been very clear that unless class sizes and lowered and funding restored for students with special needs, we will continue to fail to meet the needs of our most vulnerable students. A parent petition prior to the budget release urged the government to meet the recommendations of their own finance committee. It called on government to provide funding increases, stating:

"In their report, the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services noted that evidence indicates current funding is insufficient to cover the operating costs of public education and recommended an increase. Citizens of B.C. are calling on Premier Clark to do the right thing and remedy the underspending on B.C. education, especially now, when the province is in a state of budgetary surplus. We cannot afford to continue to erode public education through underspending."

Reaction to the budget has been swift and critical. The Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council issued a press release commenting: "To the extreme disappointment of Vancouver parents and parents throughout the province, the 2015/16 Budget announced yesterday (February 17) does not raise public education funding to an adequate level; on the contrary, it provides far less than adequate funding, and requires further cuts by school boards who have already faced more than a decade of cuts".

Notably the budget did include two increases. The first was a very small credit for teachers who coach extra-curricular sports or music activities. They will be entitled to a tax credit worth up to $25. Not only does this in no way offset the costs and time put in by teachers who volunteer to work with children, it also blatantly chooses to target one group of teachers while ignoring those who tutor after school, purchase supplies with their own money, or run other types of activities such as board game or chess clubs.

More insidious, however, is the $30 million increase to independent private schools -- almost exactly the amount being cut from the public system in the first year. This follows a decades long trend of shifting resources from the public to the private system. B.C. private schools can receive 50 per cent of the per pupil funding grant and as they continue to flourish, the amount of the education budget going to private institutions keeps increasing. Enrollment in private schools now accounts for 12 per cent of the student population. 

Thus, in education, as elsewhere in B.C. budget 2015, the news was the same -- increased funding for the wealthy and more cuts to services for the rest of us. So much for families first.

Standardized testing: a pillar of privatization

It's FSA season again. Every year in British Columbia, every student in grades 4 and 7 has their regular classroom schedule put on hold for two weeks while they complete the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) -- a collection of standardized tests mandated by the provincial government.

Every student, parent, teacher and citizen should oppose these tests. There is a litany of reasons for this, but top among them is the role standardized tests play in the very destruction of public education itself -- by privatizing a public service. Masquerading as a test for system quality, they are in fact an instrument of system change, and not change for the better. 

The origin and rationale for standardized testing dates back to the cold war. As early as the 1960s, the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP), funded with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, was promoting the use of standardized exams for comparison of states and districts. The so--called "need" for testing was ramped up in the infamous report A Nation at Risk, published by the U.S. government during the Reagan administration in 1983. The report insisted that America's schools had to do better to fend off the Soviet threat.

As an international phenomenon, testing was promulgated by the OECD in the 1990s. It developed the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, as a way to measure member states and compare their education systems. Since this time, member states of the OECD have been only too happy to comply. State-wide testing was mandated federally in the US through the notorious No Child Left Behind act. BC has the FSAs. Ontario the EQAO. 

BC's province wide standardized exam system has been in use since 1974, but it has changed over time. The first testing program, administered in grades 4, 8 and 12, was called the Provincial Learning Assessment Program (PLAP), and was a replacement of IQ tests. The results of the PLAP were not published but rather used internally for curriculum review and to manage the school system. But in 1984 the BC government decided to publish the results of Grade 12 provincial exams and by 1998 the Fraser Institute published its first ranking of BC schools. In 2002 the BC Liberals abolished the school accreditation system altogether and now relies on Accountability Contracts from each school district to ensure school quality. These documents, produced by school boards, in turn rely heavily on FSA test scores and are of dubious quality. All FSA results are now routinely made available by government on their web site and the Fraser Institute publishes rankings annually. Media outlets gleefully report on the best and worst schools.

Thus the FSAs, like standardized testing in many jurisdictions, has morphed in the last half century from a mechanism designed to internally review the quality of an individual education system, to a comparison tool to rank schools and districts.

The changes that took place are not accidental. They are part and parcel of the usual fare of neo-liberalism: deregulation, defunding, market based provision of services, and privatization.
How does this work? In today's BC school system, a parent can pick up the Fraser Institute rankings and use them to choose a school. Because we no longer have closed school boundaries based on neighbourhoods, they can register their child in the school of their choice. As their child progresses, they have access to a litany of special programs, such as Sports Academies and International Baccalaureate, many of which provide enhanced services through additional fees. Of course it is some parents choosing to do this -- typically immigrant families and low income families simply send their children to the neighbourhood school. Many districts are therefore experiencing a form of "white flight" out of inner city schools.

If you were Milton Friedman, one of the intellectual architects of neo-liberal policy, you would look at this happily as a variant of what he called school vouchers. Acknowledging that even in the free-est of markets, the state has a role to play to ensure basic literacy levels, he advocated that all parents receive a voucher for their state education allowance with the ability to use it at the school of their choice. Now admittedly in Friedman's world, these schools would be privately administered, but the mechanism for parent choice (testing and ranking), the market of schools, and the additional resources provided through school fees all mimic the Friedman model. The virtual school voucher is the provincial funding that follows a child to attend the school of their choice. 

The US has taken the testing craze a few more steps. Not only do they have an insane battery of tests (at least two every year from grades 3 - 8), but they have attached high stakes to these tests so that every aspect of the school system becomes "accountable" to a test score. If a school does badly, close it. If a teacher doesn't improve student test scores, fire the teacher. If universities graduate new teachers whose students do badly, shut down the teacher preparation school. 

Unfortunately, the test scores mostly reflect one thing -- the socioeconomic status of the student writing the test. The inevitable result, therefore, is that it is poor (and disproportionately black) students who are losing their teachers and losing their schools. It is no accident that the first jurisdiction to have no public schools remaining at all is New Orleans.

We can learn from our neighbours to the south, where a growing anti-test movement is sweeping the country. We have the opportunity to scrap the testing and ranking before it completely takes over our public school system. If you are a parent, please withdraw your student from the FSA. If you are a teacher, please work with your colleagues to encourage parents and others to refuse to take the tests. If you are anyone else, work with teachers and parents to end the testing mania and advocate for a school system administered by and for the public.

This article has also appeared on my rabble.ca blog

Badass Book Review: The Future of our Schools, Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner

Badass Book Review: The Future of our Schools, Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner

Since the massive public sector upsurge in the 60's and 70's, teachers unions in the US have been in a long steady decline in power. Only very recently, with the 2012 Chicago teachers strike, have we seen any resurgence in teacher union power. Why is this?

Weiner presents an overview of the pitfalls of teacher unionism and what teachers can do to revive their organizations. For any teacher anywhere, frustrated by the untenable working and teaching conditions we now face, this book is essential reading. She describes the project well in a way any teacher can relate to: "The best way to explain what the union should be is to describe what it should not be, which is like most schools: hierarchical and paternalistic." Sound familiar?

Weiner herself has a long tenure in the teaching profession and with teacher unions. She therefore brings real expertise to an analysis of the history of teacher unionism in the US and the prescription for more effective unions. Key to her understanding is a focus on rank and file activism and social unionism. While she is using US examples and history, the global nature of the education reform movement means that her arguments are really relevant for any teacher, anywhere.

Social unionism is a type of organizing philosophy that contrasts with another historic trend - business unionism. In Weiner's approach, social unionism has two key elements. The first is  to adopt a set of issues and bargaining objectives that reach beyond traditional "bread and butter" demands like wages and pensions. This has traditionally meant objectives such as smaller classes and more recently the fight against standardized testing. She argues, rightly, that in a public sector context, these bridges with the community are essential to creating the social power necessary to win. Weiner writes, "One essential change from what occurred in the 1960s and 1970s is that we must now reach out to allies to ask how they think the union might use its legal and political power, including the right to negotiate legal agreements, to improve schools....It's critical that teachers understand that we are in a greatly weakened position, and parents, students, and community activists are being courted quite seductively by our opponents."

If you are a teacher in the BCTF, you might think we already do this - we are a social justice union. But I believe Weiner is arguing for a more organic and connected form of working together. While we have, in BC, approached bargaining with a view to improved learning conditions, we have not seriously engaged with some objectives that are clearly a high priority for parents, such as playground equipment and seismic upgrades. We have instead sought out parents as allies to our objectives.

The second critical component to social movement unionism (which I think distinguishes it from social justice unionism), is the requirement to have grass-roots, rank and file activism and democratic control of union decision making.

"Often union members assume someone else - anyone else - will run the union, and it will, somehow, continue to exist. Their perception and passivity are supported by the leadership's conception of the union. Perhaps without realizing it, members and leaders accept the "service model" of unionism that predominates in US labour. In this model, sometimes referred to as "business unionism," the union is run like a business and exists to provide services including lower rates for auto insurance; benefits from a welfare fund; pension advice; contract negotiations; and perhaps filing a grievance. Officers or staff make decisions on the members' behalf. The union as an organization functions based on the assumption (generally unarticulated, unless it's challenged) that paid officials know best about everything. They're supposedly the experts. Often they conduct negotiations in secret, reporting  back only when a tentative agreement has been reached. Then members have the legal right to vote on whether the contract should be approved. But other than voting on a contract and electing officers every few years, members are passive."

I'm sure this description speaks to many trade unionists, not just in teacher unions but throughout the labour movement. And while there may be aspects that are more or less true in any given union, we need to be always reminding ourselves and encouraging as much member democracy as possible in every situation. This is not just about fetishizing democracy, it is actually needed to create powerful unions that can win.

Finally Weiner touches on a number of issues that can divide us, such as race and gender, and focuses on some that are very particular to teaching. One is the "nurturing" aspect of teaching, and to what degree teacher unions should "defend schooling's social purposes and teaching's nurturing aspects". The social union perspective guides her conclusions: "The struggle to create schools that are caring makes teachers allies of parents in creating places in which we want to teach and children want to learn. Putting forward an ideal of a caring school reframes the debate about our working conditions, explaining our needs as workers and professionals in human terms."

Given the struggle we are in to defend public education and to push back on corporate and privatizing reforms, this book is a timely guide on how to revitalize our unions so that we can not just stop the tsunami of neoliberalism, but actually make gains and improve our schools.

Badass Book Review: Raising Expectations & Raising Hell, by Jane McAlevey

Book Review: Raising expectations (and Raising hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, by Jane McAlevey

It's been a tough couple of decades to be a trade unionist. Since the early nineties, with Paul Martin's cuts to transfer payments, through the Mike Harris's assaults, to the BC Liberal's ripping up contracts and the Harper Tories legislating them, it seems increasingly hard to find strategies that win.

Yet paradoxically, since about 2011, there has been a notable upsurge in progressive movements: teachers in Wisconsin, the squares of Egypt and Turkey, the world wide Occupy movement, the Maple Spring, Ferguson, and Burnaby mountain. These are just a handful of the recent uprisings against neoliberalism. Clearly, dissatisfaction with the status quo is rampant. So why can't workers seem to harness this same energy?

On the worker front, the last three years in Canada have been pretty dismal. The wholesale dismantling of Canada Post, the ongoing decline of union density, increasing government intervention in contract negotiations, forced restructuring of bargaining units, tepid, long contracts mediated by Vince Ready, two tier contracts, attacks on pensions, Bill C-377, the list goes on.

Enter some optimism in the form of Jane McAlevey. During a period of general union decline, the mid 2000's, she worked in one of the toughest right to work states to build strong unions and win good contracts. Her book provides not only a much needed dose of excitement, but also many lessons to rebuild worker power everywhere.

She takes us on a personal account of her journey through the world of the SEIU. Having come from the student and social movements, she brought with her a philosophy perfectly suited to trade unionism - an analysis of power. And she correctly sees power rooted directly in the worker. Although she only quotes Marx once, the book is a glowing example of the need for workers to take and build power themselves.

The main section of the book describes her fight in Nevada to win new certifications and new contracts in public and private sector hospitals. For any trade union activist, the little details will be an enjoyable read, and full of practical ideas to implement yourself. My favourite, and what I sense was the most powerful, was the use of very large worker bargaining teams. She describes in detail how the Nevada local built up the strength to force a thousand member, cross workplace, bargaining team on a powerful, intransigent employer.

Along the way, she outlines some very important lessons for trade unionists: the weakness of legal strategies; the importance of what she terms "whole worker" organizing, but what could be called a form of social movement unionism; the weakness of craft organizing and the sectionalism it inspires; and the dreadful and counter productive turf wars of the union bureaucrats in their endless fights for power from each other, instead of the bosses.

Every argument is made in straight forward, concrete terms. This again is especially useful for those hoping to win these same arguments in our own unions. For example, she describes the dangers of "elite" craft unions by comparing the nurse-to-patient ratios won in California, by a nurses only union, to those won in Nevada, where the whole hospital is in one local under one contract. Comparing the two, she notes: "But in our CHW contracts, we also won language prohibiting management, as they implemented our new nurse-to-patient ratios, from cutting non-nurse positions. This difference is crucial. Because the California Nurses Union was only fighting for the elite workers, the intent of the California law [to create nurse-to-patient ratios], when it took effect, was grossly undermined by hospital bosses, who gutted their ancillary staffs to pay for the additional nurses they were required to hire." This same story is played out all the time to the detriment of us all.

There are a few ideas and opinions that will be thought provoking, to say the least. One is her attitude towards the grievance process, of which she is extremely critical. However this has to be taken in the context she found herself in - one where grievances are used by bureaucrats to build internal political power within the union. Nevertheless, as some critics have written, the grievance process is also often used as a potent tool along with organizing and many moribund unions suffer from filing too few grievances, not too many.

Also potentially controversial is her opinion on minimum wage organizing, which she considers a diversion from the immediate task of building the strength and power from a union's base outward in stable workplaces. But it is worth thinking hard about what she is saying, particularly as we have seen the same phenomena here at home. The BC Federation of Labour's $15/hour campaign is absolutely worthwhile and an important fight that needs labour's support. But given the many battles labour is facing it is arguably a tangential focus away from building genuine worker power within existing unions to win gains for our members through real solidarity and action. Moreover, workers' ultimate power is the strike in the workplace, and the yet the minimum wage campaigns have been predominantly politically based.

The one area where I do think McAlevey veers from a genuinely rank and file approach is her lack of focus on internal union democracy and acceptance of staff models of organizing. Despite her insistence on building worker power at every step, she nevertheless still sees and does this through initiation by paid organizers. Arguably, when things eventually fall apart, one factor is that not enough energy has been spent on building internal democratic processes so that the new worker leaders are able to withstand the massive onslaught from the bureaucracy to quash their power. She aptly describes the new confidence workers develop in confronting management, but not those within their own union impeding their grass-roots control. Ultimately, workers have to transform their own unions themselves, not with outsiders.

Nevertheless the book is undoubtedly a welcome breath of fresh air in a landscape where many worker activists are feeling downtrodden and unable to win. It provides both the inspiration and concrete organizing examples to inspire any activist committed to winning a better world through the power of their union.

BC's Site C Dam - Another stack in the LNG house of cards

The BC government announced today that they were going ahead with an $8.8 billion commitment to build BC's largest dam - "Site C". A few (even on the left) believe we should support Site C, as a large, green public energy infrastructure project. It is important to understand that that is not what this is.

Critics of the project consist of most of the province that isn't involved in the building and resource extraction industry. First nations oppose the project. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the BC Union of Indian Chiefs was one of the first to condemn the decision. The flooding will destroy a number of First Nations sites and is actively opposed, with law suits pending. Local communities generally oppose the project, concerned about the impact of a massive influx of people in an area already experiencing growth. The nearest municipality of Fort St. John cannot currently handle an increase of so many workers and would face strains on public infrastructure such as schools and hospitals and other public services. The residents of the 5500 hectares of fertile farm land that will be flooded obviously oppose the project.

Yet the approval should come as no surprise given the Premier's unbreakable allegiance to her ill-fated plan to make BC wealthy (or should I say some BC businessmen wealthy). This was her smoking gun in the most recent election.

On almost every metric, this project makes little sense. BC does not currently need the energy and perhaps never will. That was the sentiment of the first two decisions of the BC Utilities Commission in 1982 and 1989 which was effectively shut out of this round of decision making.

The project is estimated to cost $8.8 billion, but will realistically be closer to $10 - $20 billion given the history of costing for large government projects. To put this in perspective, just this week the very same government said it couldn't afford to pay for adults to upgrade their high school coursework to pursue post-secondary opportunities because the $20 million was too rich. This project could probably pay for smaller class sizes, free childcare, and housing all our homeless. Or how about programs to address the highest poverty rate in Canada?

While hydro electrical power may appear "clean", many believe the real purpose of the dam is to support the proposed Liquefied Natural Gas projects the Premier is so desperately trying to attract to the province. First, they introduced a tax rate of only half what they proposed during the election (which sadly had the support of the NDP as well). Now, they are providing an external energy source to support those projects, should any of them ever proceed. This project might appear to be a large, green, government infrastructure project, but the LNG component makes it more like government's part of a public/private partnership to develop natural gas extraction. This means a net increase in consumption of energy, including dirty energy.

Site C is just one more component of the public infrastructure needed to "entice" (publicly subsidize) the LNG industry. As I reported previously, the provincial mandate in education - both high school level and for colleges - is to target funds into trades programs designed to fast track students as quickly as possible into resource jobs. The trajectory of government on every front seems to have only one purpose in mind - turn BC into the next Alberta.

Lost on no one is that just as the announcement was made, the entire world is consumed with falling gas and oil prices, making new LNG investment by private interests increasingly unlikely. The Premier's entire provincial agenda is more and more looking like the last desperate attempt to win in the bursting resource extraction bubble.

The Mind of Christy Clark

My colleagues and I were somewhat perplexed at the lunch table this week to grasp the motivation behind the latest decision of the BC Liberals to end funding for adult graduates to upgrade their high school courses.

OK yes, it is obvious they want to fund less and charge more fees. But how does this fit with the grander scheme of grooming BC's youth towards a life of resource extraction? Surely getting those extra credits in Math and Science are part and parcel of the path to trades school and the LNG highway?

It is easy to forget about Christy's earlier life as Minister of Education (yes, those are dark days we educators try to block from memory). But her failed attempt to overhaul the graduation program provides some insight into the broader program she is pushing today.

Back in the early naughts, Christy tried to create a fully streamed graduation program, complete with eight distinct pathways and different degrees. Starting in grade 10 (age 14 or 15), students would choose a pathway and each would lead to a different place - be that university, vocational school, or perhaps right out into that service sector job at Walmart. At the time, she denied that this was a form of streaming, yet the proposal came at the same time as the introduction of provincial exams starting in grade 10 - essentially a high stakes barrier to some of these pathways for children as young as 14 (see BCTF report on page 8).

The original pathways proposal was never implemented, but the curriculum and graduation program was changed to reflect a similar approach. The graduation program now includes grade 10 - meaning decisions are made one year younger than the previous graduation program. Courses in key academic areas such as Math and English and Science that are included in the program include lower level curriculum which is not accepted for university entrance. For example, Math essentially has three pathways - what was first "Essentials", "Applications" and "Principles" and is now "Workplace", "Foundations" and "Pre-Calculus". Regardless of the titles, one is for graduation only, one is for vocational program entry, and one is for university entry.

Christy left government shortly after these changes. During Gordon Campbell's tenure, the focus of government education disruption was somewhat different. Entranced by technology and the Global Education Reform Movement, Campbell's year were more closely aligned with the project for 21st Century Learning (see my critique here). But Christy is back and her original vision has come with her, albeit with a heavily shifted focus not to any old vocation, but towards vocational training primarily in the trades and resource sector. Thus the government has mostly abandoned Campbell's BC Education Plan (whatever it was), the "vision for 21st Century Learning" from the BC Technology Council, and replaced these with the BC Skills for Jobs Blueprint.

If you haven't had a look at the Blueprint yet, you should. It aims to redirect students from a comprehensive senior secondary program into a trades training program that will merge seamlessly from secondary school to college. Many of the pieces are already in place, and a student can already begin their trades training in Grade 10 and be taking dual credit courses at college in Grade 12 and be ready to work shortly thereafter. Passport to Education grants, which gave some grants to graduating students and were applicable for all subjects, have been replaced with much larger grants covering only trades programs.

Like every other Christy policy extolling the virtues of "choice", in the case of trades training, this is nothing but a smokescreen. The illusion of choice always comes with institutional barriers that will in fact direct some students down one pathway and leave choices only for a select and privileged few. It is therefore fitting that general upgrading for post-secondary entrance is out, while the new trades path from grade 10 is in. Upgrading for adults allows for mobility between pathways - a genuine choice and opportunity.

Christy's program is noticeably similar and in line with the push by the Federal Conservatives for a national trades training system. Minister Jason Kenney recently took a delegation to Germany, where there is a long history of streaming students from age ten into either university or vocational schooling.  The Jobs Blueprint promise to "reengineer training and education in BC" fits right in with Kenney's plan to "reinvent" vocational high schools.

Kenney also uses the "choice" cover for what is actually a step towards further inequality. "This is about choices for kids," he said. "Sometimes the German system is criticized as being brutal with its streaming in the secondary school system. The truth is that they're just trying to help reflect where kids' aptitudes and interests are." (Canadian Press)

Ironically Germans themselves are looking at the horrific racial and class divisions entrenched in their education system. As the Guardian reports:

"most children are streamed at the age of 10 into either the Gymnasium, a route to university; the Realschule, where mid-level vocational studies are common; or the Hauptschule, for a basic secondary education.

Inequality is rampant. Children from a privileged background are four times as likely to attend Gymnasium as a child with similar grades from a working-class home and, according to the federal education body KMK, children of immigrant families attend the Hauptschule twice as often as native children – even within the same socio-economic class." (Guardian)

What is left unspoken by either Christy or her Federal counterparts is that this is a program to relieve business of the costs of training and at the same time practically eliminate comprehensive secondary education for many students, and in particular those who are low income or who struggle in school. Unsurprisingly, aboriginal students are specifically targeted, under the guise of special grants and mentor-ship programs.

Far from choice or opportunity, this grander scheme is about putting children in their place.

Reflections on the BC Teacher Strike

Teachers are reflective practitioners. And just as we reflect on a lesson to judge what worked and what did not, we ought also to reflect on our struggle to improve the public education system. The point is not to lay blame. It is to figure out how to do it better next time.

A starting point for reflection is to judge the outcome relative to our goals. From this point of view, there is much to be done. As we return to class this week, there are still no class size limits for Grades 4 - 12. There are still no rules whatsoever on the composition of a class. Our salaries will increase pretty much in accordance with the original government proposal. Elementary teachers will have ten more minutes of preparation time. This is a far cry from the proposals tabled over a year ago, and still far from the "bottom line" of the framework proposal made at the end of June.

Teachers will still act as the shock absorbers for a system under stress. We ourselves will be the ones on medical leave from the ten percent of classes that are truly not adequate learning environments. We will continue to see teachers leave the profession. We will continue to fill in the gaps with our own resources - be that money or time. And at the same time our salaries will continue to fall relative to inflation.

We will watch as the BCTF goes back to court over the imposition of Bills 28 and 22. While this is absolutely necessary, we will no longer have the opportunity of immediate reinstatement of our class size language. Even if the courts uphold Justice Griffin's decision and reject the government's appeal, we will be teaching in over crowded classrooms until something new is negotiated, and we know what that process is likely to look like.

So what have we learned for next time?

Some commentators have suggested this deal was better than a legislated end to the dispute. In the context of our court case, I'm not so sure. A legislated contract likely would have been two years, with the same wages, and with no re-opener on the court case. The possibility would be there of immediate reinstatement of our class size language with a final court decision. A two year agreement would have us bargaining again before an election, not after one. These are the reasons the government wanted this deal and didn't want to legislate.

Others have said we had no other choice - public support would disappear. I'm not so sure about that either. The public was with us because we were fighting for classroom conditions. If we were clear that this deal made few improvements, I believe many in the public would have stayed the course. Regardless, we have a lot of work to do to build stronger alliances in our communities. Public support was good, but not overwhelming. Our relationships need to deepen and broaden. We can't only ask parents to help us when we need it. We have to be there on parent issues such as seismic upgrading, school closures, child poverty, day care and affordable housing. And I don't mean just taking the right position. We have to be there on the streets, like parents were for us.

It should have been an option to return to work but reject the deal. Unfortunately, this option was not available to teachers. There is some irony that the timing of the vote came in part due to a motion from a BCTF AGM requiring a vote to end a job action. This motion was to prevent a "sell out" from leadership at the end of a strike by stopping job action without membership consent. But it was never meant to rush a ratification vote. Teachers should have had two separate choices - do we return to work? Do we accept this contract?

Teachers had about six hours to look at the contract language. They received conflicting information about the re-opener clause (which had been settled in bargaining at least three days earlier), and about the impact of the Education Fund. The BCTF claimed 850 new teachers would be hired, but failed to mention the layoffs this spring (such as 135 in Surrey alone), or that most of those hires had already happened with the Learning Improvement Fund. This year's new money for teachers is only the amount that had been spent on CUPE staff - probably about 15-30% of the fund. Teachers need adequate time to debate and consider an agreement and they have the right to see the actual language of the contract. These are basic democratic rights that any membership should insist from their union. We need to rethink how we ratify contracts.

The government strategy of starving us out was effective. If we choose to take strike action next time, we need to think a lot more carefully about how long we can stay out. Striking at the beginning of the school year was very effective at creating pressure - especially due to the impact on International programs. Striking in June was not effective, and only added extra financial pressure on teachers. We need a properly funded strike fund. And teachers need to learn a lesson from the private sector that you should have several months savings to help you weather a longer strike. If government perceives this bargaining round as a win, which I believe they do, they will use these strategies again next time - lock outs and long strikes.

BC Teacher strike - Lessons learned

On the evening of the vote results, I found myself, with great difficulty, repeating the tried and true advice: "Don't mourn, organize." Because it is correct. There is much to do. And there are always setbacks and disappointments on the way to a better world.

That said, it is also worth some analysis on the strike to guide the future. Here are my thoughts.

Longest teacher strike in BC history

Despite the outcome, perhaps the most incredible thing about this strike was the resolve of teachers. Although long strikes are more common in the private sector, for a public sector union this was a very long strike indeed. Three days of rotating strikes, followed by two weeks in June, followed by almost three weeks in September. Five weeks in total. This is more than double the length of the 2005 strike of two weeks. The length of the strike showed the depth of the resolve amongst teachers.

Teachers understood clearly the severity of the issues at hand and the need for extended pressure in the context of a government that campaigned on and implements neo-liberal reforms. Teachers should be rightly proud of taking a stand and making a personal sacrifice to do so. And union leaders should take careful note that workers in British Columbia are willing to take action to stop concession bargaining and instead fight to win improvement. I hope we are at a historic breaking point from the thirty year concessionary bargaining of the North American labour movement.

The length of the strike is also important for its knock on effect. Periods of history where labour makes gains are marked by frequent strikes and by more strike days. Not every one of these strikes results in victory. But the cumulative impact changes the balance of power. Employers get nervous if they believe the risk is high. And this in turn impacts the outcome of bargaining.

The outcome

I do not believe this strike was a victory.

On the major issue, return of class size and composition limits, we failed. The Education Fund, as I've already noted, is a shell game. The money in will in short order be offset by increased costs to School Boards and stagnating per pupil funding. The "reopener" clause for government in the event of a court victory on our class size case will nullify potential gains from that win. The grievance settlement we paid for ourselves with the strike savings, relieving government from a potential liability and bargaining lever.

On wages, the government did shift slightly. In spring they removed the requirement for sick day accumulation limits to pay for wages. They also shifted the timing to put more increases front loaded. But overall, the wages remain below inflation and so this is a concessionary contract in that respect. Teachers' buying power will go down over the life of the contract.

The small increases to elementary preparation time are a genuine win, and this was a much better way to bargain the funds from the grievance settlement. These increases set a new standard in contract for elementary preparation time and this time is sorely needed. This is the only real improvement in working conditions in this contract.

Teacher teaching on call (TTOC) per day rates increased for most TTOCs, but at the expense of those at the high end of the salary scale. This is probably overall a positive step, as there is a historic imbalance in the remuneration of teachers at the beginning and end of their careers. But it does come at the cost of experienced TTOCs who will pay for the change.

Solidarity?

Many teachers reluctantly voted yes because they felt a longer strike could significantly impact parent solidarity and the sympathy of the public. This may or may not be the case. Many vocal supporters were clear to indicate that support would continue regardless of the vote and that they were behind teachers in fighting for better classroom conditions. It is also the case that every public sector strike faces a conundrum - instead of monetary pressure on the employer, a strike creates public inconvenience. The widespread, organized support of parents and the continued support in polling was one of the great victories of this strike. This, more than anything else, pressured the government. The test now will be to ensure that the teacher/parent bonds that have been forged deepen and strengthen. Ultimately this will be required to win back smaller classes.

Solidarity from organized labour is a more difficult assessment. It is first important to distinguish between the actions of the leadership of unions and the actions of individual members. Many individual union members showed great commitment. They came to our picket lines, they wrote letters, they rallied. Like parents, many actively organized in support.

The labour leadership, five weeks into the strike, offered interest free loans to teachers and the BCTF. A few individual unions gave direct donations (notably Ontario teachers who donated $1,000,000). But the majority of the "support" came in the form of interest free loans.

To me this is one of the tragic failures in this dispute, and a warning sign for workers in BC. While loans and donations are appreciated, what we need is collective pressure. BC now has a long and sad history of the union movement failing to step in with solidarity strikes when they are most needed. Two glaring examples stand out - long strikes by small private sector unions, such as the projectionists and now the IKEA workers, and public sector strikes. The failure of the BC Federation of Labour to mobilize with us is a continuation of the trend that sees joint labour action moribund. Nowhere was this more clear than during the "net zero" mandate, where there was so much reason for a joint coordinated response to a broad attack on public sector wages. Labour can and must work to support one another if we are to muster the strength needed to stop concession bargaining and regain what we have lost. 

Will the Education Fund improve classroom conditions?

The tentative agreement negotiated this week includes an Education Fund which replaces the Learning Improvment Fund (LIF). Will this improve classroom conditions? Not much, if at all.

The BCTF did an excellent analysis of the failure of the LIF, which I won't repeat here. But suffice it to say there are four main problems with the LIF:

1. it is about 1/4 of the funding needed for class sizes that match our previous language
2. some of the funding is spent on non-teacher resources
3. there is no method for fair allocation
4. there is no change in how classes are organized

The net result is that after several years of the LIF, classroom conditions are worse, not better.

The new Education fund only addresses one of these issues - spending on teachers. But this is insufficient to mean the fund will help you in your classroom. Here is the cold hard truth.

Dollars

In terms of dollars, the new fund will be $80 million per year, instead of $75 million per year. The $400 million figure the BCTF is publishing is for the six years combined. So the increase is a mere $5 million dollars per year for 500,000 students. That is $10 per student per year. The same amount spent on the botched computer system BCeSIS. This is wholly inadequate. The original BCTF bargaining position of $225 million should have been our bottom line. Even that amount is far short of the $330 million removed from the 2002 legislation.

Teachers hired?

The new fund will be spent exclusively on teachers and this is an improvement. But the BCTF claim that this translates into 850 new positions per year is disingenuous. Firstly, as this REPLACES the LIF, the only new positions are those created by the extra $5 million and the funding that was previously used on Educational Assistants. In my District, the LIF was used to hire 6 additional teachers. With the changes to the Education Fund, this will likely change to 10-15. But as we have 45 schools, this means only 5-10 schools will see an additional teacher. Most school will see no change whatsover.

The supposed 850 new positions are really more like 3-400 new positions, and it is really important to understand that these positions are TEMPORARY. Both the Education Fund and the previous LIF were allocated each year on a year-by-year basis. So we will not see new additional teachers each year. Just like the LIF, we will see a couple of new hires in September who are then excess in June, and the process repeats.

Allocation of funds

As with the LIF, teachers will be consulted, but the District will ultimately make the decision. It has been an unhealthy and destructive process to have teachers and schools arguing over who should get the tiny pot of money.

Class composition

The new fund does nothing to change how classes are organized. Critically, with inadequate funds, Districts will continue to cluster students with Individual Education Plans into single classrooms and place EAs in those classes. Don't expect any changes to the number of classes with more than three students with an IEP.

In the BCTF analysis of the LIF, Larry Kuehn asks "How, then, if 500 teaching jobs were to be created by the fund, did the reported number of FTE teachers in the system actually fall by 33?" I fear with the Education Fund we will be asking the same question.