Peace with teachers was an election cease-fire

Now that government has secured a second term the battle lines have been redrawn

You’ve got to admit, it wasn’t easy to see this coming. But then again, by now maybe we should know better. The government was at war with Nova Scotia’s teachers just five months before the provincial election. That’s not necessarily an electoral disaster by itself but it can be when parents line up with teachers, which is what happened back in December 2016.

So, Stephen McNeil’s Liberals negotiated a fragile peace with teachers, and soothed the frayed nerves of parents before heading to the polls in May. Maybe we should have suspected then that the battle lines would be redrawn once the government had secured its second term.

The province made its peace overtures convincing. A classroom improvement committee with teachers was formed, and order was returned to the kingdom. Sure, there were still contract irritants between the government and the teachers’ union but that’s business as usual.

Nova Scotians went to the polls worried about health care. The schools seemed, at least, under control.

It’s not a stretch to now conclude that Nova Scotia’s governing Liberals went into last spring’s election with a hidden agenda on public education. It’s not hidden anymore.

There was a vague statement in the Liberal’s election platform about reviewing public school administration in light of “(school) board decisions to reduce classroom supports without looking into central administration savings.” Should that have been a tip that big changes were planned for the school system?

Perhaps, but gentle language followed, claiming the review would ensure the new pre-primary program and classroom size caps are part of Nova Scotia’s education future, so it took on a benign, even positive, glow.

When the review hit the fan, it wasn’t about pre-primary or classroom sizes at all. It was about killing off school boards, taking principals and vice principals out of the teachers’ union and setting up a professional watchdog, or college, of teachers.

That last idea was tried and failed in British Columbia, leaving Ontario as the only province that has such a beast.

In Ontario, principals and vice principals were also removed from the union, and what followed was a sharp increase in labourrelated grievances, so the lawyers cashed in, but students found themselves in schools

“The government’s going to spend a good part of the spring putting its reorganization of public schools into law and teachers appear to be regrouping to fight them every step of the way.”

that were less congenial.

Nova Scotia should absolutely take the lessons from other jurisdictions and apply them here. But it might be better if we did that with the successes rather than the failures.

The teachers’ union will tell you that with principals and vice principals in the union, conflicts are resolved amicably within the schools and the union fears that positive work environment will be a casualty of the province’s plan. Teachers, and by extension, students will suffer.

It seems that Nova Scotians are willing to give the government’s plan a chance. Most wouldn’t know that at least two of its central components have been tried without much success elsewhere.

While it may seem logical that managers, in this case school administrators, should not be part of the same union as the teaching staff, we’re forgetting that many vice principals and some principals also still teach.

It also seems that schools are, for the most part, a pretty good working environment already. The province hasn’t made the case that our schools are somehow broken and taking administrators out of the union will fix them, so it is completely possible that the reverse is likely.

There is no love lost across Nova Scotia, or anywhere else, for school boards so the political downside from abolishing them will only be felt if the education department proves itself a more inefficient manager than the boards were. That’s distinctly possible but we’ll have to wait and see.

The government’s going to spend a good part of the spring putting its reorganization of public schools into law and teachers appear to be regrouping to fight them every step of the way.

Fighting the major battles early in a government’s term is conventional political wisdom, and that’s exactly what McNeil’s Liberals are planning to do in education.

The question that will go answered is, why didn’t they tell Nova Scotians this was the plan last May when they were asking to be re-elected?