Government on hook if teachers walk
On Thursday, the teachers of this province voted overwhelmingly in favour of a strike mandate. The strike vote was necessary, according to union leadership, in order to get the government bargaining team moving toward what the Nova Scotia Teachers Union considers a fair collective agreement. NSTU president Ryan Lutes summarized the situation by saying, “Teachers are frustrated by rapidly declining conditions inside their schools, and by government’s lack of action to provide safe and healthy learning environments.”
The government has put forth its version of the story. Calling the strike vote a “distraction,” Education Minister Becky Druhan was quick to frame her government as the organization that is truly listening to teachers. In a news release, Druhan claimed to have attended upwards of 80 staff meetings to genuinely hear from thousands of frontline workers. (From what I can gather, that means staff standing up and parroting prescreened answers to three government-selected questions.)
She also pointed out that her government has a committee set up to look at school violence, and how they also set up an “Ideas for Education” web portal to give teachers a voice in making positive change.
BEEN HERE BEFORE
If this all sounds very familiar, that’s because it is.
In October 2016, I wrote an article on the then-impending strike vote that was, once again, being called to move an obstinate government. I honestly think I could have simply copied that article, pasted it here and called it a day.
Then-minister of education Karen Casey was also claiming that she, not the union, was hearing from frontline teachers via a new education panel (albeit one that contained no actual teachers), lauded a new committee her government was forming (this one to address working conditions outside of collective bargaining) and that she was also getting ideas about improving education via the web in the form of an online survey. (Items were cherry picked from that survey by government to support the ideas of the beyond-paper-thin Glaze report.) So this all feels very familiar.
I am obviously biased. I have made no secret of my involvement with the NSTU over the years and I am seeking to become its next president. However, I also have been studying educational policy and politics for an awfully long time, and what strikes me the most about our current reality is how government continues to choose to ignore that they are operating in an educational world that has substantively changed POST-COVID.
I began my educational writing career back when the NDP were in power in Nova Scotia. At that time, the Dexter government was talking about deficits and looking to shave money off government spending by cutting upward of 700 teaching positions across the province. The NSTU protested and, somewhat predictably, then-education minister Ramona Jennex stood up in Province House and stated her government, not the union, was “here for the students,” rhetoric repeated by the Liberals.
Today, the government is using the same line to defend inaction. However, in this day and age, if we were to remove those same 700 teachers from our current staff-strapped system, it would probably have to shut down.
DIFFICULTY OF RETENTION
For my money, that’s the crux of the thing. Nova Scotia, much like many other jurisdictions right across the planet let alone the country, is having a hard time filling teaching positions. We are also, much like everyone else, having a hard time hanging on to the teachers we have, particularly those who are early on in their career. Their exodus from the profession poses an existential threat not just to teachers but to our entire province.
That may sound alarmist, but even the most optimistic among us must understand that young Nova Scotians who have a university degree have options. A great many of those options include employers who provide extensively more attractive working conditions and employee benefits than currently exist in our public schools.
Government has a responsibility to the citizens of this province to provide a high-quality public education system. That means maintaining a highly trained, highly motivated workforce.
The NSTU has a responsibility to
take the concerns of that workforce to the government in order to have those concerns addressed. If government refuses to address those concerns, however, the available workforce will inevitably dwindle.
That possibility should have us all worried.
This moment in our educational history may have originated long before Tim Houston took over the political reins, and certainly I do not envy him the task of cleaning up the considerable educational mess left by the Mcneil Liberals.
However, after almost a decade and a half of deteriorating conditions and constant belittling by successive governments, something has to give.
It will be up to the Houston government to determine if that something is a rather large chunk of our professional teaching workforce.