Education changes only make sense to government

Rather than fixing what’s broken, the Nova Scotia government is breaking what works.

Teachers want you to know that the government’s plan to remake education in health’s image won’t do a thing for Nova Scotian kids or their education.

The government’s agenda will create a new bureaucracy to agonize endlessly over problems that are now handled quickly and with sensitive common sense in the schools. The collegial atmosphere that makes schools more than the sum of their parts is in jeopardy.

The province is committed to changing education’s administrative structure, so it makes sense to government. Nova Scotia kids are about to suffer a wound inflicted by bureaucrats and politicians who honestly believe that if something makes sense to them, it must be right. At least half the time they’re wrong.

After a few hours listening to teachers, it’s hard not to get in their corner. At some point in a wide-ranging conversation the realization dawns that if the word “students” is replaced by “patients” this is eerily reminiscent of a recent conversation with a similar-sized group of family doctors.

I can report that the teachers are making far more sense.

For years and at every level, government officials in Nova Scotia have been talking about “evidence-based” decisions. Yet the province refuses to reveal the evidence upon which it based a decision to make wholesale changes in how the province’s schools are run.

Why does Nova Scotia need a college of educators to regulate the profession? A similar entity was tried and failed in British Columbia. Ontario still has one, and by all accounts the result is cumbersome and protracted processes to resolve disputes that are dealt with today in Nova Scotia by teachers in a matter of hours or days and almost universally to everyone’s satisfaction.

How will removing principals and vice-principals from the Nova Scotia Teachers Union improve the education of any child? The best the minister and his officials can come up with is an analogy between schools and factories. The boss is not in the union with the ratchet-makers. True enough, and thanks for the insight into how government views the education of Nova Scotian kids.

The NSTU and Education Minister Zach Churchill are talking at least, so maybe the province will give enough to avert a strike by the province’s 9,000 teachers.

Teachers can tell you what’s wrong in Nova Scotia schools. It has to do with one in three kids suffering from an anxiety problem, one in five reporting thoughts of suicide. Capped class sizes are a fiction as often as they are a fact. They will tell you their schools need reading specialists, speech and language resources, and psychologists, and that because these resources are missing, way too many kids are falling through the cracks.

Teachers go to school every day determined to make a difference for the kids they teach, and rather than coming to their support the province has decided to make sweeping administrative changes that don’t belong on the first page of school priorities, if they make the list at all.

It could well be that for the second consecutive year, schools in Nova Scotia are subjected to some kind of “job action” by teachers. If so, it will be the second time in history.

So here’s the evidence. For more than 100 years, public schools operated without disruption. Last year, students endured work-torule and uncertainty hangs over the schools again this year.

The difference between the past two years and the previous 98 is the current provincial government. Teachers didn’t break more than a century of peace. The evidence supports a finding that Stephen Mcneil’s Liberal government is the problem.

The government seems bound and determined to force through changes unsupported by any evidence it has produced, nor can it make the case that the education of our kids will improve.

Teachers are willing to risk illegal strike action and all the jeopardy that brings to fight the government’s plan.

Nova Scotians will now decide whether they support the government or the teachers. Barring the production of some new evidence that favours the government’s position, the choice is obvious.