Teachers work to rule, cancelling activities
Many students attending English public schools in Quebec have come home with glum faces this week after learning that some of their favourite extracurricular activities and outings have been put on hold indefinitely because of pressure tactics by their teachers.
Teachers in public schools across the province have launched a work-to-rule-campaign, meaning they will only work 32 hours a week, because they’re angry that the provincial government wants to increase class sizes in elementary and high schools. Quebec is also proposing to no longer consider whether a child has a learning disability when calculating class sizes. At present, for example, a child who is autistic could count as three students depending on the severity of the autism. This proposal would increase the number of special-needs students in classes, teachers say.
The work-to-rule campaign has resulted in the cancellation of sports teams, chess clubs, extra tutoring and field trips in several English schools across the province.
At Royal West Academy in Montreal West, parents received an email from the school administration on Tuesday saying it would be suspending its entire extracurricular program. The administration suggested that parents contact their local MNA to demand that the government reach a settlement with the teachers immediately.
Parent Debbie Blond said her daughter Lori, who is in Grade 11, is worried that several extracurricular activities will be cancelled if the labour dispute drags on, including the honour band, a grad trip to New York and the yearbook. “She is very upset,” Blond said. “Royal West prides itself not only on academics but on the enrichment they get from their extracurricular activities.”
The Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers said increasing class sizes is a step backward and will greatly affect students’ ability to learn, especially those with special needs.
“We had seen the lower classes sizes were making a difference in success rates for students and learning rates,” said Richard Goldfinch, QPAT’s president. “It made it so teachers could handle a class with a lot of special needs students.”
Goldfinch said if there are more students in classrooms, the government needs fewer teachers. “It’s all about austerity,” he said. “They looking for some way to finish the negotiations with no cost to the government.”
Teachers at French school boards across the province have also decided to follow their collective agreement and only work 32 hours a week at school, said Sylvie Lemieux, a spokesperson for the Fédération des syndicats de l’enseignement, which represents 62,000 teachers across the province, but not in Montreal. Lemieux said French teachers aren’t boycotting after-school activities but will only do them if they can be done within their 32 hours. “In some cases it will work and in others it won’t,” she said.
Robert Green, a teacher at Westmount High School, said he knows parents and students are disappointed with the cancellations, but he said teachers cannot stand by and allow the government to “pack 40 kids into a classroom.”
“In small classes, we find that all the traditional achievement gaps related to race and class disappear,” Green said. “We’re talking about harming the most needy students who have barriers in the rest of their life to getting a quality education.”
In 2010, the Quebec Liberals announced a $119-million plan to shrink class sizes in elementary schools, especially in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. By 2012, the class size maximum in Grades 5 and 6 in disadvantaged areas dropped to 24 students from 29. In other schools, the ceiling for those grades is now 26.
But it appears the current Liberal government has had a change of heart and no longer believes reducing the student-teacher ratio improves school success rates. A few months before negotiations began in March on a new collective agreement with the province’s teachers, former Education Minister Yves Bolduc told reporters that there was no clear link between smaller class sizes and student performance. Bolduc quoted a 2008 Université Laval study that concluded “the effects are more significant when the number of students is fewer than 20 per class and only for children starting elementary.”
Green said teachers can’t allow the government to “balance its books on the backs of the neediest students. The parents need to understand how serious this is,” he said. “One way to get them talking about it is to start taking away some of the free labour we do.”
Green said he did a survey last year to determine how many hours teachers at Westmount High School worked and he discovered that “barely one teacher in my school was working less than 50 hours a week.” He said Quebec teachers are the lowest paid educators in Canada and the government needs to boost salaries if it wants to attract quality teachers.
The extracurricular activities could be suspended until the government backs down on increasing class sizes, Green said.
Goldfinch, who heads the federation that represents nearly 8,000 teachers in the nine English school boards, said the government also wants to increase the work week from 32 hours to 35 and is only offering a three-per cent wage increase over five years. Quebec also is proposing changes to teachers’ pensions, he said.
A spokesperson for Education Minister François Blais didn’t return a call from the Montreal Gazette on Wednesday, but Blais told reporters on Tuesday that negotiations between the government and teachers are often difficult.