National Post (National Edition)
Teachers’ unions are kneecapping education
RESIST THE TEMPTATION
TO BLAME ‘TEACHERS,’
BECAUSE IT ISN’T THEM.
— MARK SCHATZKER
“What would my grandfather think of all
this?”
That’s the question I found myself asking recently. My daughter had just told me, midday on a Tuesday, that she’d already completed her entire week’s work. Her twin brother, meanwhile, doesn’t see the point in doing work, because the school system announced nothing he does now counts toward his final grade. He has a point.
And then there is their older sister. Way back in February, which feels like it was seven years ago, she got an A+ on her clay model of a cell. Today she is a kind of recluse, clinging to her room, keeping night-shift hours. The world she knew was ripped away, only to be replaced by a new one of desperate social interaction amid the lockdown. She is mad, she is defiant and upset. On her phone, we find invitations to join a smartphone app called House Party as late as 3:50 a.m. The other night, my wife found her in the kitchen at 2:30 a.m. eating a bowl of macaroni and cheese.
There is a reason she is behaving this way. She is a teenager. Socially, she is in that difficult twilight between childhood and adulthood. Biologically, her brain is in a period of profound growth — it hasn’t generated grey matter at this clip since she was a baby. Brains are energy hogs. So she is feeding it what it needs to grow — calories.
But calories are not the only thing that a growing brain needs. It requires stimulation. Facts. Arguments. Stories. Debate. She needs to learn, in other words. All those new brain cells are like an empty jug that needs to be filled.
Once upon a time, school filled that jug. There were French tests, lab experiments, vocab tests, history and math tests. All of that’s gone. Now she, along with her brother and sister, are participating in remote learning — which is a polite way of saying hardly any learning.
This would appear to be by design. When the lockdown was announced, the school system moved at a geologic pace. Its March break lasted the entire month of March. Then, when it finally woke up, the remote schooling it put in to place barely met the definition of “schooling.”
My eldest daughter, who is in Grade 8 — which is to say, preparing for high school, the last chunk of school before university — is officially assigned 10 hours per week of work. Think about that. Before the lockdown, she spent 25 hours each week at school, and that’s to say nothing of homework, which was significant.
My son, who is 11, does one hour a week of online classes. That’s not an hour of online classes before lunch. Or an hour of online classes in a day. That is for an entire week.
For too long, I just sort of accepted it all as standard Canadian institutional lameness.
But all that, I discovered, is wrong. The problem isn’t the government, or teachers. The real reason my children’s education has slowed to a crawl is enough to make a parent cry.
My path to enlightenment started with my neighbour, an OR nurse who has been seconded to a different hospital to intubate COVID-19 patients. One day she was assisting doctors through surgery, the next she was inserting tubes down the throats of patients dying of COVID-19 while trying to avoid their deadly breath.
It dawned on me: hospitals are government-funded, just like schools. And yet there they are, pivoting in the face of emergency — cranking up ICU capacity, clamouring for more PPE, flattening the curve and working a good deal more than 10 hours per week.
Why are schools so different?
They don’t have to be. My friend Jeff’s wife, Jodie, is a teacher. Unlike most teachers, however, she teaches at an independent school, not a public school. When the government announced schools were closing, Jodie’s school pivoted the way hospitals did. They had two days of meetings, learned how to use Google Meet and by the third day held their first virtual classroom.
This was, literally, months ago. Since then, Jodie has been meeting with her class twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and in between holds small group meetings and one-on-ones. All the while, Jeff and Jodie — like so many families — are struggling to teach their own children, because their kids go to a public school.
Why does it have to be this way?
Resist the temptation to blame “teachers,” because it isn’t them. Some public school teachers — many, in fact — wanted long ago to fire up the virtual classroom. I know this because another friend — let’s call him Jim
— told me the story of how right after the lockdown started, he received an email from his daughter’s teacher giddily announcing the commencement of live video classes. Jim was elated. Virus be damned — the learning would go on.
But then a day later, the live chat was cancelled. The reason? “Livestreaming communication is not approved by ETFO.”
You read correctly. Apparently, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario had killed video chatting before it had even been born. As the world slipped further into chaos and economic uncertainty, teachers were being told not to teach.
Could this actually be true? Was the labour body representing teachers really trying to stop teachers from teaching? It was time to speak with Steve.
Steve, to be clear, is absolutely not Steve’s real name. I can’t tell you what Steve does, or even where he does it, because it would put his job at risk.
What I can tell you is that Steve works in public education and has done so for more than two decades and holds a fierce belief in its importance. Politically speaking, Steve is as left as you can get without veering into totalitarianism, and he’s not afraid to say so. As he put bluntly it to me, “I hold deep, socialist, big-government beliefs.”
Steve insists that the public system is not the institutionally ossified wreck so many believe it to be, and he described to me how one school board in the Greater Toronto Area managed to get computers into the hands of tens of thousands of students who couldn’t afford them, and did so in a matter of days.
“Think about that,” he said. “They had to identify the needy, verify their addresses and ship computers to more people than attend your average baseball game. So don’t discount the work that has happened.”
Steve had a point. So I put it him bluntly. Was it true that the teachers’ unions were actually putting the brakes on children’s education?
“Yes,” he said, sounding frustrated and angry. “During the March Break, they put out an order telling teachers to pull back on virtual education.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I’m not privy to the union network,” he said. “But in general, they wanted to control the situation,” he continued. “So, while the world was coming apart, instead of turning to school districts and saying, ‘How do we help?’ they went the opposite route. They did the union thing and treated the government like some monolithic force that must always be opposed.”
Was this true? As the country slid toward dysfunction, was one of our keystone institutions — education — pushing it in the wrong direction?
According to the ETFO, the answer is no. Everything Steve said, they assured me, was incorrect. “ETFO’s guidance to members,” I was told, “was that they should follow the instructions of the ministry and the boards.”
I visited the ETFO website, where “Advisories to Members” are posted. If you have a taste for institutional spite, it makes for an entertaining read. There were eight “advisories” all told, and every single one started with identical wording: “Members are advised not to …”
What were teachers being advised not to do by their union? Mark EQAO tests, take a math proficiency test, report on other members. It made a certain kind of sense that the body representing elementary teachers sounded like it was throwing a tantrum. But, to be fair to ETFO, there was nothing advising members not to participate in online learning.
Steve laughed when I told him that. It was true, he confirmed, that there was no big official announcement from ETFO at the provincial level. But that, he says, was intentional. “It was all done quietly and off the record.”
“The bottom line is teachers stepped up to the plate — they wanted to teach — and were then told to step down. I don’t care if it’s regional or provincial, it came from the union. They asked teachers to cease and desist.”
I had to hand it to them. The unions were mendacious and self-interested. But they weren’t stupid. In the midst of a deadly pandemic and unprecedented economic turmoil, they weren’t dumb enough to come right out and take a public stand against learning.
But amazingly, they did. Three weeks after ETFO assured me their opposition to virtual learning was a falsehood, they publicly proclaimed they were “fundamentally opposed” to live video conferencing “being mandated as a learning tool during this pandemic.”
Harvey Bischof, president of the OSSTF — the union that represents secondary school teachers — publicly stated that online learning was “a risk to staff and students.” Then he grumbled that teachers were finding it difficult to work from home during a lockdown.
Did it ever occur to Bischof, I wondered, that trying to balance work and childcare qualifies as a privilege these days, not a complaint, given the number of people who do not have jobs? Did it occur to him this work-life balancing act is something every Canadian has to grapple with, not just teachers?
What would our hospitals be like if the medical staff took the same attitude? Here was my neighbour, intubating COVID patients — a job, I think we can all agree, presents a legitimate “risk.” And then there is Harvey Bischof claiming, with a straight face, that that virtual learning is a “risk.”
That’s what started me thinking about my grandfather. His own education, it so happens, was cut short by economic catastrophe. During the Great Depression he left home at 14 to join one of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s labour camps, where he drove a team of horses.
He would go on to become one of this country’s most accomplished labour organizers. He worked in the upper echelons of the United Auto Workers — this was before there was such thing as the CAW (which later became Unifor) — and went on to spend 20 years as general-secretary of ACTRA (the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists). In recognition for his contribution to this country, he was awarded the Order of Canada on June 29, 1987.
For a man who made his name working for organized labour, he was anything but some bulldog “union guy” out of a Scorsese movie, or a greedy, petulant slacker, which is fast becoming the Canadian union stereotype. The man was even-tempered almost to a fault, if that’s possible. From the day I was born until the day he died, I never heard him raise his voice.
What, I wondered, would he make of all this? What would he make of unions so powerful that not a single person I talked to for this story was willing to have their name in print out of the fear that some embittered unionist would make their child pay for it.
I asked my grandfather’s daughter — my mother.
“He would be appalled,” she said. My grandfather valued public education the way my friend Steve does, even though his was cut short. He grew up near Thunder Bay, Ont., in an immigrant household that spoke Finnish and his wife grew up in Alberta speaking Ukrainian. “Public education,” he always said, “is what made us Canadian.”
It’s strange when you think about it. The group at the greatest risk of dying due to COVID-19 are the elderly. We have, laudably, brought the economy to a screeching halt so that those who have lived a long life can live a little bit longer.
But when it comes to the youngest generation, the generation whose lives have yet to be lived, whose minds ache to be filled with knowledge, the people who keep pretending to care about them quite clearly do not.
It’s crazy. It’s wrong. It is appalling. And it needs to change.
IT CAME FROM THE UNION. THEY ASKED TEACHERS TO CEASE AND DESIST.