Back to school bogged down by bargaining
Back to school ain’t (and isn’t) what it used to be.
Back to the bargaining table is now the new normal.
In years past, teachers, parents and students could count on years of labour peace in between contract talks. No longer.
Looming over this week’s return to school is the prospect of perennial (or perhaps perpetual) labour negotiations — one round resuming almost immediately after the last. An endless cycle of talking in circles.
Two years after their contracts expired, and a year after a provincewide settlement was supposed to serve as the template for peace in our time, some teachers are still bogged down in negotiations (GTA school boards have settled). With the current three-year contact set to expire next summer, both sides are braced for bargaining to resume early next year. Enjoy the respite. While you can. This week, parents are probably more preoccupied by declining math scores or deteriorating facilities. Students are looking forward to team sports, spared the spectre of extracurricular boycotts (for now).
And politicians are still going in circles over sex education. The Tories tried to seduce social conservatives in last week’s Scarborough byelection by sending out thousands of letters promising to “scrap” the updated curriculum — until they had second thoughts about their thoughtlessness.
Against that backdrop of back-toschool distractions — teacher negotiations and voter seductions — it’s easy to get discouraged by the state of our schools and pine for a return to the basics. Less rhetoric, more reading. Less wrangling, more writing. Less ’rithmetic over salaries, more math for students.
For all the fuss about falling math scores, at least we still test how it’s taught. Teachers’ unions have long criticized the EQAO assessments of children’s math competency in Grades 3, 6 and 9 — most recently in 2015, when teachers targeted it for work-to-rule disruptions.
But legitimate disagreements over testing (and other pedagogical debates) seem destined to be overtaken by disputes at the bargaining table, which siphon endless resources from government. Is there a better way?
The last round of teacher talks was supposed to be an improvement over the past. The idea, incubating over the past decade, was to stream- line bargaining on a more stable two-track process for the public and separate Catholic systems.
A “central table” would determine province-wide pay and benefits, on the theory that there has been a single provincial paymaster since the Mike Harris Tories centralized funding. Local school boards could then thrash out the fine print at a decentralized level.
Premier Kathleen Wynne hoped it might repair the bad blood after former premier Dalton McGuinty pre-emptively imposed legislation on the teachers in 2012 to restrict their bargaining rights. Both sides were onside with entrenching twotrack negotiations in legislation. Then it all unravelled. High school teachers pre-emptively went out on strike in parts of the GTA last year, only to be called out by the Ontario Labour Relations Board for flouting the law. Elementary teachers refused to fully fill out report cards, accept parental requests for meetings, or co-operate on EQAO testing.
Protracted negotiations finally produced province-wide deals. But the Liberals got only more grief when the Progressive Conservatives discovered that the government had been quietly reimbursing the unions and school boards for extra expenses incurred in the complex bargaining process. (Rather than antago- nize the teachers, whom PC Leader Patrick Brown is quietly courting, the Tories leaked it to the media.)
The multimillion-dollar payouts, while a rounding error in a multibillion-dollar budget, looked like another Liberal scandal. The auditor general criticized the government for not demanding receipts, but found no foul play.
In the aftermath, the new framework seems fiendishly complex. But it’s hard to pinpoint whether the past five years of strife and stasis in our schools are the result of an imperfect process, or the rigid financial parameters brought on by massive budget deficits.
Next time, the government is unlikely to demand “net zeroes” from the teachers after freezing them since 2012. While that financial flexibility won’t make union leaders any more malleable, it may lubricate a creaky process.
As to the bigger question on the minds of parents — will we ever get a break from non-stop bargaining, so that the province can put more thought into educating students?
There’s only one certainty: back to school is more than we bargained for. We’ll know more when school’s out next spring. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn