Teacher unions should bargain for smaller class sizes
Across Ontario, high school students have returned to schools offering fewer course options, reduced supports and larger class sizes.
In the Toronto District School Board, for example, over 100 full-time teaching positions have been cut and many classes are approaching 40 students. As Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation president Harvey Bischof summarized, “To put it bluntly, it’s a mess.”
Given that this is all a result of the government’s education cuts, it might be tempting to let the effects fully sink in to maximize the political fallout faced by Doug Ford and the PCs. However, this risks permanent damage to our worldclass education system and the educational experience of its students. So how do we clean this mess up? Education Minister Stephen Lecce has an answer. With teacher contracts currently under negotiation, Lecce recently suggested that class sizes may not have to increase if Ontario’s teacher unions can provide other cost-saving measures.
Lecce’s offer was met with scorn. The Star’s editorial board viewed it as an attempt to shift the blame for deteriorating conditions onto teachers. And the president of Toronto’s OSSTF branch said the union was not interested in “bargaining with students’ learning conditions.”
But this is a mistake. Rather than being seen as a political ploy, it should be viewed as a historic opportunity to be seized by Ontario’s teacher unions.
Currently, under the sole purview of governments, class sizes can be changed at a moment’s notice, often for political reasons that are neither educationally sound nor well thought out. However, teachers’ collective agreements can offer an added layer of legal protection against capricious decision-making by politicians.
It is instructive here to examine the actions of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF). In the1980s, the BCTF began a major campaign to expand the scope of collective bargaining to include items such as class sizes. In the 1990s, in exchange for an effective wage freeze, the BCTF negotiated a new provincial agreement that contained firm class size limits and increased special needs supports. When a conservative government later tried to unilaterally increase class sizes, it was rebuffed twice; first by the B.C. Supreme Court in 2011, and most recently by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2016.
Since their inception, teacher unions have been criticized as unprofessional for focusing on traditional items in collective bargaining such as pay and benefits. While undoubtedly important, focusing less on these areas — in order to achieve lower class sizes and better student learning conditions — can help cement the reputation of teacher unions as the protectors of public education.
This is what is happening in Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers’ Union recently rejected a 16 per cent pay increase and is set to strike in order to achieve lower class sizes as well as more school social workers and special needs supports.
According to the 2018 OISE survey of public attitudes in Ontario, more than two-thirds of parents believe that smaller class sizes help students do well in school. If something is important to parents and students, it should be important to teacher unions as well. Thus, taking the fight for lower class sizes to the bargaining table offers Ontario’s teacher unions an opportunity to create an indelible positive image in the minds of the public.
It could also set a precedent for teachers and their unions to start exerting broader influence on educational policy. Some conservatives might fear this development as an attempt to usurp the authority of policy-makers. But if teaching is a profession in which teachers are the front-line experts, there is nothing illegitimate about teacher organizations having an influence on all aspects of schooling through collective bargaining.
Ontario’s teacher unions currently have an opportunity to fill the leadership vacuum left by the Ford government. While they did not create the mess in our schools, teachers and their unions should seize the opportunity to clean it up.
Sachin Maharaj, PhD, teaches educational leadership and policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and is a teacher in the Toronto District School Board.