Stakes high to improve schools in the province

Hiring of 1,000 teachers will improve student results, Charles Ungerleider writes.

As a consequence of the recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association, and the provincial government have reached agreement on a plan that will create more than 1,000 new teaching positions. Further discussions will take place about the restoration of provisions of the teachers’ collective agreement that the Gordon Campbell government removed.

The benefits of the victory, more than 15 years in the making, extend beyond the teachers of B.C. to the students and the broader public. But the victory and the teaching positions it restores raise the ante for educators and the education system.

The BCTF has long and publicly maintained that B.C. education system is underfunded and that the system’s quality was dependent, at least in part, on the adequacy of the funding provided by the provincial government.

In commenting on the court victory in a BCTF press release, Glen Hansman, the federation’s current president, pointed out: “It’s important for parents and the public to understand how our contract language made a difference for kids. It guaranteed supports for students with special needs, and manageable class sizes for all. It ensured teacher-librarians, counsellors, English language and other specialist teachers were there to give students the individual attention they need.”

The BCTF anticipates that further discussions with the government and the employers’ association will restore additional positions. It remains to be seen whether those discussions will restore the approximately 2,700 teaching positions that were eliminated by the government’s unilateral legislative action.

Consistent with the BCTF’s argument about the difference its collective agreement makes for students, the addition of even 1,000 teachers should produce visible improvements in student performance. The federation has said that “the new funding will be used to implement two priority measures: adding enrollingteacher positions and non-enrolling positions in schools (for example: counsellors, teacherlibrarians, special education teachers, and other specialists across all grades).”

Specialist teachers who are added to the system’s cadre of professionals should produce visible results. It is not unreasonable to expect that, over time (and it will take some time) the graduation rates of aboriginal and special needs students should increase, attendance rates should improve, school suspension rates should decline, and student grades and their performance on examinations should also increase.

But, as I have said, even the addition of 1,000 teachers raises the stakes for educators. I use the term “educators” rather than “teachers” because the stakes are raised for teachers, school-based and district-based administrators and teacher leaders at the local level. Decisions about the allocation of the additional resources will be made by committees established in each school district by the local superintendent and union president.

Placing the responsibility for these decisions at the local level is the right thing to do because the parties at the local level should be in the best position to know where the additional personnel are likely to have the greatest impact, making it incumbent upon the parties to place these additional resources where the impact will be greatest. The interim agreement offers the opportunity to hire teachers in two categories that were not in the previous agreement: First Nations program teachers, and speech and language pathologists.

Assessing the needs and determining how the new staff should be deployed to meet those needs will prove a challenging test of the collective professional judgment of the educators involved. Formulaic allocations of teachers would not have produced the flexibility afforded local decision-makers in placing teachers to help vulnerable children or to address competency gaps revealed by assessment tools. Mistakes will be made, but, if the situation is carefully monitored, the professionals should be able to learn from their mistakes and better align needs and resources to produce better results. The professionals will have to closely monitor results. While it would be unreasonable to see immediate payoff from the additional resources, the benefits in student achievement and well-being should be evident over time.