BC's public education system is gone by 2015

What you say about the Liberals may very well be true but you are misinterpreting Hattie's book.

BC already has one of the most privatized education systems in the country.  All private schools receive provincial funding not just Catholic or French schools as is constitutionally required in other parts of the country.  I will note that we just had an election campaign where education reforms were not a major plank of the NDP.  They certainly mentioned it but it was not highlighted very much.  The same can be said for health care which is also in a deplorable state.  The NDP's lack of focus on two of the big policy areas allowed people to think they had nothing much to say about fixing the real problems in both those areas.

The private school movement is less about who gets in and more about who gets shut out.

Buckle up, everyone. Christy made comments about a 10 year contract with teachers to the media after her caucus today. That contract will include contract strips to enable the bc ed plan of course, but given carte Blanche by BOTH the election win AND by the proven apathy of my bctf colleagues the opportunity for more changes presents itself. We have proven ourselves incapable of making any more than a very minimal personal sacrifice, and we are about to see the result. Our new imposed contract will include such strips as getting seniority provisions and draconian evaluations in the interest of allowing our principals sweeping powers to place "the right teacher in the right job". As far as the privatization agenda, I believe the intent is more to cut costs than promote private schools. The ability to deliver content on line and the ability to greatly expand the granting of graduation credit for non-school activities like hockey practice, bagging groceries, or playing the zither is what will facilitate the continued decline in our schools. The current funding formula is by "block" or course at the secondary level, so the fewer blocks you need to fund the better. If little johnny gets a few grad credits for riding around in his uncle's plumbing truck for a while, has his ultimate frisbee coach sign off on a bunch of hours,and completes a few other courses via canned content online, suddenly we have saved 20 percent on the cost of "graduating" this student. Expanded across the province it is literally thousands of teachers out of work if students are given the "flexibility" to "personalized" their education in this way. There may be benefits to the individual at the beginning of this process, but once the institution of the school as a cultural player is significantly diminished (as i the inevitable result in my opinion),the costs to future students and to our society at large are immeasurable. It is too bad that the voting public or the teachers are unwilling to support the only instrument left to stem the tide of this change. We have clearly demonstrated that we will not shut the system down to express our disagreement, and without that hammer, this unfortunate transformation is inevitable.

On  a Canada-US program called The Editors, chaired by our current Governor-General in the 1990s, there was a debate about what are the differences between Canada and the US. After a long debate, a right-wing commentator summed it up: there is one government-run sector in the US, euucation, and two in Canada, ecucation and health care; we'te working on privatizing both of them. 

Interesting stuff, but I maintain that the future of education in BC is more a simple agenda of cost cutting via irreversible restructuring than an obama plot of some sort. I guess I disagree with this thread's title as well. There is not some sudden unforeseen set of actions that will dismantle education as we know it by 2015, rather we will experience an acceleration of the decline that has been at play for the last 10 years. We, as teachers, have played a part in the decline by refusing to stand together, and now we are at the front line of the consequences as we weather the coming imposition of a "collective agreement".

tyoung wrote:

Interesting stuff, but I maintain that the future of education in BC is more a simple agenda of cost cutting via irreversible restructuring than an obama plot of some sort. I guess I disagree with this thread's title as well. There is not some sudden unforeseen set of actions that will dismantle education as we know it by 2015, rather we will experience an acceleration of the decline that has been at play for the last 10 years. We, as teachers, have played a part in the decline by refusing to stand together, and now we are at the front line of the consequences as we weather the coming imposition of a "collective agreement".

i never said what happens in BC is an Obama plot. But right-wing (or left-wing for that matter) politicians will imitate policies in a form modified for their regional circumstances of other similar idenlogical parties that have been reelected. Reagan imitated Thatcherite policies of privatization and probably even consulted her on how to do it without it being plotted out in advance. 

The Liberal junta in Victoria wishes to impose a 10 year Collective "Agreement" and has instructed the BCPSEA to take note. The BCTF calls it "rescinding the current bargaining mandate".

The Clark regime did not bother to inform the other side. This is what fascists do. Dictat.

As a sidebar, the BCTF noted "respectful and quiet negotiations" over the past 4 months. Were they played by the Liberal stormtroopers? The NDP did not bother to campaign strongly in support of education ... and, in quiet negotiations, neither did the teachers.  

"Nothing worth having comes without some  kind of fight."

tyoung wrote:

Interesting stuff, but I maintain that the future of education in BC is more a simple agenda of cost cutting via irreversible restructuring than an obama plot of some sort. I guess I disagree with this thread's title as well. There is not some sudden unforeseen set of actions that will dismantle education as we know it by 2015, rather we will experience an acceleration of the decline that has been at play for the last 10 years. We, as teachers, have played a part in the decline by refusing to stand together, and now we are at the front line of the consequences as we weather the coming imposition of a "collective agreement".

I never said what happens in BC is an Obama plot. But right-wing (or left-wing for that matter) politicians will imitate policies in a form modified for their regional circumstances of other similar ideological parties that have been reelected. Reagan imitated Thatcherite policies of privatization and probably even consulted her on how to do it without it being plotted out in advance. Watch non-union charter schools and independent schools grow as the public system shrinks. The BC Liberals have already privatized a large part of formerly the Hospital Employees Union (HEU) work. They have also made a rougly $500 million dollar repair to BC Place Stadium while closing over 100 schools. When one right-wing jurisdiction is successfully reelected after implementing privatization policies it encourages others to carry out similar policies. 

Incidently, despite Chicago being 42% African American, 88% of the students directly affected by school closures were African American and mostly poor. Yuu can expect that school closures here will also disproportionately affect the poor and NDP-held ridings. 

[/quote]

Justin Trudeau is a potted plant. Or a robot. No, wait, Justin Beiber is a robot. Whichever . The two of them are pretty much interchangable.

Damn. I knew I wasn't smart enough to have an origipal idea: http://m.thetyee.ca/Opinion/2013/04/22/Justin-I-Mean-Trudeau/

Good points. JT is a diversion in this thread anyway. C who must be obeyed has set the table: short timeline.e, new bargaining objectives that will allow a small,below-cost-of-living wage increase,with some tie to other public sector deals, and will proceed to use this "reasonable" image to tear into a whole bunch of other basic worker rights by stripping language on seniority,hiring, fair evaluation, extended work hours, working conditions such as class size and composition, and the slow but steady creep of invisible contracting out, which is an essential part of the bced plan: students obtaining grad credit from sources outside the school.

Fewer teachers, fewer services to students inside schools, lower costs . And teachers look totally unreasonable if we fight it because in the eyes of the public, we will be greedy and lazy for not jumping at the 1.62 percent or whatever crap they offer.

.

Its not thread drift it is just Jan telling us how much she hates Trudeau.  It is a subject that she fits into every thread.  No matter what forum or what provincial matter we are talking about it is all about Trudeau. Frankly I am tired of having him show up everywhere but apparently many people in this country can't get over their obsession with him. 

In the meantime the BCTF is going to get hammered and as is the norm in this province the BC Fed will issue a strongly worded press release.

John Hattie's book is a synthesis of research on a number of topics related to instruction and learning outcomes. His is primarily a meta-analysis with visual graphs to show the effectiveness of various teaching methods, organizational schemes, protocols, etc. No way does it support what the OP's local school pooh-bahs apparently advocated -- it's detailed, statistics- and research-heavy, and does not have any particular political bias, so far as I can see. Since it's not an easy read, I'll bet none of the administrators involved have actually read it, they have just repeated bilge they heard at workshops. I meet few in the education bureaucracy who are well-read or who actually know much about the policies they are in charge of implementing. 

I've gotten involved informally in advocating for parents, including some in my extended family, and have encountered such staggering stupidity in some cases I wondered how these people ( school administrators, some higher-up bureaucrats as well) graduated high school themselves.

Hattie's book, entitled Visible Learning, has a lot of data on what works for students in different contexts. Notably, it fails to confirm some of the favoured pet ideas, like dependence on technology, independent study (works for highly motivated students, not so well for many others), online learning, "discovery," etc. etc.  Guess what works, good TEACHERS directly TEACHING kids, imagine that. One of his most notable findings was the importance of immediate, regular, descriptive feedback from teachers to students (think coaching, music teaching..). Costs money though, not what they want to hear.

tyoung wrote:

This could be a new era of supportive action by the fed in the bctf's favour.

The BC Fed always says the right things. I too would like to see a new era of action and not just words or a one day of action however the structure of the Fed is what ties its hands. It is an umbrella organization that has no power to tell any individual union what it should do around any issue especially one that involves union members being involved in job action.