Why Are Elementary Teachers REALLY Starting Strike Action? (Pass this on to anyone who is curious about why/how we are striking)

I have found, in talking to many people, that most people don't know the real reasons why teachers are taking strike action all over Ontario right now. It has NOTHING to do with "wanting more money". We have all pretty much accepted that a continued pay freeze is in the works, but we do object to other demands the government is making that lessen the chance of each student to succeed and, frankly, put the lives of young students in danger. Some highlights of the government demands include:

1. Taking all language regarding class size caps out of the agreement, making the government free to save money by reducing the number of employed teachers in each school by having classes of, say, 30....or 35....or 40...it would be totally up to the government's discretion

2. Making it the job of our principal or the ministry to dictate how teachers spend their preparation time every day, instead of leaving it up to the professionally trained teacher to decide how to best make use of their time. Trust is an important thing in any work place and very few employers sit and watch you every moment to make sure you aren't "using your time inappropriately".

3. Taking Early Childhood Educators out of kindergarten classes for part of the day, leaving one kindergarten teacher in a room with up to thirty 3-5 year-old youngsters on his/her own. Does ANYONE think this is a good idea?

4. Reduction of the number of paid weeks a new mother or father gets on a maternity/paternity leave, This doesn't sound like progress to me.

There are other issues as well, but I won't get into all of them right now. The government, like 2 years ago, has refused to budge on any of these issues and frankly, many teachers feel that they want us to go on strike to save money. The cost of full-day kindergarten is much more than they expected, they spent millions uselessly in the gas plant scandal and other debacles and they refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy or corporations, which prevents them from creating any new revenue for education, healthcare, infrastructure or social assistance.

They also keep throwing more and more millions into standardized testing, like EQAO, which yields very little usable data for a multitude of reasons (ESL students and students with special needs count equally with every other student, school averages don't consider that some school populations are much smaller/bigger than others, students who miss or can't write the test get a score of 0 which counts towards the school score, the questions are not similar to how the ministry wants to teach us to teach math or language to students etc.). Since when were students data and why do schools have to be audited like businesses? Kids don't work that way!

Anyway, below is a video from English Teacher's Federation of Ontario (ETFO) president, Sam Hammond on the current state of affairs with our union. We will still be working Monday and teams and extra-curricular (voluntary these are, by the way!) activities will not be affected. Our fight is with the government, not students. We still care about them. Time for the government to do the same.


Statement from ETFO President Sam Hammond