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
OTTAWA—A new paper by
researchers at the International Monetary Fund appears to debunk a tenet
of conservative economic ideology — that taxing the rich to give to the
poor is bad for the economy.
The paper by IMF researchers Jonathan Ostry, Andrew Berg and Charalambos Tsangarides will be applauded by politicians and economists who regard high levels of income inequality as not only a moral stain on society but also economically unsound.
Labelled as the first study to incorporate recently compiled figures comparing pre- and post-tax data from a large number of countries, the authors say there is convincing evidence that lower net inequality is good economics, boosting growth and leading to longer-lasting periods of expansion.
In the most
controversial finding, the study concludes that redistributing wealth,
largely through taxation, does not significantly impact growth unless
the intervention is extreme.
In fact, because redistributing wealth through taxation has the positive impact of reducing inequality, the overall affect on the economy is to boost growth, the researchers conclude.
“We find that higher inequality seems to lower growth. Redistribution, in contrast, has a tiny and statistically insignificant (slightly negative) effect,” the paper states.
“This implies that, rather than a trade-off, the average result across the sample is a win-win situation, in which redistribution has an overall pro-growth effect.”
While the paper is heavy on the economics, there is no mistaking the political implications in the findings.
In Canada, the Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau is set to make supporting the middle class a key plank in the upcoming election and the NDP has also stressed the importance of tackling income inequality.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have boasted that tax cuts, particularly deep reductions in corporate taxation, are at least partly responsible for why the Canadian economy outperformed other G7 countries both during and after the 2008-09 recession.
In the Commons on Tuesday, Employment Minister Jason Kenney said the many tax cuts his government has introduced since 2006, including a two-percentage-point trim of the GST, has helped most Canadians.
Speaking on a Statistics Canada report showing net median family wealth had increased by 44.5 per cent since 2005, he added:
“It is no coincidence because, with the more than 160 tax cuts by this government, Canadian families, on average, have seen their after-tax disposable income increase by 10 per cent across all income categories. We are continuing to lead the world on economic growth and opportunity for working families.”
The authors concede that their conclusions tend to contradict some well-accepted orthodoxy, which holds that taxation is a job killer.
But they say that many previous studies failed to make a distinction between pre-tax inequality and post-tax inequality, and so often compared apples to oranges, among other shortcomings.
The data they looked at showed almost no negative impact from redistribution policies and that economies where incomes are more equally distributed tend to grow faster and have growth cycles that last longer.
Meanwhile, they say the data is not crystal clear that even large redistributions have a direct negative impact, although “from history and first principles . . . after some point redistribution will be destructive of growth.”
Still, they also stop short of saying their conclusions definitively settle the issue, acknowledging it is a complex area of economic theory with many variables at play and a scarcity of hard data.
Instead, they urge more rigorous study and say their findings “highlight the urgency of this agenda.”
The Washington-based institution released the study Wednesday morning but, perhaps due to the controversial nature of the conclusions, calls it a “staff discussion note” that does “not necessarily” represent the IMF views or policy. It was authorized for distribution by Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist.