Recruitment and Retention Allowance 2010

Members, a friendly reminder that the recruitment and retention allowance has increased for 2009-2010 by 2.5% (as per Provincial CA Article B.1.2.g). The new allowance for this school year will be $2255.

This applies to all teachers in the Elk Valley/South Country.

On your September pay stub, the amount for September should be 10% of this ($225.50) Please check your stub, and if there is a mistake, copy the stub and give it to your staff rep., who will then contact me.

Pension Workshop - Indexing is not guaranteed!

Your pension has the potential to be your greatest financial asset. It will be the major part of your income when you retire. Its spending power through full indexing is not guaranteed. Indexing is an increase applied to pensions to try and maintain the spending power of the pension over time.

Within the next year, the Teachers’ Pension Board of Trustees is making decisions that will allow your pension plan to maintain some measure of indexing into the future. The BCTF is looking for input from you, members of the pension plan, to give the Teachers’ Pension Board of Trustees feedback on options that meet the financial needs of both active and retired members of the pension plan.

Where: Fernie Secondary School library
When: October 26th, 4:30 PM
Who should be attending: Any member of the Teachers’ Pension Plan
Why: To find out why full indexing is not guaranteed for the future and what options may be available to sustain some measure of indexing.

Your opinion is crucial. Your voice is important. Please take the time to attend the meeting.

BCTF 2009-10 Member's Guide is now online

The 2009-10 Members’ Guide to the BCTF is now online at http://www.bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/public/AboutUs/MembersGuide/guide.pdf and accessible from http://www.bctf.ca/AboutUs.aspx?id=4298.

The online version differs a bit from the hard copy. Policy 10.J.04 incorrectly stated that the local minimum fee for 2009-10 is $340, but it was actually changed to $350 (Jan 09 RA).

Education Minister's words on her cuts...

September 14th's Question Period was devoted entirely to questions about cuts associated with BC public schools.

Watch these two clips with Margaret MacDiarmond attempting to defend her government's cuts to Parent Advisory Councils:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axBTkLkmZco

and to BC School Sports:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCnjBfNjBbU

(if you watch closely, you'll see Bill Bennett's face in the background!)

Bill 33 ruling, and the highlights of the latest BCPSEA response...

(dated September 11th, 2009)

" What is Relevant? Arbitrator Dorsey has indicated that it is the principal’s responsibility to determine what information is relevant. However, Arbitrator Dorsey has ruled that the relevant documents would include:
1. The class list with the identification of students with an IEP
2. Copy of the most recent IEP if it has not already been distributed to the teacher earlier in the current school year.
3. Any other documents that the principal deems to be relevant to his/her proposal for the size and organization of the class.

As noted above, to date no further arbitrable guidance or rulings have been issued that would describe what other, if any, documents would be deemed relevant by the principal. Principals need to determine at the school level which documents and information they feel are relevant to their proposal on an individual class by class basis. If applicable, and not already provided to the teacher earlier in the school year, there should be strong consideration given to the inclusion of student safety and behaviour plans (especially if not detailed in the IEP), and student transition documents prepared by the previous years teacher(s). The principal must also include copies of any additional documents or information that the principal feels is relevant in their initial proposal for the size and organization of the class. This must be considered within the context of each individual class situation. "

I would like to point out this passage from above:

"there should be strong consideration given to the inclusion of student safety and behaviour plans (especially if not detailed in the IEP), and student transition documents prepared by the previous years teacher(s)."

NEXT:
" Clarification: Where the teachers of a single class and the principal agree, a joint consultation involving these teachers and the principal may occur. This does not preclude any teacher of that class from opting for an individual consultation instead. "

NEXT:
" Clarification: While it was acknowledged that, subject to any collective agreement language, there is no requirement under Bill 33 to provide paid release time for attending or preparing for the consultation, the BCTF felt that these guidelines promoted districts scheduling consultations during lunch and recess. It is recommended that consultations only occur during times of the day that permit adequate time for discussion. "

Bill 33 ruling on the provision of relevant materials

Hot off the press from the 28 page ruling that came out today.... and since it is a public document...

Numbers in [square brackets] are the paragraphs from the ruling.

[9] During the legislative debates, concerns were raised about the nature, scope and content of the required consultations that will most frequently have to happen in September, one of the busiest times in the school year. The Minister said the principle was that there is to be consultation about class organization .... The Minister was unequivocal that the expectation and best practice was a conversation between principals and teachers. They meet and talk to each other about the best way possible to meet the students’ needs.

[24] BCPSEA is not a partner organization of the Learning Roundtable, but is responsible to advise its board of education employer members on the implementation of the new regulation.

[69] The striking feature of the definition is that it addresses what principals must do for teachers. They must provide information. They must provide time to consider the information before engaging teachers in consultation. They must consider any teachers’ views that are provided.

[70] Principals must provide “information relevant to a proposal for the size and organization of the class.” This suggests there was a concern with the quality or accessibility of the information base on which principal-teacher consultation dialogues were taking place.

[71] Principals must provide the information at a time that gives teachers two school days to consider the proposal for the size and organization of the class and to provide their views to the principal “before a decision is made respecting the size and organization of the class.”

[73] This context suggests the concern was not with the teacher knowing the proposed size and organization of the class or the names of the students in the class, which might be known as early as June, but with ensuring teachers have adequate access to information and time to reflect before being asked to articulate their views on the proposal. An unprepared consultation can be a hurried consultation that leaves teachers being consulted deciding it was neither a genuine opportunity to express their views nor a sincere effort to seek their views. Conversely, it can be an unfocused, inefficient, perhaps prolonged, search for accurate information that is not productive for either the principal or the teacher. In either scenario, it can be correctly characterized as futile or meaningless .

[74] Principals must consider teachers’ views in making a final decision about the organization of the classes. This reassures teachers their participation and expression of views will be considered.

[84] The requirement for “provision” in the definition of “consult” has two applications. One is to make available to teachers two school days for consideration of proposals for the size and organization of classes and the information relevant to the proposals. The application of “provision” in this context is scheduling, unlike the outcome in British Columbia Public School Employers’ Association [2007] B.C.C.A.A.A. No. 60 (Kinzie) (QL). An integral part of this “provision” is that teachers actually have the relevant information for at least two school days and do not have to spend those days seeking access to the information.

[85] This requirement might be recognition of the many demands on teachers’ time in the first weeks of the school year for individual and collaborative activities. At the same time, it places another burden on principals who must manage the process and have equal or greater demands on their time.

[89] BCPSEA is not correct in advising that instructing teachers how to access relevant information about individual students and having the teachers seek out and perhaps compete with colleagues and administrators for access to that information, with or without the assistance of non-enrolling colleagues who likely have ongoing student service and teacher responsibilities away from their offices or classrooms, is meeting the responsibility to make provision of information relevant to a proposal for the size and organization of the class.

[90] This approach, in effect, continues the status quo before the regulatory amendment and is not consistent with remedying a mischief or establishing a consistent consultation practice as was intended by making the regulatory amendment. Nor is it consistent with effective and timely consultation practice to have multiple users seeking access to a single source at the same time with the accompanying high risk of delay and frustration of the required consultation.

[91] Principals are responsibility to ensure there is a meaningful and effective consultation process, regardless whether teachers choose to take advantage of it. Timely notice, advance disclosure and provision of information that principal s consider relevant, time for teachers to consider the information and open-minded consideration of teachers’ views and whatever information teachers think is relevant and provide to principals are benchmarks or good practices that principals are directed to follow for an effective and meaningful consultation process. Timely provision of relevant information may persuade some teachers they will not disagree with the proposed size and organization of the classes and waive their right to continue with the process.

[94] If copies of the individual education plans for each teacher’s students have not been provided by the time of the notification package, the information in the individual education plans is relevant information. Principals are required to provide this information to teachers either by electronic access or by delivering copies of the documents to the teachers.

[98] In short, principals will not discharge their responsibility to make provision of relevant information to teachers by telling them the nature of the information relevant to the proposed size and organization of the classes assigned to them and saying to them if they want to discuss this information at the scheduled consultation meeting they can get it whenever it might be accessible to them through the custodian of the information.

[100] For the purposes of this dispute, decision and declaration it is not appropriate to comment on any source of potentially relevant information other than individual education plans, which have been determined and agreed to be relevant sources of information. If individual education plans for students in the class have not been distributed to teachers before the consultation notification package and they are not electronically available to the teachers, copies must be included with the materials in the notification package.

Toronto teachers get a new Collective Agreement!

City public high school teachers ratify deal; Union pleased with 4-year pact that gives them 12% hike and 'no significant changes', The Toronto Star, Fri Sep 11 2009. Kristin Rushowy

Toronto's public high school teachers have ratified a four-year contract with the board that allows principals to assign them to cover for absent colleagues if a substitute can't be found.

But what emerged as the key sticking point during negotiations - how much supervision teachers provide in hallways or cafeterias - remains the same, and is still by far the lowest amount of time in the province.
.....

Doug Jolliffe, president of District 12 of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation, said 98 per cent of members supported the deal, which also provides a 12.55 per cent wage increase over the next four years, as provided by the provincial government.

......

"It was not an unreasonable request on the part of the board," for principals to call on teachers to fill in for a colleague's full-day absence if a substitute isn't available, Jolliffe said.

The union said all along it would not agree to any "strips," or clawbacks, to supervision. Its members do the lowest amount of supervision anywhere in Ontario.
....

Toronto teachers can do 37 supervision blocks of roughly 40 minutes each, per school year, monitoring hallways or computer rooms or filling in for colleagues who are absent for part of the day. But because of restrictions written into past agreements, they only end up doing about 12.

In the past, principals and vice-principals have had to cover the classes, taking them away from administrative duties also creating safety concerns, Campbell said.

From a column by Paul Willcocks... on education cuts

A remarkably bad string of school cuts, Times Colonist (Victoria), Fri Sep 11 2009. Paul Willcocks

....In the last two weeks, the government has announced four cuts to education funding. None seems sensible.

Leave aside the discussion about core school funding and the problems created by per-pupil grants. These are cuts outside of that envelope.

The biggest is the elimination of $110 million in funding that districts had expected for maintaining schools this year. The annual grants provide for upkeep and capital improvements -- wheelchair ramps, classroom renovations and all the standard maintenance needed to keep buildings functional and safe.

Five months into the fiscal year, Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid cancelled the grant program without notice or consultation. Some districts had set aside money each year to build reserves for major projects; they could raid that money to cover needed work, she said.

So prudence is punished. Districts which did maintenance work over the summer, counting on the grants, have to cut spending to balance the budget as required by law. And economic stimulus is abandoned.

Next, MacDiarmid was sent out to defend a decision to eliminate the government's entire $130,000 contribution to B.C. School Sports, almost 30 per cent of its budget. The organization helps support and manage all the regional and provincial sports events for schools in the province.
......

Then came the most perverse cut.

At a staged event to highlight $500,000 being sent to schools for Olympic programming -- about four times the amount saved by cutting the sports funding -- MacDiarmid revealed the grants to parent advisory councils would be cut in half. (Again, without warning or
consultation.)

They had received $20 per student. This year, it would be $10. The government would save $7.6 million, at the expense of parent councils at schools across the province.

....Finally -- at least so far -- the government cut almost $2 million, or about four per cent, from the CommunityLINK program. It provides meals for hungry children and counselling to keep struggling students on track. And it's not a high enough priority to justify consistent funding, in the government's view.

...

From your Social Justice Chair

Here is the link to Margaret White's research about poverty.

http://www.bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Publications/Research_reports/2009EI01.pdf

(This is a 22 page pdf file of a research report by Ms. White at the BCTF)

What do standardized tests evaluate?

12,000 Teacher Reports, but What to Do?, The New York Times, Wed Sep 9 2009. Jennifer Medina

As the city's students return to school on Wednesday, thousands will enter classrooms led by a teacher that the Department of Education has deemed low performing on internal reports. But in a sign of how complicated and controversial the reports are, many teachers never received them, and there are no plans to release them to parents.

The reports use standardized test scores to monitor how much teachers have helped students improve from one year to the next and whether they are successful with particular groups of children, such as boys or those who have struggled for years.

During the last school year, education officials distributed some 12,000 reports that considered how well teachers did in educating students, producing a report for any teacher who taught fourth through eighth grade for the last two years. The reports put New York at the center of a national debate over ways to measure the effectiveness of individual teachers and the role that test scores should play in the evaluations.

"We've always said that we need to be able to understand where teachers are successful and learn from that," the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in an interview last week. "Nobody thinks you can boil down teacher effectiveness to a single criteria, and we also should not ignore student performance as an important criteria."

Last year, the State Legislature passed a law prohibiting using student test data as a factor in tenure decisions, at the urging of teachers' unions. And in a deal with the United Federation of Teachers, the city agreed not to make the results public.

While Mr. Klein has repeatedly said that the data reports would not be used to shape teacher evaluation and pay, he has also said that he wants to move away from the practice of lockstep pay and salary increases based solely on seniority. He said he would continue to push for such changes in the coming teachers' contract, but it remains unclear if Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg would pursue such changes in the negotiations, particularly in an election year.

President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, have pushed states to use student performance to evaluate teachers, declaring that states that banned use of student data would be ineligible for billions of dollars in competitive grants from the federal government. Last week, the Gates Foundation announced that it would work with the city and the union to develop a new way to measure teachers by using student performance on tests along with extensive classroom observations and videotaped lessons.

Last week, the school system released another set of marks, letter grades for each school, in which 97 percent received an A or B. In contrast, on the teacher reports, 20 percent earned "low" performance marks, 60 percent were called "middle" performers and 20 percent "high."

While both grading systems were based largely on test scores, schools were able to earn A's and B's if more of their students passed the tests. Teachers were essentially ranked against other teachers, both citywide and those who taught demographically similar classrooms.

For Odelphia Pierre, the principal of Public School 129 in Harlem, the teacher data reports were little more than extra information.
While department officials estimated that 80 percent of principals spoke with their teachers about the reports, several principals said the reports had so many problems that they decided not to give them to teachers.

Ms. Pierre, for example, said that she worried about how the reports would affect morale and decided that she would tell teachers they could see the reports if they wanted. Most of those who did, she said, were among the higher teachers.

"I really didn't see the purpose, because it wasn't very clear what they were supposed to take away, and they might have had questions I would have not been able to answer," she said. "I didn't want them to be distracted in the middle of the year."

Denise Bazemore, who has taught third grade for nearly a decade at P.S. 129, said that while several of her colleagues were not interested, she was eager to see how she compared to her peers around the city.

"I think it was helpful just to know where you stand," said Ms.
Bazemore, a "middle" performer. "I do wish it would tell you where to go from there, but it is what it is."

Ms. Pierre said she did pay closer attention to teachers who ranked in the bottom tier of the reports, stopping in their classrooms to evaluate them more frequently than she might have, though she never told them that directly.

For the last two years, the department created its own report with the help of outside experts, but this year agreed to a $1.1 million contract with a group at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research to produce the reports. The group is expected to spend much of its efforts on making sure that the city's Education Department's data is complete and accurate.

For some principals, the reports are helpful in managing a large staff. Sheldon Benardo, the principal of Public School 86 in the Bronx, said he used them to decide teacher and student placement.

"If it was completely shocking, I would not be doing my job as a principal," he said. "But whenever you have hard data that tells you something, whether it's a weakness somewhere or something else, it only can motivate you to do something better."

Mr. Benardo passed out the report to each of the teachers, having them meet with the assistant principal individually to discuss the report. He said that while the majority of his teachers fell somewhere along the middle, there were several at the top end and a few in the lower ranks

"It's not like anyone was insulted or felt intruded upon -- they know that data is part of the game here," he said. "Like any of us, when we don't perform so well, we are going to attempt to rationalize, to justify and explain. I have a great respect for our classroom teachers, and if they're here it means I selected them for a job, so I am going to pay attention to what they're saying."