Recently there has been a proposal that instead of cutting jobs they simply not replace those teachers who retire? How is that not cutting jobs? What about the hundreds of teachers who have been jumping through hoops and waiting their turn?
I’m not an expert, but from my observations the state of things is due to a few facts: First, too many new teachers are being pumped out of the universities to fit the need and demand. Secondly, the unions have given teachers and school board members some great benefits but they have also helped to create a system that in protecting its members in ways that hurt future members and prevents the necessary flexibility to make educating more effective. It is about teaching the kids, money should be going towards having more effective teachers, not to school board luxuries.
If you want to make cuts then maybe start with the bloated school board administration and their mismanagement of funds, then maybe get rid of those part time teachers who are already retired and are taking percentages away from the newbies. Do not get rid of the position, but make more meaningful positions… turn those 10% and 20% where you can into full time. Make it so that the administration can get rid of those ineffective teachers (many teachers are great but even teachers know there are many who are a detriment to the children and their future). Fill those positions with those that appear to be effective, or have the better potential to be. Seniority does not make for a better teacher. Don’t cut those extra programs that help support kids in reading and math, help those programs be more effective by getting teachers in place that can see them work.
22% cuts to education in a province where the populous for the most part is being undereducated already makes no sense. Make the cuts where they make sense (away from the classroom) and make the classrooms more efficient/effective by replacing the 22% of teachers that are a detriment with 22% of teachers that will make a difference. NS education as a whole is behind the country and the world… we need to get our sh**t together, but that does not mean taking money away from the one place we can to do this. Promote our classrooms and good teachers and cut the necessary administrative spending and employees . Don’t F it up further. —NotATeacherButWTF
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2011.
As I said before cuts are not the answer. The whole system needs an overhaul. The number of students and where they are need to be known, then what is required to educate them. There are too many schools in some areas and too few in others. That also goes for teachers and admin staff. Get it back to what it was designed for – STUDENTS.
And yet student enrollment is down. How can we rationalize increased funding and more teachers/schools per student and still have dropping educational outcomes? 22% in my opinion is a good start. Do you really think student results will drop 22% as well? I would be suprised if outcomes dropped at all….which begs the question……
I actually agree with Walter to an extent…with enrollment dropping, WHY do we need an increase, or even the status quo? In terms of real dollars, shouldn’t we be spending less because we’re educating less kids?
Also: totally unrelated. I need a muffin.
i can see a time when schools will become obsolete…here ya go pk http://adland.tv/n1rv4n4g8/2006/apriljpgs/…
hahaha, thanks Painy!
You all forget, that for the past decade or two, class sizes have been increasing. Try teaching to a clasroom of 30+ of your little darlings. Unless class size is being reduced by 1/3, we still need more teachers.
And yes, a revamp of the education system, is long past due.
If you took a Doctor from 100yrs ago & put them in a Hospital, they wuld be lost. Same for a scientist in a modern lab, etc. Take a Teacher from 100yrs ago, give them a lesson plan, stick them in a classroom – no problem.
Unfortunately any reworking of the education system, wil be (at best) half-assed and ineffective, because there will never be enough time and resources to do it right.
It wasn’t uncommon to have 30+ kids in a class when I was in elementary. And up to 40 in high school classes. *shrug*
My son has to have a split class, grade 4/5, and there is still only 22 kids in the class. The sky isn’t falling and the world isn’t ending – and if there are class sizes above thirty in this province they are few and far between.
I am one tax payer (and parent) who is more than happy to see the fat being trimmed!
Perhaps we will also get performance based tenure for teachers, school choice, and charter schools.
the boy was in split classes in elementary as well…worked out fine but he had great teachers
I was in a split class in grade 6 because there weren’t enough kids to make a whole class of grade sixes. We had like 7 of us, MAYBE.
The total class size was like 15.
Wow and I thought I had some small classes.
It’s not just about the size of the class but about what one person has to manage with the fairly new inclusion policy. Children with such things as ADHD, physical disabilities, severe learning disorders, etc. need extra help and consideration. There is so much more to being a teacher than there was 20 years ago.
what can i say o.p., it’s the fucking government.
We had kids with all those issues in our classes when I was in elementary, Kim! A few years had this great kid who had a cognitive disability in my class — 3, 4 and 5. He was amazing and really added to our class, though, he used to torture me relentlessly by going on about how i was his “girlfriend” lol.
As for ADHD…I get the feeling it’s over diagnosed these days. How many of these kids are just bad? There’s no discipline in schools anymore, and parents sure as hell don’t seem to be disciplining their kids either so…it makes you wonder.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Speaking of ADHD – if you have never seen this a very interesting little video care of the TED series.
quite the vid dartmouthy. quite so indeed. and too fucking true.
I suppose I’ve seen both spectrums…
because of my name, I was always in a split class with the grade below me from 3 thru 6.
Never minded it really…. seemed to work well considering.
then I moved here to rural NS and in high school there were 3 people in my math class.
3, myself included. not sure what the people in my grade are up to now… but you can bet if it involves math, it also involves asking if you need plastic bags too….
Interesting video, dartmouthy. But the likelihood of Nova Scotia overhauling the whole education system, even if they agreed it was dated, will never happen. Drugging children to make them stay still…they know better, but they do it anyway.
Just because enrollment is down does not mean that we can spend less $. I’ve heard this before and think it’s worth repeating: a class of 14 or a class 22 or a class of 36 – they all require ONE teacher to teach them. You cannot simply start combining classes and dropping teachers to save $ just because the #s are down.
For example, think about high school classes: there are 4 different Math streams, for example: Essentials (basic, jr high stuff), Foundations, Academic, and Advanced. Oh, and let’s not forget about IB – that’s a 5th. And this is only for Math; what about the other subjects ie) in Science or Social Sciences?
So combining these classes & getting rid of teachers in this way isn’t the solution unless we want our kids to suffer by effectively stripping them of opportunities.
Oh and speaking from experience – 30something class sizes is not that uncommon in HRSB these days, though I do remember large classes when I went to school.
I’m going to bring up another point that Kim_NS raised re: inclusion.
There was NO full inclusion policy in NS until 1997. So while we may have all had a “Timmy” or a “Morgan” with special needs “in our class” before this time, they were not “fully” in our class. [We can argue that today they’re not physically ‘fully’ there, but that’s another can of worms]
What do I mean by ‘full inclusion’? It is the responsibility of the teacher to create/help create & teach individualized lesson plans (IPPs) for each & every student in his/her class who is unable to meet the ‘regular’ high school/jr high/elementary outcomes, in addition to teaching the rest of the students. And then there are students on “Adaptations” [to the regular curriculum]. It is common for there to be a number of kids on IPPs & adaptations in any given class, though at higher levels (ie advanced) it is much less common.
This can be ridiculously difficult for the teacher without any or very little support, which is the reality in most of NS’s classrooms today. What happened is that in 1997 the government decided that full inclusion was the way to go but resources and support have been declining ever since.
The gov’t essentially got away with a pretty sweet deal by dumping it all on schools, meanwhile providing fewer resources thus saving $: “Hey, here’s this great new full inclusion policy that we all really believe in and it’s gonna be awesome….[mumbling] just don’t ask us for more support; in fact, we’ve gotta cut some of that out to pay for more important things. Oh well, at least we can say we support full inclusion.”
Effectively, today’s educators have to deal with a lot more than their counterparts of 20 yrs ago, with a lot less.
“I’ve heard this before and think it’s worth repeating: a class of 14 or a class 22 or a class of 36 – they all require ONE teacher to teach them. You cannot simply start combining classes and dropping teachers to save $ just because the #s are down. “
But Kellis, it’s not on a class by class basis. It’s on a school basis. So if you have 100 math students, you might need 4 teachers, if that number drops to 75, it’s pretty hard to argue you wouldn’t go to 3 teachers.
As for class sizes- I’ve come across some pretty convincing research which shows bigger high school classes actually help students who go onto to university, because they learn to fend for themselves.
The problem is that not all students are going to university, in fact only something like 25%.
And that’s the problem. We got kids in class who will be drug dealers, Mcjob people, community college types, clerks, doctors, lawyers, the whole gamut, and we put all those kids in a class like Global Geography 12, which is the standard global credit, and expect it to work. It simply does not work.
Now about the money. Not one study has ever shown a positive correlation between funding and achievement. This has been widely researched by Thomas Sowell. Check him out.
What do parents care about? Well they say money but that’s because they link money and results. Results are what matters. Students who have reading, writing and numeracy skills. Ability to think would be good too. If you want these achievements, you have to bin inclusive education and outcome based learning. Neither produce results.
Outcome based learning has been a proven failure with empirical evidence. South Africa just binned it last year after almost 2 decades – it was declared a complete and utter failure. Australia also experimented with it but the parents protested on the streets to bin it. No joke. It is a serious failure.
But, for whatever reason, I suspect PC reasons – which really should be PF for polite fictions – we adopted outcome based learning.
Forget the cuts. Money has nothing to do with results. Do the right thing.