Many of you have heard of Lynda.com before and if you have, you likely know it as that “IT training platform”. What you may not know is that it has become rebranded as LinkedIn Learning, and depending on how you get to it, you may see different logos. The Ottawa Public Library has an option to log in through their site, for free, you just need your OPL library card and a 4 digit PIN (likely the last four digits of your phone number, unless you changed it).You can find the link through OPL / BROWSE / ONLINE RESOURCES / LYNDA.COM
The main page will ask you for both your library card barcode number and your PIN to let you log in, and then ask you if you have ever had a Lynda.com account before — if you have, you can enter the info from that and transfer all your training history over to your new account. If you want. Or just create a new one, tied to the Library.
For those of you who are uber paranoid about privacy, note that the Library monitors usage, so they’ll know if you do a course. They don’t care if Joe does a course, they just care how many do which types of courses to know if it is worth it to pay for it again next year. But I digress.
What’s available? The list of learning paths is HUGE but they are grouped by categories:
3D + Animation;
Audio + Music
Business
Computer Aided Design (CAD)
Design
Developer
Education + ELearning
IT
Marketing
Photography
Video
Web
As I said, it has a history of being IT-related, but it has tried to expand in recent years for other elements. Here are some more regular courses that might be of interest. I’ve marked some work-related ones with an asterisk. *
However, before I list the areas, be clear about something. This is not simply a video or two to watch. These are DETAILED training programs. For example? The one for Excel is 25 hours worth of training. 25 HOURS. This is not free YouTube videos
Songwriting (write a song, become a songwriter, improve your songwriting skills)
Become a bookkeeper
Become a craft business owner
Become a project coordinator / manager / scheduler *
Become a government project manager *
Become a Word 2013 MS Office specialist *
Getting started with MS Excel *
Become an Excel 2013 MS Office specialist *
Improve our MS Excel skills *
Become a Sharepoint 2013 MS Office specialist *
Become a Powerpoint 2013 MS Office specialist *
Master MS Powerpoint *
Become an Access 2013 MS Office specialist *
Become an Outlook 2013 MS Office specialist *
Become a Manager *
Managing Change *
Fostering Innovation *
Improve your teamwork skills *
Publish an ebook
Design a logo
Become a content marketer
Become an SEO expert
Become a photographer
Become a photo retoucher
Improve your mobile photography skills
Become a web designer
Become a Junior WordPress developer
Become an Advanced WordPress developer
If you select one of the big Excel courses, for example, you’ll see that it subdivides into five videos:
6.5 hours of essential training on the basics of Excel 2013, plus data, functions, charts and PivotTables
2 hours on managing multiple worksheets and workbooks
3.5 hours on charts
2 hours on advanced formatting
5.5 hours on advanced formulas and functions
It then has another 4.5 hours preparing you for the Microsoft certification exam, if you were planning on doing that through Microsoft which you would have to pay for with them. But you get some 20 hours of training on all the elements of Excel.
If on the other hand you wanted to explore a non-work-related training area, like opening a craft business, it too has a similar multi-video production:
15m opening video;
1h15m on foundations of entrepreneurship
1h15m on creating a business plan
1h5m on legal options
45m on sales secrets
3h15m on craft photography to show off your items
2h30m on advanced craft photography
1h15m on customer service
The overall feel of Lynda.com is very similar to TheGreatCourses — heavy on video, light on interactivity.
As part of PolyWogg’s Reading Challenge 2020, I wanted to read the uber-popular “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson. I frequently avoid pop psych stuff as the analytical side is rarely up to my standards, but it is subtitled a “Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life”, and I’m willing to give it a chance. So I started keeping notes as I read it.
Chapter 1: Don’t try
The basic premise is that most self-improvement efforts are too vague or too generic to be helpful. They are all about getting more, doing more, having more success, and that the real key to doing so is self-improvement. But Manson argues:
Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.
And so people end up focusing on trying to achieve self-actualization in every aspect of their life, every achievement possible.
The key to a good life is not giving a fck about more; it’s giving a fck about less, giving a fck about only what is true and immediate and important. […] Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fcks in situations where fcks do not deserve to be given. We give too many fcks about the rude gas station attendant who gave us our change in nickels. We give too many fcks when a show we liked was canceled on TV. We give too many fcks when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend.
Oversimplifying somewhat, I would summarize the argument as simply you’re going to get annoyed about SOMETHING, so why not make sure that the something you are annoyed about is worth it. In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff, only sweat the big stuff you care about.
Hardly revolutionary.
Chapter 2: Happiness is a problem
The argument is that happiness is not a “solvable equation”. You find happiness by loving the struggle. If pain of some sort is inevitable, and you accept that, focus on accepting which pain is worth your while. And the journey is the source of happiness, not the destination.
Also known as “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
But Manson adds a small twist about finding problems you like to solve (i.e. what you love).
He then goes off on a long BS rant about links between Millennials, entitlement, and social media. Yawn. It was also said about every generation before this one. “The kids today…with their long hair, their rock and roll, their lack of responsibility…”. He then equates all of it to relying on denial or victim mentality, and thus the reason none of them can “change”. If someone wants to see an entitled summary of a narcissistic a-hole of epic proportions, his summary of his own adolescence and how his parents were to blame would rank up there among the all-time greats. Double yawn.
I did like one quote near the end:
Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
Not quite “I have a dream”, or, “I think therefore I am”, but there’s at least something in it.
Chapter 3: You are not special
This chapter is mostly meaningless self-aggrandizing about his rough childhood (spoiler alert: it wasn’t as “traumatic” shit as he thinks) to come to the conclusion that you can’t be special in every area, and maybe average in some or even the majority is okay.
Chapter 4: The value of suffering
About this point in the book, I’m starting to realize that he has some nuggets of ideas in each chapter, but most of his evidence tends to prove the exact opposite of what he’s trying to say. For example, his grand example of measuring things wrong is Pete Best being kicked out of the Beatles and the statement “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.” Ignoring the self-rationalization process involved in any kind of statement like that, there’s absolutely no basis to know even if it would be objectively true. Yet instead of pointing out the fallacy of any such “what if / road not taken” comparison, i.e., the entire basis for regret, Manson uses it to prove that not all suffering is bad. Okaaaay.
He introduces the common concept of self-awareness being like an onion with layers:
What are emotions?
Why do we feel certain emotions?
Why do I feel that emotion and how am I judging things?
But then he does nothing really with it. He does summarize true self-improvement as being really about prioritizing better values for ourselves. Now THAT’S an interesting premise. It isn’t quite the same as people just simply committing to service to others as a panacea for all that is ailing you, but rather a way of focusing on the types of priorities you choose. Of course, he does settle for complaining about material things or pursuing pleasure, but the idea was interesting.
Chapter 5: You are always choosing
I liked the opening premise. He gives an example of being forced to run a marathon vs. choosing to run a marathon, and often the act of “choice” determines what your outcome is like (pain or joy). I much prefer Kottler’s “Change” treatment of a similar issue which is that how you talk to yourself during trauma oftens determines how you process it later, but okay, it’s pop-psych here, not true psych. Where Manson goes off the rails is his interpretation of blame, choice, and responsibility.
Basically he argues that we don’t always control what happens to us, but that we can control how we interpret it and how we respond. Except every psychologist knows that statement is simply not true. Some of us have serious issues, we’re not all self-aware and rational creatures, so saying we don’t respond like Pavlovian dogs to some stimuli doesn’t make it true. But he wants to use it to say while we are “responsible” for our problems, we are not “to blame” / “at fault” for our problems.
I can’t help but be reminded of the classic comedy skit by David Frye called “Richard Nixon – A Fantasy”. He does voices for all the characters, and as Nixon, he gives a press conference explaining the difference between being responsible and to blame. He says, “Let me be perfectly clear. I am responsible, but not to blame. Let me explain the difference. Those who are to blame, go to jail; those who are responsible, do not.”
About this point, just over 50% of the way through the book, I would probably have chucked it if I wasn’t reading it for a reading challenge. And as I noted above, there are a few nuggets here and there that are interesting ideas.
Chapter 6: You’re wrong about everything (but so am I)
This chapter is badly named, not surprisingly, but I like the idea that many people like to live in a “known” world, even if painful, believing something negative rather than hope for something else that is totally uncertain and requires work to achieve. Often this shows up as “unrealized potential” — the would-be rock star who never tries too hard, or the writer that never writes. It’s easier to think of yourself as having the potential to be great than risk it all and fail. And so he concludes that certainty is the enemy of growth.
See? This is what I mean. Amidst all the fucks and shits in the text, suddenly he finds an acorn of value like a blind squirrel.
Except, then he goes off the rails again. He uses it to argue that what is holding people back is fear (true, obviously) and that it is fear of challenging their own view of themself. So, the solution for him is to redefine yourself as simply as possible so that you’re not trying to challenge a complex view. Yep, crickets. Chirping in the night while time passes.
Chapter 7: Failure is the way forward
Don’t be afraid of failure, failure leads to growth, growth leads to goodness, goodness defeats the dark side of the force, a temptation you must avoid, hmm, if to face Vader you must. Or something, I don’t know, he lost me in his own shitstorm story. I don’t know if he was smoking something or watching Empire Strikes Back with Yoda too much, but he kinda goes off on a tangent.
When he eventually emerges, he has some interesting thoughts about how we tend to think of a linear process of “motivation” leading to “action” which leads to “results”. And so we often look for inspiration or motivation to get ourselves going, to start “acting”. But he notes that sometimes the action leads to an outcome or interim result that will actually give us the motivation we need. Cause and effect, reversed in a way. If this sounds vaguely familiar, think back to every Nike ad you’ve seen for the last 20 years. “Just do it”.
It’s one of the stupidest ideas on the planet. Here’s a wake-up call — if you COULD just “do it”, you would have already done it and you wouldn’t need a fucking book. If you haven’t, maybe there’s something holding you back. And it ain’t motivation, asshat. Maybe it’s fear, but more likely it’s way more complicated than that. But no worries, try it anyway. Uh huh. Sure Mark, no problem. Everyone will get right on it, now that you’ve opened them up to the most obvious idea on the planet.
Chapter 8: The importance of saying no
I kept wondering if Marie Kondo read this book before she came up with her joy theory. If it doesn’t give you joy, get rid of it. Or in Manson’s words:
The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.
Wow, I read all of the previous crap to get to this? Man, I better get some sort of badge for this.
Chapter 9: …And then you die
Yep, that’s it. Or it could be called “…and then the book ends”.
Summary
Did you ever see the movie City Slickers with Billy Crystal? He goes off to be a cowboy for a vacation, and Jack Palance tells him that he has to find his “one thing” that is his purpose in life. The single thing, in Manson’s world, that you give a fuck about if you only had one fuck to give. And you could be happy if you organized your life and your goals around that one thing while letting go of everything else that didn’t bring you joy or closer to that joy.
Or you could just summarize it as “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff”.
There ain’t much else there. Even if it is written in more Millenial vernacular than Boomer examples.
People should support education, which is mostly about teaching (a narrowing);
The Government made a bad policy decision
Teachers are willing to strike for the bad policy decision i.e., the issues
Except the issues aren’t really “strike worthy”. Funding levels are not significantly off from what they were — we’re not talking cuts like Alberta is seeing for health care. Larger class sizes have actually been more or less settled already with the latest offer, regardless of how few schools would actually see those theoretical limits. Layoffs will be done by attrition, local priority funding is going to school boards and has been increased, and violence in the classroom is based on faulty data.
Not exactly a strong rallying cry when you look at the substance. Which leaves only two other items — pay and benefits. The nuts and bolts of labour relations. And a trigger for the other issues that unions are claiming they are fighting for, for the “kids”, they say.
But are they “strike” issues?
You might think I’m referring to whether they are important enough or not to strike, the same issue as I already outlined. The so-called crisis may not exist, but the much bigger question is a fundamental one of governance.
The majority of the issues — all of them except pay and benefits — are not actually labour relations issues. I’m not saying that as a matter of opinion, I’m saying it as a matter of actual fact in the teacher contracts.
Special education funding? Not there.
Size of potential layoffs or firings or number of teachers hired? Not there.
Funding levels of education? Not there.
Violence in the classroom? Not there.
Use of merit-based hiring? Not there.
Teachers are told by the unions that this is terrible, this is evidence of the government not caring. But the unions are lying. The reason these “terms” are not in the contract or the offers is because they are NOT actually labour law issues. So they can’t be in the contract. In fact, as everyone keeps pointing out, these are PUBLIC POLICY issues to be decided by governments through public policy processes (like elections, stakeholder consultations, internal analysis, etc.), not through labour relations negotiations. In addition, to the extent they have to negotiate them, they are terms to be negotiated between the Government and the local school boards. Not with teachers. Because it isn’t part of the teacher contract.
The biggest priority of all is Class Sizes, supposedly at least. And in the last contract, it doesn’t appear. Instead, there is a non-binding “letter of commitment” from the Government outlining its intended policy approach. It can’t be in the contract because it’s not a labour law term or condition. It’s a public policy issue and not only will labour law not recognize it as a labour law issue, but the Crown also can’t fetter its sovereign rights through an illegal contract. Instead, classroom size is between school boards and schools, while the regulations on caps come from the Ministry of Education. And that can’t be “contracted” for, it’s not a labour law issue. And the exclusion of it is a black and white labour law condition. Look right now at the health care crisis in Alberta. Massive chaos over plans to adjust the health care budget. Clinics will have to close, doctors may leave to work in other provinces. Wait times will jump. And yet, the majority of the issues are not labour law conditions for doctors to negotiate, they’re public policy issues. Which the medical community is mobilizing around. Politically. Not mis-using labour negotiations to extort public policy positions.
In history, it is hard to find true comparators, because unions are more recent phenomenon. However, prior to the 1900s, attempts to “force” public policy changes through any means other than public policy discussions or as part of general democracy/governance were generally considered treason. In the 1920s and 30s, it was called extortion and racketeering.
Labour law helped clean some of that up, legitimized unions and the interest of “labour” in contracts. But as labour law has embraced unions and rule of employment law, it has equally been very clear over the last 80 years — public policy elements are best left for governments to decide in Parliament, not in labour contracts. Pay and benefits is the only element in the current list that can be part of the labour-negotiated contract, and labour law rules have turned “treason” and “extortion/racketeering” allegations into something more mundane. If you attempt to add things to a negotiation that are not part of the actual contract, i.e. things that cannot be part of the contract, it is called bargaining in bad faith.
Unions aren’t dumb but they might have got outsmarted
Unions know all this. They know that the public policy issues cannot be part of the contract. Yet if they focus on only the pay and benefits elements, no one will support the strike action. They needed the public policy issues to galvanize support. Not only from the public, but from the teachers too. Many of the teachers want an increase in pay and benefits, sure, likely even deserve it, but many wouldn’t go on strike for it. They care, but they care more about the students. For the unions to get members to go on strike, they know they need the teachers to go into a frenzy on the policy issues. That’s where they care. That’s where they’ll want to strike. Yet, as I outlined above and before, the reality i.e. the TRUTH not the rhetoric is that the policy issues are neither actually serious enough (both before and with the latest offer) to justify a strike nor do they have anything to do with actual labour relations terms and conditions for the contracts.
But for the union gambit to work — pushing for more money, better public policy, supported by teachers and parents — the unions need sheep who don’t look too closely at what is on the table. They need them whip-ready to strike and protest and stand on street corners with signs. Galvanizing support, even if it is based on false portrayals by both sides.
And last weekend, the Government of Ontario apparently conceded a bunch of elements and put a bunch of the public policy issues to bed. Class sizes? Reduced considerably, in line with what public polling says parents are willing to live with. Funding for special ed given to school boards (rather than direct to schools), but essentially restored. But what they weren’t willing to budge on was the limited pay raise to 1% and the benefits raise to 4%.
This basically takes the wind out of the union’s sails for galvanizing support. And in a normal negotiation, the union would tell the membership about the offer, and either put it to a vote or at least reassess remaining elements and desire to keep striking or negotiate remaining elements. But it appears the union decided to do what PSAC did back during the federal pay equity negotiations. They didn’t tell the membership about the “offer”, they just said “no”.
PSAC was faced with a similar problem back when it was negotiating pay equity. The two parties had agreed on the payouts for more than 95% of the members and TBS wanted to send out their cheques. The money was in an account, the computer was programmed, they were ready to press print. And PSAC said “no” — they wouldn’t agree until all the members’ negotiations were done. Why? Because once the 95% were paid, PSAC had no leverage to force concessions on the remaining 5%. At one point it was so bad, it was more like 98% vs. 2% remaining. And the Government of Canada i.e., TBS was stuck. As part of negotiations and labour law, the employer cannot violate the rules of negotiations and speak directly to PSAC members. It violates tons of rules and equates with bargaining in bad faith while undermining the union negotiators. It’s a way to “break” unions. So the rules say you can’t do it. But GoC was being crucified in the press — constant delays, no settlements, PSAC giving press conferences slamming and slagging them all over the place. And members listening to PSAC, duly lapping up every lie. Believing that it was all a mess still.
TBS reiterated their proposal to PSAC to pay out the 98%, and PSAC apparently refused again to take it to members. So TBS found a loophole in the rules. While TBS could not tell the members what they were proposing to the union negotiators, they COULD fulfill their reporting and accountability responsibility to Canadians and Parliament and TELL THEM the status of the negotiations. So they held a press conference and told Canadians. And indirectly, PSAC members. Shortly thereafter, PSAC agreed to binding arbitration for the remaining 2% and they got what they wanted anyway (wonky ways to calculate the last 2%). But it ended the delays and cheques started flowing.
This past weekend, an offer was apparently communicated to the unions. When asked about it by the press earlier today, the union refused to answer the question in public (they know if they admit it that members will be VERY unhappy AND if they end up in arbitration, the arbitrator will crucify them for it). I hope union members decide to ask the question of them too and force answers out of them. Because the government agreed to just about everything that was asked for except the pay and benefits. It’s not perfectly everything, but enough for most members to probably say, “Okay, settle, no more strikes”. Yet the union wouldn’t tell the members the details.
So, five days later, the government responded to the “no”. They held a press conference and reported to Ontarians and parents where they were in the negotiations and what they were proposing. A complete end-run around the union executive, which was completely pissed. Almost every one of their quotes today was a refusal to answer any questions about when they had first heard the offer and then a complaint that this wasn’t a negotiation, it was a press conference. Yep, that’s how governments roll now when they make an offer and the union refuses to tell its members. And today they are scrambling. Claiming it wasn’t in writing (yeah, public policy proposals don’t go in writing, which the unions know), that it was time-limited to a year (like all government budgeting commitments), and that it was just dumped on them at a press conference (yeah, cuz it seems you refused to tell your members you got a significantly new offer).
Presumably, teachers care when their union lies to them as much as they claim to care when the government lies to them. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen of the sheep online, they lapped up what the union said and just ploughed ahead regurgitating the union’s spin.
Conclusion
So the issues they’re trying to “change” are not suitable for labour negotiations, but rather public policy processes, which they themselves admit. And the government “conceded” on most of them anyway. People have been wondering if the government disagreed with the union, then are they folding or have they agreed with their rationale?
From an outside perspective, the GoO has a huge problem. They are constitutionally obligated to provide education services. All it takes is one parent (or more likely a coalition of parents and thinktanks) to sue them for not providing educational services to their kids, and they’re in deep doodoo. People tend to forget that we have laws that say every child must be in some form of school. Legally obligating parents to educate them, which also adds duties and obligations for the government. It’s why they have to do full special education integration — because the students have legal rights to the same education, not a separate classroom. They have to be fully integrated. Anything less violates disability legislation, the provincial and federal bills of rights, and likely the Charter too. I try not to notice that the same “reasons” teachers and unions say integration can’t be done are the same wordings that teachers said “blacks couldn’t be integrated with whites” in schools in the Southern U.S.
But that leverage is why teacher strikes work. The union whips the members into striking on “issues” because they know with the kids as leverage, they can extort concessions from the government on a range of issues they can’t achieve through normal political processes. Eventually, the Government has no choice but to budge.
But it’s not “labour negotiation”. It’s achieving public policy changes they couldn’t get through rallies and elections by pointing a rights and Charter challenge cannon at Government, who can either leave students to be cannon fodder or eventually concede. That’s called extortion.
People should support education –> People should support education, which is mostly about teaching (a narrowing);
Teachers disagree with the government’s approach –> The Government made a bad policy decision
The next sub-element is that teachers believe the government made a bad policy decision.
Bad policy
In order for us to decide it was a bad policy, let’s first articulate what exactly the elements of that “policy” are that are irking the teachers:
Education funding levels;
Larger class-sizes;
Firing teachers;
Non-renewal of lapsing “local priorities” funding;
Violence in the classroom; and,
Salary increase of 1%.
I confess in advance that I’m going to fall off the logic chain pretty fast in this list. Let’s start with the overall heading — education funding.
Education funding
While the Government is claiming an increase in education funding of $1.2B, it’s a misleading figure, mainly as it includes a lot of money in there for child-care. When CBC boiled down the numbers, they found an increase of only $133M on a base budget of $25B, and I’m fine to go with their numbers.
I’ve said already that I’m a huge supporter of education, and I’m also pretty good at understanding macro economics, government budgeting, and large-scale policy sectors. Let’s start with two needed clarification about EVERY budget total by governments:
It is part of a larger budget of the whole government, which affects how much is available for that sector; and,
Budgets include base amounts plus temporary funding for special areas.
There is no MAGIC formula that will tell you what the overall budget for the entire province should be, nor what share should be devoted to education. No science or economic model will tell you the “right” answer. It is not unlike your own home budget. How much do you spend on shelter, food, transportation in a given month? Suppose you spend 40% on shelter. Is that a good number? Suppose you spend 60% on shelter. Is that a better number or a worse number? There is no “right” answer to that question, unless covering your basic human needs exceed your income. Some people want to reduce one number as low as possible so they move out to the suburbs and have a longer commute, giving them more money for other things; other people want to live close by to the city and pay higher portions of their income on shelter but avoid commuting time. There is no single “right” answer to that question. There are merely policy and budgeting choices to be made. This Government was elected on an austerity platform — they said they would reduce the deficit and that is what they are doing by reducing spending overall. No surprise there. And since they were democratically elected to do that, it’s hard to say their choice is “bad” or “wrong”, particularly when you look at the actual numbers.
As I said, the CBC has calculated the base budget for all of education at $25B, as per the government’s own public estimates. The Government is claiming it is increasing the budget by $1.2B, but that is misleading as they are including things like child-care in there. The “core” / “base” budget is only going up by $133M. About half a percent.
So let’s put this in clear perspective. The “crisis” that everyone is screaming about is that the increase was only half a percent, when they think it should have been more. Not exactly the dramatic “cuts” the teachers unions are claiming.
However, the pain is in the temporary funding. In the past, there was temporary funding for so-called “local priorities”. This was meant to be temporary funding for school boards to adapt to local pressures. And like all temporary funding, when it ends, everyone screams that they’ve been “cut” even though it was meant to be temporary. That’s kind of like saying “I made a lot of money last year because I worked a bunch of overtime” and saying “this year, my boss cut my salary” because you’re not working as much OT this year.
The additional wrinkle in there is that nobody knows what’s going to happen with the local priority funding. It wasn’t included in the budget i.e., it looks like the local “top-ups” are gone, but last year’s ECE negotiations added $60M+ back into the budget. As temporary funding.
Yet I would be remiss if I didn’t point out, the overall base budget STILL increased. Just not by as much as teachers think it should. That doesn’t scream crisis.
Larger class-sizes
The rally behind class sizes is an easy one. Larger classes mean less individualized attention for students, particularly in an environment with special needs students integrated in the classroom.
The unions have a really hard time with this topic, often because what they used to say was that integration was a terrible idea. That it was disruptive and bad for the other students. When I first wrote this paragraph, I was pretty damn harsh in my response. Instead, I’ll simply note that ableism is alive and well in the teachers unions and I will never accept laying their problems at the feet of the most marginalized group in the school. The parallels are too strong with teachers trying to block desegregation in the American South 70 years ago. That won’t work with me.
But let’s ignore that discriminatory element and look at the actual changes to class sizes:
Kindergarten — unchanged;
Grades 1-3 — unchanged;
Grades 4-8 — average size could go up by 1 student;
Grades 9-12 — average size could go up by 3-5 students (not yet decided).
Now, let’s be clear. Most elementary schools have their biggest cohort up to Grade 6, with many 7&8 being shipped off to high schools. Kindergarten to Grade 3 is unchanged. 50% of the school. And the other 50% could go up by one extra student per class.
Let’s look at those numbers. Most schools do NOT have overcrowding in their classrooms. They’re under the average. The distribution is extremely variable. The problem is that what drives an increase in the average are that some schools are heavily overcrowded. Why? Because there aren’t enough schools in the area, enough teachers in that school, or space in those schools. So they get bundled up and the average goes up. But guess what? That area has a problem, those types of areas, not the entire province. If the average went up by 1 student, the vast majority of schools in the province, close to 75% would be unaffected.
In fact, you could increase the average by 5 students and it wouldn’t change much in YOUR school, at least not in the short-term. Because most schools aren’t near the average. They’re running classes as low as 16 and most under 23. The board records show what many of the schools have. There are crap schools, mainly high school, where there are 40 in a class because the school board hasn’t straightened that mess out. Not the Ministry of Education, the school board. And yet elementary school teachers in your school that offers Grades K-6 are striking about something that doesn’t currently affect your school and likely never will.
Does this scream crisis to anyone?
Firing teachers
Here’s a shocker for you. The big claim is 1000s of teachers will lose their jobs. Really? Show me somewhere that has happened. No, I’m serious. Show me the 1000s of teachers who are now on unemployment because of layoffs. You can’t. Because I know how to read EI rates by occupation and there aren’t suddenly 1000s claiming more EI. The school boards have even agreed — nobody will be laid off. All potential elimination of positions will be done through, wait for it, attrition.
This means not a single permanent teacher will be fired. It sucks for wannabe teachers as a lot of jobs they hoped would suddenly open up likely won’t. But that, too, is not a crisis with our schools.
The basis for every decision is a little thing called labour market information. What does LMI say about education? That we have an overabundance of teachers, and we’re still pumping them out the assembly line. Doesn’t matter if there aren’t any jobs or that many teachers who COULD retire are choosing not to and working into their sixties. Or going back after retirement and taking up spaces for supply teaching since they are the best-qualified with years of experience to beat out newbies trying to break in. That is not the fault of the Ministry of Education or the school board or the schools. That is bad decision-making by wannabe teachers.
However, since we’re not ACTUALLY firing teachers, let’s not pretend we are.
But wait…aren’t there cuts? No, we already answered that. Temporary funding and temporary positions are being eliminated i.e., temporary teachers hired on contract are in limbo because no one knows what might happen with the extra School Board funding for local priorities. I’ll come back to that though.
Before I leave the section though, I would like to point out that traditionally, all Governments are TERRIBLE at cutting workers. They almost always say we’ll do it through attrition, and 2-3 years later, the numbers are actually higher. It’s usually a freeze of about 2 years, for one simple reason — to STOP / SLOW growth.
Renewal of local priorities funding
There is a challenge in here, and the people claiming a problem are dead right. Local priority funding, the temporary funding designed to respond to local priorities, has not been fully renewed. Because it was temporary.
But it was being used by School Boards to pay for supposedly “extra” things like special needs, Indigenous students, student well-being, and ESL.
Yet the temporary funding was to help School Boards adapt so they could realign their internal budgets to pay for this going forward. It was NOT additional base funding. Special needs, ESL and Indigenous students have the RIGHT to their supports and School Boards weren’t providing it. To avoid the School Boards being sued for not doing what they legally have to do in some cases, the Government gave them extra funding.
How did School Boards adapt? They didn’t. They just used the new money and changed NOTHING ELSE. This is a recurring theme. The Ministry of Education doesn’t run schools, the school boards do. When there are 40 people in a school classroom? The Board decided that, not the provincial government. Multiple portables in your school yard? The School Board.
So teachers aren’t wrong that these clients are getting underserved. Absolutely true. But is it a crisis in the school? Nope. It’s a human rights issue with both the School Board and the Ministry.
We are also talking about 2% in funding. One of the reasons it isn’t being renewed is because School Boards are supposed to be realigning money to address this problem. And they’re not, they’re just taking the new money and leaving everything else as is. That wasn’t the deal. So why should the Government keep funding bad local management?
But again, that’s not a strike issue.
Violence in the classroom
One of the emerging topics with some unions is the question of “violence in the classroom”. The rationale is clear — teachers and students should be safe in the classroom. Absolutely. 100% agree.
And if that was a serious problem, everyone should jump all over it. Unfortunately, it is a bit of a red herring, and I say that for two reasons.
First and foremost, the evidence they are using is completely fabricated. A bunch of them are using stats from occupational health and safety reports in Ontario on days missed, misusing the numbers and claiming on FB and elsewhere that it is more dangerous to be a teacher than a police officer. And people are widely sharing the memes like sheep, without first stopping to ask themselves…”Wait a minute…could that possibly be true?”. No, it can’t. Schools in Ontario don’t all look like the worst inner city schools portrayed in TV and movies with security guards, gun shootings in the gym, gangs roaming the halls, and metal detectors snagging knives every five minutes. There is no educational equivalent of Checkpoint Charlie in Ontario.
But what about the numbers they cite?
Occupational health and safety figures use “days off as a result of an incident” as their metric. And when they count those figures, they group together those that are the result of an accident (like slipping on a wet floor) or a violent incident. The memes going around show the large total for educational workers (not just teachers) which includes accidents AND violence and the small total for police that only shows violence. The combined educational total is 3x the violence only total for police. However, if you use the same metric for police, it goes up to about 6-7x that of teachers. As you would expect. And most of the OHS numbers are for accidents, not violence. But the violence numbers reported are so low, it doesn’t make their case for them.
If you want to limit it to violence only, you run into a methodological problem. If a teacher has an “incident” at school, and they want to take a day off, the union basically tells them to report it as an OHS issue. Why? Because they don’t get a bunch of vacation days off like most professions. Any of us could slip and fall at work, and if we didn’t feel up to going into work, we could maybe call in sick or take a vacation day. Teachers don’t have the same flexibilities. But if they report it as OHS, they get different leave approvals. By contrast, police DO have other leave options. And they are discouraged in cop culture for taking a day off as a result of anything related to violence. So they have a massive underreporting bias by police and an overreporting bias by teachers, and yet the numbers still favour police. Not what the unions want the public to hear, so they make up memes that are completely misleading.
Secondly, how do teachers say we should respond to this issue? By hiring more special ed teachers, psychologists, behaviour therapists, counsellors, social workers, and child and youth workers. In other words, arguing that “violence in the workplace” justifies the same increases they’ve been claiming should be done for other reasons. Yet the incident rate is pretty low and doesn’t justify that level of extra money that has to come from somewhere. Equally, it is hard to reconcile punting all these kids out of classes to the other supports when they have the human right to be in the class. Although it is consistent with the claims of teachers in the American South that blacks were more violent too.
Even if I separate out my deep-rooted suspicions, I’m left with lying numbers and a vastly over-stated set of false claims of a crisis.
Serious issue? Sure. Strike ready? Nope.
Salary increase of 1%
Ah-hah! An actual labour relations issue! Finally!
The Government was elected on an austerity platform and passed legislation limiting all public servants to 1%. Is it fair? Probably not. Should they strike to get more? Sure, why not?
Will I support you to strike? Well, now therein lies a rub.
Conclusion
So let’s recap. We know the Government made a policy decision, and it turns out that they are only increasing a base budget by half a percent while likely eliminating some temporary funding that was previously available to School Boards. Teacher unions are claiming it will mean larger class sizes, but Grades K-3 are completely unaffected, 4-6 might go up by a student or two on average but most schools (up to 75% or more) will see no change whatsoever. No permanent teachers are being fired, but some temporary ones might not be renewed and it might be harder for new graduates to find jobs. School Boards don’t know how much of the temporary local priority funding they might get to do what they were already supposed to be doing with their base budget and have done nothing to fix while the temporary funding was in place. The teachers unions are raising violence in the classroom as a new issue to justify massive hiring of more supports while completely lying with their stats.
None of that screams “bad policy” decision that equals “a strike is the only solution”. Not even collectively. Most of those are details that could have been addressed with School Boards or through the earlier political process by electing a Government that wasn’t focused on austerity. But we did elect an austerity Government. And the only issue left on the table is salary.
Can they strike for more money? Sure.
Am I willing to support their strike mandate for all of the other issues and/or their salary rate?
I would say “stay tuned” but the title already gives it away. I cannot.
In my post earlier this week (I support teachers, not a strike – Part 1 / 5 – Education is mostly about teaching), I was okay with the argument that education is important and teachers are responsible for the most important part of the delivery network. So I’m still on the logic train the teachers union argue leads to people needing to support a strike. The next link in the logic chain is:
Teachers are striking to change the government’s bad approach to education
That is a very complicated sentence that has three components:
The government decided
They chose a bad approach to education
Teachers are striking to change it
For (a), it is easy or even popular to say a specific person (the premier, perhaps) decided something. The chain is that this one person were wrong, so let’s change things. Except that is highly misleading. And doesn’t reflect the basic tenets of democracy in Ontario.
The democratic system and our roles within it
Like most democratic systems, we have five roles tied to the state:
Voters cast their votes in an election to choose representatives;
Advocates as individual citizens or groups of citizens lobby for decisions that align with their views;
Representatives almost give up their status as “individual” to represent not themselves but the citizens and taxpayers in their constituency in a collective decision-making body;
Service deliverers provide services through their role as employees, ranging from civil servants handling finance all the way to teachers in classrooms; and,
Users avail themselves of the services offered.
That’s the system.
Who made the decision?
While it is popular to believe that the person at the top is some dictator of everything, there were multiple steps to get to that “decision”.
First and foremost, we held elections. The voters voted and chose their representatives. And the choices in front of the electorate were relatively clear. A party that was strongly focused on trimming costs was elected by the voters. We did that. One citizen, one vote.
Oh, I can warm my cold electoral heart with the knowledge that I didn’t vote for this party. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. I don’t agree with their priorities or policy approaches. But the people I did vote for didn’t win. THIS party did. And they formed the government. That’s the way the system works.
Was it a lawful election? Yes. No coup, no voter fraud. Lawfully elected. Is everyone happy with who won? Of course not, that’s why we HAVE elections. Because we can’t all agree on one person or one approach. So we vote. The winner gets to be in charge.
Second, was there some secrecy, payoffs, bribes, backroom deals, a conspiracy to make the decision without anyone knowing? No. They were pretty open about it. Advocates and lobby groups and stakeholders, oh my, have lobbied them during the election and afterwards. They made no secret of their intent.
Third, is it within their power to decide? Yes. Everyone — and I do mean everyone, from voter to teacher to union to parent to taxpayer — agrees this is a public policy issue. What services the government should provide. How. At what levels. And at what cost. Clearly the realm of public policy and within the government’s power to decide.
Fourth, who approves the approach overall? The government per se, made up of OUR representatives, the ones WE elected. Sure, Premiers and Ministers have more say in the approach, but ultimately, everyone is accountable to the Reps. And they approved the budget for the government.
Why and how could they approve such an approach focused on costs? Because public budgeting regrettably often looks like the classic cliché that there are options to have it right, fast, or cheap, and you can only pick two. This government seems to have decided that cheaper and faster are the priority right now, so they decided this was the way forward.
Voters decided + advocates decided + the party in power decided + the reps decided = the government decided.
Conclusion for part two
Each step in that series of decisions was perfectly valid and everyone was in their proper lane. Teachers would like you to believe it was just the third group, the party in power, or even just the premier, that decided and that they made the “wrong” decision, so they are striking to change it. But nobody — again, nobody — disputes that the government both made the decision and had the right and power to do so. People just think they were stupid with their choice.
