On March 25, 2006 the Minister of Edcuation met with District Parent Advisory Council representatives in a full day pulicity/discussion session.
Here are two reports on the meeting.
Brenda Dorosz, DPAC Chair , Okanagan Similkameen # 53. Download file
Debbie Derochese-Fullton DPAC Chair, Julianne Doctor DPAC vice-Chair, Vancouver #39. Download file
You are cordially invited to a UBC applied anthropology (RMES500Q /ANTH 409A) student research project presentation (project descriptions below).
These presentations will take place Wednesday, April 5 2006 from 6:30 – 9:30. Each project presentation will last from 20-25 minutes with an opportunity for discussion, questions, and feedback and then a short break to transition to the next project presentation.
Light refreshments will be served from 6:15 pm.
Presentations in room 205 of the Anthropology/Sociology Building, 6303 NW Marine Drive. Parking is available in the metered lot in front of the AnSo Building and the Museum of Anthropology or across the street in the rose Garden Parkade.
For more information email charles.menzies@ubc.ca. RSVPs appreciated
6:30 pm. Urban seed histories. Partnered with Farm Folk/City Folk.
In collaboration with FarmFolk/CityFolka local non-profit organization committed to environmentally beneficial agricultural practicesstudents will investigate the propagation of seeds in urban gardens.
7:15 pm. Social impact assessment of fisheries quota management systems. Partnered with T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation. The objective of this project is to identify the social impact of fisheries quota systems on small-scale commercial fishermen and their communities. Conducted in collaboration with the T. Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation, the student researchers will interview small-scale fishermen to identify their concerns with respect to fisheries quota management systems.
8:00 Grade ten exams and graduation rates. Partnered with BC Society for Public Education. The aim of the project is to examine the effect of BC’s new Grade 10 provincial examinations on secondary school enrollment and completion. Research will include reference to data provided by Statistics Canada on graduation rates; research undertaken in other jurisdictions about factors affecting graduation rates; Grade 10 exam results provided by BC’s Ministry of Education; information obtained through interviews with secondary school guidance counselors; and if feasible, interviews with secondary school drop-outs who are over the age of 19. The researchers will make a particular effort to determine whether provincial examinations, including the new Grade 10 provincial examinations, are having, or are likely to have, a disproportionate effect on the enrollment and graduation rates of aboriginal students or other at-risk group of students.
8:45 pm. Gobalization and teaching in public schools. Partnered with BC Teachers Federation.
Working in cooperation with the B.C.T.F. student researchers aim to explore the impact of globalization on elementary school teachers and classroom settings. The students will participating in and observing groups of teachers discussing the issue of globalization. Students will also conduct interviews with interested elementary level teachers
Message from Elliott Burnell, President, UBC Faculty Association
I am pleased to inform you that, with the help of mediator Mark Brown of the Labour Relations Board, the Faculty Association has today reached a four-year settlement with the UBC Administration. This agreement includes the “signing bonus”, wage increases in each year and language improvements -details will be sent to all members early next week, and an information meeting will follow the AGM Thursday April 6, 2006. Ratification of the agreement will be by electronic ballot – we will inform you of details next week.
Best regards on behalf of the Faculty Association Bargaining Team and the
Executive.
The tentative agreement for the period July 1, 2006 – June 30, 2010 provides for a monetary package totaling 13% over the four years of the Agreement, out of which are costed $3.2 million in retention funds, $600,000 for a subsidiary agreement with the Sauder School of Business, and $268,000 in other targeted increases – $50,000 to be applied to the Librarians’ minimum scale, and $218,000 to be spent in Nursing across both campuses.
Following the deductions noted above, the monetary package includes general wage increases and market adjustments for all members in each year and a flat-rate increase ($962 per FTE in year one) designed to provide additional benefit to those with lower salaries. The agreement also provides for a signing bonus totaling $10.95 million ($3,255 per member) less statutory benefits, to be divided among members of the bargaining unit.
In addition to the monetary terms, the agreement provides for a number of changes to the Agreement on the Framework for Collective Bargaining, including:
Leave of Absence provisions have been amended to increase clarity, and to ensure that members on medical, maternity or parental leave do not face excessive delays in eligibility for study leave. As of this July 1, 2006, up to six months of each medical, maternity or parental leave can be counted as full-time service toward sabbatical.
Finally, the tentative agreement creates a process whereby significant issues that could not be fully resolved by the March 31st deadline will continue to be discussed. Under this process, negotiations regarding the abolition of mandatory retirement will continue, with agreement to involve an external facilitator if the issue remains unresolved after 31 December, 2006.
Letter from UBC Faculty Association president issued today following a meeting of the Faculty Association Executive.
Dear Member,
Your Faculty Association bargaining committee has been negotiating contract language and monetary issues with the UBC Administration since February 15, 2006, and has not yet reached an agreement.
At 13:00 today we started the mediation process at the BC Labour Relations Board with Mark Brown (Registrar, Deputy Vice-Chair and Associate Chair of mediation division) as mediator. We shall communication updates as soon as they are able.
Elliot Burnell
President, on behalf of the Bargaining Team
UBC Faculty Association
Members of the University of Prince Edward Island Faculty Association went on strike at 7:30 am Tuesday morning, March 21, 2006, after late-night negotiations on Monday failed to achieve an agreement. Spirits of strikers were lifted by support from the honking horns of cars and passers-by and students stopping with coffee, donuts and greetings of solidarity. The Strike ended April 5th, 2006.
The strike concerned central issues of salary comparability within the region, workload, benefits and ending mandatory retirement. Late on Monday night (March 20) the employer rejected the association’s substantially revised framework for salary and teaching workload.
According to Wayne Peters, Association President, “This strike concerns fundamental issues of respect for academic staff and quality of education. Our members are determined to have a workplace that at least compares with other universities in the region.”
Welcome back to school and to Eduction week (see proclamation here). As school doors open we learn that the Liberal government’s plan for school boards to become venture capitalists has run into some difficulties in New Westminster.
Vancouver Sun education reporter, Ms. Janet Steffenhagen, reveals that: Education Minister Shirley Bond has ordered a review of a business company operated by the New Westminster school board after some parents complained that the company has devoured almost $1 million that could have been spent on schools and students.>(Vancovuer Sun online source; Download file.
Vancovuer parent Dawn Steele comments that this is exactly the sort of problems that parents have been worried about since the current government enacted legislation to permit venture capitalist activies by school boards.
These are EXACTLY the concerns we raised when Vancouver announced its plans to do the EXACT same thing. Thankfully, the former school board scuttled the whole thing very quickly, but we can be sure that these suggestions will rise again, and they raise enormous issues:
- As this story points out, the School Act provides no clear regulatory structure to ensure accountability.
- Incompetent/untrustworthy Boards hide their activities and their mistakes behind a veil of secrecy, pleading the need for corporate privac.y
- Most such activities seem to be directed at overseas ventures — where risk is most extreme, which only demonstrates the naivete and gross inexperience of our “entrepreneurial” trustees.
- Entrepreneurship is by its very definition high risk — the stats show that most ventures fail, even when you’re launching something far more mundane on your own home turf.
- Such ventures bleed badly-needed funds away from schools for start-up capital and they bleed our schools even more when they fail.
The moment we accept this idea of depending on entrepreneurial activities to finance education, we are choosing to stake our children’s future on a gamble. Districts that strike it rich can educate kids well, while those that fail will deprive thousands of children of quality education, through no fault of their own. Where is the level playing field?
Parents, PACs and other education partners who care about our children and the principles that underlie our public education system must say NO to entrepreneurial financing of public education in the strongest possible terms. Let our politicians finance their own salaries and pension schemes from offshore China ventures instead if they feel the need for adventure.News articles related to this issue
Businesses run by B.C. school boards lose money
The parent Involvement issue of UBC’s School Leadership centre is up and online. A range of articles, including my own reflection on the October Teachers’ Strike, can be found that discuss forms of parental involvement. Here is the opening to the editor’s introduction:
Two years ago the School Leadership Centre joined with representatives from several of the major educational partner associations in BC and with UBC researchers to engage the topic of parent involvement. The Parent Involvement Research Committee (PIRC) has since undertaken a number of activities to advance the understanding and practices of parent involvement. Ann Henderson and Karen Mapp (2004) have methodically collected a large array of American research studies that conclusively argue that parent involvement in schools makes a positive difference for students. However, when Ms. Henderson presented in 2004 to an audience of parent leaders from the lower mainland, sunshine coast, and the Island, it quickly became evident that parent involvement in British Columbia was already functioning at a level of sophistication that her research was just beginning to suggest might be fruitful. From that time forward, it has been clear that researching our own parent involvement practices in BC is a necessity. Not only is there much that we can offer to the global educational community, but if we don’t understand and theorize the strengths and weaknesses of what we do, then we are prone to give up valuable traditions that have evolved here through generations for the latest policy flavour of the month. Moreover, as many visitors I have met here at UBC over the last few years have observed, the education community here is like no other. The articles in this issue of the BC Educational Leadership Research reflect our uniqueness: from innovative leadership, to successful experiences, to lack of minority parent inclusion, to political fractiousness.(Continue reading the introduction and Table of Contents)
First we test the students, then we test the teachers. Maybe we should test the parents too? Just joking, but at what point do we realize that testing is about compliance and the generation of market revenue and not about education nor the assessment of real learning. Testing helps to make compliant subjects willing to be evaluated without question –just the sort of person who will refuse to join a union, who will refuse to stand up for themselves when threatened, just the sort of person who makes a great Mac-worker (to borrow Doug Coupland’s now famous term). Philospher and radical educator Bertell Olman comically makes the point in his book How to take an Exam . . . and Remake the World at the Same Time.
BC’s minister of education has put the control over aspects of some BC Standardized tests and the rights to sellsome of these tests into the hands of a private Edmonton-based publishing company, Castle Rock . Of course companies like these feed off of the anxiety of parents and students about making the grade in a test-centric world. The BC page of this company sells “quality, curriculum-based resources” to teachers, students, and parents. Without the push to standardized tests introduced by the string of provincial Education Ministers and former Edomontonian deputy minister Dosdall, there wouldn’t be a market demand for these types of resources. Pushing tests creates a busines opportunity and the chance for goldrush profits for those with an inside track.
The BC Society for Public Education has a veryuseful resource page on standardized testing.
Read about what is happening in the United States with privatized testing.
Educational Testing Service to pay millions for errors in teacher tests
The Educational Testing Service has agreed to pay $11.1 million to settle a class action suit over errors in its primary teacher-licensing test, The New York Times reported. The funds will be used to compensate teachers who lost jobs or some wages because of their incorrect test scores. The Times reported that 27,000 people who took the test in 2003-4 received scores that were incorrectly low, and that more than 4,000 of these people were incorrectly told that they had failed.
As with student testing in schools, states have increased testing for current and prospective teacher, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the claim that standardized tests predict who will be a good teacher. (Continue reading at the blog Where the Blog Has No Name.)
Since the Valentines Day Throne Speech of February 14, 2006 Emmery Dosdall, Deputy Minister of Education, has been distributing a Friday missive to the masses (i.e. superindenents, trusstees, and principals). They make for intriguing reading and I have inlcuded the first set of them here for your reading pleasure. I look forward to an engaged discussion of these carefully crafted message bites.
Have a great Spring Break
February 10, Download file
February 17, Download file
February 24, Download file
March 3, Download file
March 10, Download file
SOS-talk is an active email list dedicated to the support of public education. Many of its original members where active in the 2002 SOS Vancouver parents’ campaigg in defense of public education. At that time the provincial government introduced a series of legislative changes to education which including a manadated teachers contract an dincreased to the Medical Services plan, but they didn’t provide the funds to pay for it. In Vancouver alone the school board budget cut was 25 million dollars.
Vancouver SOS Principles
If you agree with these principals and wish to join sos-talk send an email message to owner-sos-talk@interchange.ubc.ca in which you identify yourself, state your level of invovlement with education, and any other details you feel relevant. Membership is reviewed but the discussion is open and unmoderated.Quote from the 2002 SOS letter writing campaign
We are a diverse group of PAC reps and parents trying to reach other PACs in BC, inviting you to join us in a massive, province-wide letter-writing campaign against proposed education cuts.
Our campaign began when Vancouver parents and PAC chairs came together to form an ad hoc, non-partisan parent group called S.O.S. (Save our Schools) – see attached Information Sheet. As parents we decided that instead of fighting each other for shares of an inadequate budget, we would stand up together and ask the provincial government to live up to its promises. We are currently collecting thousands of letters in Vancouver and starting to work with PACs and DPACs in other districts across BC to ensure adequate provincial funding for a quality public education system.
It is urgent that all PACs and parents who share our concerns act now because school districts must submit their budgets by late April. By collecting enough letters, we hope to convince school trustees and the provincial government to re-consider decisions that will hurt all our students.
The crux of our campaign is to ask the provincial government to fulfill its promises to make education a top priority and to protect education funding. Specifically, we ask that they fund the increased costs that were legislated, but passed on to school districts. We also ask the government to restore the funding that many districts lost due to their new funding formula, as this will force many districts to cut services or even close schools.