Perhaps nothing has been more politicized during the pandemic than the health and well-being of children. Children’s lives should not be a political football, and for that reason I approach the subject with caution. At the same time, when kids have been caught in a world where their lives are disrupted and endangered by the actions of adults, the impact of that demands examination. Perhaps, when the argument comes up of “won’t someone think of the children,” the best test of who is acting in good faith is to see who was thinking of the children all along. - Chapter 8, A Healthy Future
Thank you Larger Scale readers for your patience with a brief pause on posts as we’ve been getting settled into a more regular life and work duties here in Maseru. In the coming days you’ll see a series on syndemics informed by observations from Lesotho and Saskatchewan. But first, a few thoughts on school.
We were very lucky to find schools a short walk away from where we’re staying and the Partners In Health office. With the holiday break over, our boys have just started school here now, finding new friends and so far adjusting well to the uniforms, harsher discipline, and heavier homework of a very different school system.
A Line in the Snow
We also continue to watch what’s happening with schools back in Saskatchewan, including yesterday’s one-day teacher’s strike. A day off in the dead of winter is a minor inconvenience to families. But it sends a message. Everyone can make it work for a day, what would it be like to try to make this work for weeks? It also reminds people how teachers have to scramble every day to try to make an untenable situation work in their overcrowded and complex classrooms, for the kids whose future is in their care.
This is the main sticking point in the negotiations, with teachers wanting to include language on class size and composition in the contract. The BC Teachers Union won the right to do this in a 2016 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and Saskatchewan teachers want to use the same mechanism to improve their work conditions and the conditions for children in their classrooms. Minister of Education Jeremy Cockrill has described this as his “line in the sand," willing to increase salaries for teachers but not to include these key measures
Today’s situation recalled to me a passage from the original 2012 version of A Healthy Society:
In order to provide the kind of learning environment that will create more responsible future leaders,, we need first to value those who do the front line work. As I was writing this chapter, Saskatchewan’s teachers had taken strike action for the first time in nearly eighty years. Like most strikes, the headlines come down to wages and percentages; the teachers wanting more, the government offering less, and the public in the middle wondering what’s fair. As with most strikes, there were deeper questions that didn’t make the headlines.
How do we value the work teachers do? If we are committed to the best education for young people, what is needed to make that happen? Clearly, it includes attracting bright, committed people to the teaching profession. This means not only paying them well, but also creating the kind of environment in which they and their students can thrive. To be effective at responding to and leading educational innovation, teachers need the opportunities to improve on their existing skills and learn additional and emerging techniques throughout their careers. Rather than going backward to a more prescriptive and less responsive system of education, or playing hard ball with teachers over their demands, we need to explore ways to advance the cause of learning at all levels.
There is nothing earthshaking about these thoughts. The idea that education is a public good and requires care and attention seems pretty obvious. And yet, early on in their government, the Sask Party decided that teachers made for good heels in their political wrestling ring. They’ve painted teachers as overpaid and underworked and attacked their professional integrity. Anyone who’s knocked doors in the last decade has heard the response, “I’m a teacher, so I think you can guess where my vote is going.” This climate of mutual distrust and disdain was only worsened when Scott Moe decided to try to keep his far-right flank happy by bringing American-style culture wars into the classroom over the delicate issue of gender identification.
This sort of cynical playbook, standing up against an ostensibly overfed or impure other, is nothing new for any stripe of government. What’s particularly galling about this example is how comfortable the Sask Party has been with taking kids hostage in the bargain. Educators have raised the alarm for years on the impact that decreasing per student funding and general neglect will have on the school experience and academic outcomes. We are now seeing those roosting chickens, with the test scores of Saskatchewan school children falling in math, reading and science, now the lowest in the country. These scores have fallen all over the world in the wake of the pandemic, but Saskatchewan students seem to have been hit particularly hard. As described in the following excerpt from Chapter 8 of A Healthy Future, now is the time to be investing in catching up, not falling further behind.
Catching Up
The impact on mental health and learning has left an enormous amount of work to help kids catch up to their peers. Pre-existing gaps between First Nations and Métis children, children of newcomers, and the rest of the population have worsened, as have gaps resulting from differences in socio-economic status.
Jennifer Gallays has been teaching for over twenty years. She says the gaps have widened more than she’s ever seen:
“I taught online all last year. I started out with about thirty-three kids in my online class. Three had intensive needs, so they had a full-time educational assistant in the classroom but not online. I had four to eight kids, depending on what point in the year, that were English as an Additional Language, they had support in a physical classroom, they didn’t have support online.”
Kids in French immersion fell behind in language learning, younger kids lost ground in reading. Many children in more challenging social situations left school and didn’t return.
Now that kids are back in class and having to catch up, they need more help than before. They need smaller class sizes and one-on-one attention more than ever. Jennifer describes what a difference those numbers make. “If I have a class of 21 kids, I can be the support for all those kids. In the last number of years I’ve had 28, 30, 32, 33, and with intense needs.” At a time like this, one might expect to see a greater investment in education. Unfortunately, Saskatchewan saw the opposite, with the 2022 budget again falling short of the cost of inflation and growing student enrolment. Instead of bringing in more people to help kids catch up, divisions across the province were having to cut staff positions. The Cornerstone School Division in Southeast Saskatchewan cut twenty-one teachers and eleven support staff. Saskatoon Public Schools eliminated thirteen full-time positions in elementary schools and seven in high schools, and had to start charging families for lunchtime supervision.
The only interest conservative governments seem to be taking in Canadian schools is insisting that they not take action to protect kids’ health. In Alberta, Minister of Education Adriana Grange was found to have interfered with public health decision-making in February 2022 after insisting that schools in her province drop their mask mandates. The same month, Dustin Duncan, Saskatchewan’s education minister, would follow Alberta’s lead by ordering school divisions to drop all public health measures, including masking. When the Ontario Principals’ Council and the Children’s Health Coalition called for continued masking in March 2022, the province refused.
In times when public debate focuses on what’s good for children, it’s helpful to ask whether the people having the debate have been acting in the best interests of children to begin with.
We hear a lot about burnout in the health professions. With health teams asked to step up and put their health on the line after years of cuts and understaffing, many people are thinking about leaving. The same elements are at play in our schools. A study in British Columbia reported that 80 percent of teachers were struggling with their mental health and two in five were more likely to leave the profession than before the pandemic. In Alberta over a third of teachers surveyed by the Alberta Teachers’ Association said they likely wouldn’t be in the classroom in five years. In Saskatchewan 40 percent of teachers surveyed in 2019 reported having considered quitting due to burnout, and that was before the pandemic. We saw people retiring early rather than working as substitutes, contributing to teacher shortages in 2021. Jennifer Gallays worries about the effect on new teachers coming into the profession:
“As for a mass-exodus, I worry about that happening, and it’s not on the back end where people are retiring, it’s the front, as either those who might be considering teaching or those who are staring down the prospect of a long and challenging career find themselves discouraged and looking for other options.”
Treating kids well is the right thing to do for them and for all of us. Our long-term health and well-being depend upon giving the young people in our world the opportunity to grow and to thrive. Education is a key social determinant at any time and is crucial to resilience in times of trouble. Those who would reduce the quality of public schools to save money or cut education taxes to stimulate the economy have an incredibly short-sighted and narrow vision of what makes an economy function. Which returns me to my initial point. In times when public debate focuses on what’s good for children, it’s helpful to ask whether the people having the debate have been acting in the best interests of children to begin with.
The current labour dispute has repercussions far beyond this year’s budget or even this year’s class. It could make the difference in whether we can keep the teachers we have or be able to attract young people into the profession to lead and inspire the next generation of learners. It could undermine the most important investment we can make in our future prosperity.
Hopefully the winds of public opinion blow away the government’s line in the sand. Hopefully the result is meaningful change in classrooms that are in real need. Hopefully the strike is short, and people’s memories long.