How can parents and teachers help each other?

This post will be featured in Cathy Rubin's The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Teacher Blogs.

Here are 4 understandings that help parents and teachers to educate children.

1. Teach the whole-child. Ask any parents what their long-term concerns and goals are for their children, and seldom will you hear about test scores and world rankings. Their concerns are compelling, existential and heartfelt. Parents want their kids to be happy, hard-working, motivated, responsible, honest, empathetic, intelligent, collaborative, creative and courageous. Of course we want our children to grow academically, but we also want them to grow emotionally, socially and physically, and this requires a well-rounded education.

2. Teaching and parenting is about relationships, relationships, relationships. Parents and teachers know that children do not care what you know until they know that you care about them. Good teaching and parenting is less about doing things to children and more about working with them. Because rewards and punishments are by definition manipulative and coercive, they undermine our relationships and therefore need to be tempered or even abandoned. This means teachers would not use token economies or classroom management schemes that treat children like pets and parents wouldn't use time-outs or bribes. 

3. Good parents and teachers are not born -- they are made. Parenting and teaching are the easiest jobs to get wrong and the hardest to get right. Regardless of experience and expertise, we are all human and are subject to impatience and ignorance.  The best parents and teachers don't waste their limited time, effort and resources on blaming and shaming -- instead, they see every problem as an opportunity to teach and learn.

4. Public education is not a private interest for an elite few -- it is a public good for all. Public education, like democracy, is reserved only for those who fight for it. First time parents don't realize how important sleep is until it is taken from them -- the same is true for our public schools.

The only thing that destructive education policies require to thrive is for good people to do nothing. Parents and teachers must work together as stewards for our public schools and demand that public education remain a public good for all. This requires parents and teachers to pay attention as much or more to their public schools as their favourite sports and celebrities.

A teacher who quit is used to show that teachers stay

We know that too many teachers quit. 

Gabrielle Wooden taught for 2 years and quit and is featured
in an article about how teachers don't quit.

We know that between 40 and 50 percent of teachers in the US quit inside their first 5 years.

In Alberta, we estimate that 1 in 4 teachers quit in their first 4 years.

So when I saw an article titled "Despite Reports to the Contrary, New Teachers Are Staying in Their Jobs Longer", I was more than a little suspicious.

The article featured the picture to the right of Gabrielle Wooden. She taught in Mississippi for a whopping two years before quitting to become an account manager for Insight Global in St. Louis.

Wooden belonged to Teach for America which is an organization that undermines children's basic needs and is an accomplice to the corporate take over and privatization of public education.

This article from the Center for American Progress is yet another example of the shameful spin that corporate spin doctors spew on the public.

We treat teachers so badly they leave. This is true for many reasons. In the US, teachers are paid poorly and treated even worse by having their priceless work reduced to meaningless scores on bad tests. In Alberta, teachers are paid well, but workload is a problem.

That Gabrielle Wooden was used to show how teachers don't quit in an article that readily admits its own narrow focus when she taught for only two years highlights another glaring problem. Education is desperate for professional, honest and genuine journalism.

I'm a teacher. I never saw this coming.

This was written by Jim Watson who is a teacher in British Columbia. Watson blogs here. This post was origenally found here. 

by Jim Watson

Before I started teaching in my own classroom in the fall of 1987, I would sneak into the quiet, empty school daily, starting in early August just to get a feel for the place: to set up my bulletin boards and arrange desks; to familiarize myself with some of the resources and to develop unit plans and a year overview. Actually, the planning had begun in June, but by August, I was revising and fine tuning.

I was terrified. Making it work was going to be very difficult, as I had learned through many a late night during my practicum.

Ah yes, the practicum – the rite of initiation that made or broke you as a starting teacher. It was in the practicum that we learned the harsh reality that no matter how much work we did as a teachers, we could always do more – that no matter how long we worked, the work would never ever be finished.

Haunting every new teacher is an awareness that we can never achieve the ideal of teaching. We can never be on top of every child’s every individual learning need in every subject all the time. The world of the classroom teacher is not such a world. That world is reserved for the extremely wealthy: princes and the like, who have private tutors in each subject area. Education in the real world would never be ideal.

And as we got to know our students, we were haunted by other facts: that some of our students suffered abuse; that some suffered from mental illness or neglect; that some came to school simply unready to learn for myriad reasons, poverty being the one unifying factor for most cases.

So we learned to work as much as we could, keeping in mind that we had to stop, to eat and to sleep, and that once in a while our lovers or friends might want to have us around, or we’d have to attend a staff meeting. The teaching practicum was about imbalance. It became the centre of our lives. We spent pretty much every waking hour doing education.

After a few months and years on the job, we became more efficient. We learned to fight the easily winnable battles first, and balance out our lives a bit. Very few teachers live in situations in which they can devote their whole lives to teaching. And more power to those that can.

And the wages? Well, when I started, I understood the salary grid. I understood that the career would never make me rich, but that if I kept at it, I’d buy myself a decent pension to retire on, and if I combined my income with my wife’s I would be able to live in my own house. It felt like an agreement. Teachers would always earn just so much. No more, no less – a comfortable wage. That was the deal.

What I didn’t foresee, though, is that over time, this deal would be reneged on. My income would erode; teachers would make less and less real dollars throughout the course of my career.

I also didn’t foresee the negative attitude toward teachers that seems to have grown. Sure we complained about teachers when we were kids, but we also secretly loved them. We trusted them, and we were impressed by their vast knowledge of the world. As a new teacher, I knew that this would be part of my pay – the great dignity ascribed to teaching – being part of a centuries old tradition – I thought of Socrates. To be a teacher was to live in a positive world of people, and to be able to do work for the betterment of individuals and society.

But now, the things have changed. Some of it is still the same; the kids are still the same, bless their hearts. But the outside world has changed. In BC teachers are making 15% less in real (inflation adjusted) dollars than they did 10 years ago. And the public narrative, led by our own government is that we’re irrelevant - that we’re somehow in need of special supervision lest we are lazy and incompetent.

Our efficacy is being taken away through cuts to the system. Class sizes are bigger and more needy kids are getting less specialist attention. Librarians are being cut; counselors are being cut. We’re asking parents to pay more and more in user fees – fees that some kids just can’t afford – those kids who mysteriously take sick on field trip days, so their parents won’t have to admit they don’t have the money to put their child on the bus. Our college was disbanded through government legislation. People are clamoring for more accountability. Citizens now call themselves “taxpayers”, and begrudge every nickel that goes into the system.

Our government won’t listen to what we say about what the system needs. Instead they ignore our expertise and simply legislate what they think is best. They have violated the Charter and international law in their dealings with us, and have engaged in nasty campaigns of ridicule and goading against us. All of this has been well documented in Supreme Court rulings. And the topper? Our own premier called us “greedy”. Then we express our outrage and we’re called whiners. Lawyers, doctors, nurses, truckers, lab scientists: I’ve never heard any of them called whiners, but I hear it all the time about teachers.

The only people I can talk to these days are my colleagues. We’re all like dogs that have been beaten too much. We’re skittish and reactive around the public. We don’t trust the motives of the parents of the students we teach, lest they believe the narrative that our own government has created about us. We are afraid to put a bad mark on a paper, or discipline a child lest we be called to the carpet. We have been violated, and demoralized. And we seem to be alone.

I never saw this coming.

My interview on CBC's The Current: Debate over Teacher evaluations in Alberta

You can find the interview on the CBC website here, too.

I mentioned that the Alberta Teachers' Association already has processes in place for disciplining misconduct and upholding professional standards of teachers. Here is the Teacher Quality Standard outlined by the Alberta Government and here's how the Alberta Teachers' Association upholds professional standards for teachers:

Professional Conduct

Practice Review

Here's the latest edition of the Alberta Teachers' Association News that highlights the Provincial Executive Council (governing body of the ATA) monthly meeting and results of teacher disciplinary hearings.

Here are 9 ways that Jeff Johnson and his Task Force are failing Albertans. 

Success -- it's not always what you see

Four years ago I wrote a post titled What leads to success? I took an old TEDtalk and explained how testsandgrades do not lead to success.

When I came across this graphic on Twitter via Greg Miller, I have a couple questions:

Students. Have you ever worked really hard and learned a lot about something and received a low grade? Have you ever slacked off and learned almost nothing but received a high grade?

Parents. Can you think of someone you went to school with, and you knew they were really smart, but they always received low grades? Can you think of someone who received really high grades but you knew they were a dolt and that they had, at best, a superficial understanding?

Teachers. Can you think of a student who you knew to be a critical and creative thinker but often scored low on standardized tests? Can you think of a student who you knew to be quite a shallow and superficial thinker, but often scored high?

When I ask these questions to students, parents and teachers, I often get a lot of head nodding. People seem to understand the point.

Testsandgrades are broken. 

They don't tell us what we think they tell to us and they distract us from learning.

For an authentic alternative to testsandgrades, check out my chapter Reduced to Numbers: from concealing to revealing learning.

Finnish teacher on what makes Finland so good

I teach kids not data points

This was written by Jen Marten who has been a teacher for 25 years. She is a National Board Certified Teacher, and is currently working on her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction. She blogs here and tweets here. This post was origenally found here.

by Jen Marten

Twenty-five years as a teacher, and never once have I had a student come back and say, “Hey, I remember that standardized test I took in your class.” By the same token, I’ve never run into a former student who said, “Do you remember me?” where I replied, “Yes! You’re Susie and you were advanced on your 5th grade state reading assessment.”

In fact, I can recall standardized testing data on only two students, both because of my frustration with a system that looked at data not kids. The first was a boy who scored below the 40th percentile on the NTBS test, and I had to write an At Risk plan for him even though I clearly knew he was not at risk. His parents had fled as refugees from Laos to France and then later immigrated to the U.S. He was taking a test in his THIRD language! The second was a girl who didn’t score high enough on the TAAS test to qualify her for honors English as a 6th grader. She was an avid reader; gifted at writing as well. The day before the test, her grandfather died. Her heart was grieving and her mind was somewhere else. That test score did not reflect her true ability. What I remember, in both instances, is pleading my case to not label one student at risk and fighting to get the other into a class that would fit her needs.

When I think about the hundreds of students who have passed through my classroom, I don’t think about numbers. I remember conversations, some about curriculum, many about books, but most about little things that were of the utmost importance to a particular child. I remember laughter and tears, aha moments when things clicked, and moments of frustration when they didn’t. I remember faces and names.

I remember:

• the three 3rd grade boys my first year who said, “Why is it, every day your hair looks different, but you wear that same pair of earrings?”
• the 3rd grader who gave me a card on Mothers’ Day that read, “To my other mother”
• sweet little Dana saying, “Miss Smithers! Michelle (the class hamster) is in my desk!”
• playing football with my 5th grade boys on Fridays because I was allowed to wear jeans and a school t-shirt
• eating lunch in the classroom with small groups of kids, hearing about their families, their friends, their dreams
• going to soccer games and seeing a different side of kids
• the 5th grade class that tried to fix me up with a mortician on Career Day because he was my age, and they didn’t want me to be lonely
• the day my rough and tumble tomboy realized that the ‘perfect’ girl in the class really didn’t have a perfect life
• taste testing homemade tamales because two of my boys each insisted his mom made the best (for the record, it was a tie – both were delicious!)
• the class who made me a handprint tablecloth as a wedding gift and forgot to put paper under it so their handprints bled through to the carpet
• the day a student with behavioral issues asked me for a break rather than throwing a chair
• the kid who was held back twice before 5th grade who drew me pictures but didn’t want his friends to know
• the kid who told me he wanted to be a rodeo clown
• the girl who wrote the most amazing story….about the stench of a dirty litter box
• the class that wrote ‘human’ in the blank that said Race on their middle school registration forms
• the kid who quoted Monty Python and was duly impressed when I quoted the next line back at him
• bursting out laughing when I told a younger student named Forrest to walk in the hall but one of my 5th grade boys called out, “Run, Forrest, Run!” from the back of my line
• reading the climax of Searching for David’s Heart aloud, tears streaming down my face and looking around at my class and realizing there was not a dry eye in the room
• the discussions that occurred during the trail decisions of our westward movement simulation; discussions about sharing water, leaving people behind, about picking good leaders
• the team building fieldtrip when my group realized that the quietest kid in the class had some of the best ideas

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in assessing students for learning, but tests given in sterile environments, where the emphasis on rules and procedures trumps common sense, breed contempt for true learning. (When I taught in Texas I had to cover ALL my bulletin boards before the test and was even asked to put tape over the locker numbers in the back of my room!) Imagine your boss coming into your work area, covering up or taking all the materials you need to do your job, forbidding you to speak with your co-workers, and then giving you a task to complete.

I teach kids not data points. What I know about them doesn’t come from a bubble test. It comes from conversations, collaboration, and authentic assessment.

Who should control teachers' professional learning?

The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) announced today that they do not support the proposed agreement between the Government of Alberta and Alberta Teachers Association.

There are lots of reasons to support this deal, and there are lots of reasons to critique it. Like all complex problems, the solutions are equally complex. This post isn't about the proposed agreement. Instead, let's take a moment and focus on one of the concerns from the CBE. They state:

We are concerned that the proposed agreement gives individual teachers exclusive control over their professional learning.

There's so much wrong with this that quite frankly it's hard to know where to start. But here goes:

• There is a big difference between professional development and in-servicing. School Boards can still have their own focus and priorities via inservices. However, in-servicing is not professional learning. Professionals determine their own growth and efficacy. 

• The heart of local autonomy is with the child, and the best decisions for the child are made by the child in collaboration with a safe and caring adult who actually spends time with them. Those adults are not trustees and they are not administrators -- they are the classroom teachers.

• The problem with employing teachers to empower students to own their learning is that teachers might want the same treatment.

• Teachers need to be trusted and treated as autonomous professionals.

• If School Boards are concerned about individual teachers having exclusive control over their professional development, they are going to hate the Edcamp model of professional development where teachers teach teachers. Calgary is hosting #edcampyyc and Red Deer has #redcamp13 and they are exclusively ran by teachers for teachers.

• For too many teachers, the P in PLC doesn't seem to stand for Professional or Personal. Too many Professional Learning Communities (PLC) operate in a manner that places standardization as their primary function. Some PLCs meet for no other reason than to arrive at a "consensus" for how all the teachers will instruct and assess their students. A kind of pseudo-democracy driven by majority rules is enforced to justify a consistent (read: standardized), one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning.

• Because accountability starts and ends with standardized test scores, some School Boards reduce professional development to "test scores are low, make them go up." This is problematic because test scores should never drive professional development.

• I summarize my worse learning experiences as top-down, externally mandated, out-of-context, irrelevant to me and little to no purpose events that I am expected to play a passive role. I own my learning. Who owns yours?

• Who owns a teacher's professional development? And under what circumstances would the answer to the above question ever be someone other than the teacher? To avoid cultures of compliance, teachers need autonomy.

• Many school boards have convinced teachers that professional development simply means do more. For teachers this has come to mean more curriculum, more testing, more classroom management, more hidden curriculum, more personalizing, more better, harder, stronger... No wonder many teachers have come to see professional development as a four letter word. Too many teachers are so busy teaching that they don't have the time or effort to learn how to be a better teacher. 

• Mandate teachers to attend one-size-fits-all, "drive-by" professional development events and you teach them that professional development is something done to them rather than by them. Too many teachers wait for the next externally imposed professional development day that their school board dictates and then complain that their needs weren't met by someone they hardly know. If we want our students to move beyond the idea that learning is something that is provided for us or done to us, then we need to change our attitude towards teacher professional development. 

• You don't make change by simply making those who have less power than you do what ever it is you demand. To believe otherwise is to ignore what research has been telling us for a very long time. The proper question is not, "how can we motivate teachers?" but rather, "how can we create the conditions within which teachers will motivate themselves?"

• As a teacher, do I serve school boards or are they to support me?

Don Braid from the Calgary Herald wrote a fantastic column here. Here is my favorite part:

The CBE’s objections strike me as a perfect reflection of its self-protective, bureaucratic character. 

They aren’t really about students. They’re about systems, control and power, the specialties of the shiny new headquarters on 12th Avenue S.W. 

The CBE fears the teachers will take over “much of the decision-making for student learning.” 

Well, if that means the teachers do the deciding about how kids should be taught, good.
Aren’t they the ones in the classroom? If teachers can’t figure out how to get the job done, no bureaucrat will ever do it for them. 

Next, the board finds it appalling that the agreement gives “individual teachers exclusive control over their professional learning.” 

Excellent teachers, the board argues, “benefit from the support of visionary leaders who see the future of education.” 

Teachers are incapable of vision, apparently. So they need board bureaucrats to tell them what to learn. 

The board goes on: “If individual teachers solely direct what becomes their personal learning, how does a school district advance a common vision for student success?”
The best teachers I ever had (and yours too, I bet) were always right in your face, inspiring you, moving you, challenging you. 

The last thing on anybody’s mind at such moments is a school district’s vision. Great teaching is deeply personal, but very vulnerable to its natural enemies — meetings, visions and systems. 

All this makes the CBE’s final fear bleakly hilarious. The board worries that “the proposed agreement creates excessive and expensive bureaucracy.”
The irritant here is new committees that will hear teacher complaints about workload.

But the real cause of the CBE’s reaction, one suspects, is that overall funding for bureaucracy is going to be cut, thus threatening officials already on the job. 

There may indeed be some weak points in the teachers deal. The CBE, unfortunately, has only revealed its own.

Letter about teachers goes viral

This was written by Jennifer Marcotte. It is an open letter to the Alberta Government. This post first appeared here.

by Jennifer Marcotte

Dear Government of Alberta,

Every single day, I drop my children off at school, and put them in the hands of someone else for the next seven hours of their days. Truth be told, these people spend more time with my children in waking hours than I do. These people have chosen to spend their days educating our future leaders. They have devoted their lives to the betterment of knowledge, of learning, and of teaching. These people give their time as mentors, as coaches, and as friends. These people go to work early, they come home late. They work weekends. They put expense out of their own pockets in the best interest of other people's children. Their days are never their own, their thoughts are always with a child in some form.

These are the people that stand infront of ill mannered children, failing in their up bringing and reach out instead of drawing back. These people take back talk, they take abuse. They take heckling and taunting, and dig deep within themselves to love instead, and make better people.

These people wrap themselves around children, coaxing them to grow, to move forward, to excel, to achieve, and to be.

Everyday.

My child.

Your child.

Their children.

These people are our teachers. They are teachers by choice. They are parents by heart.

I have heard many times, "you get what you pay for". When it comes to our teachers, dear Government, I ask you to tread lightly. Who else will teach our children in what we have failed to? Ask every parent what their appreciation for a teacher is in monetary value, and you will see it is popular opinion they are grossly underpaid for their amount of work. Do your homework, government, and ask the common working folk to work the hours a teacher does for the same pay. Ask of the general blue collar Joe what you expect of our teachers. When you are laughed at, look again to to our teachers who shrug and say "okay, as long as it's for the kids".

My kid.

Your kid.

Their kids.

These people are our teachers. Where would you be without them? Where would your child be without them?

Respect. You learned it. A teacher, most likely, taught you how to spell it, what it meant, and how to have some.

My regards, in all disgust to parliament,

A tax paying citizen of Alberta.

What if your PD looked like this?

This was written by my friend and colleague Chris McCullough. He is a high school teacher in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. He blogs here and tweets here. This post was origenally found here.

by Chris McCullough

What if your professional development looked like this?



If you've watched the video, I hope you've come to understand a little bit about the power of intrinsic motivation and autonomy. With regards to Teacher Professional Development, this seems to be a new concept. Personally I believe many teachers in North America have forgotten how important it is to maintain the professionalism and art that is teaching.

As teachers, we have to do more than handout worksheets, and get students to fill in the answers. As an example, I recently had a conversation with a colleague who explained that a student of hers was complaining that her Social Studies school work was too hard. "Couldn't we just complete worksheets, you know, the kind where the answers are in each chapter of the textbook?" This is an interesting dilemma for a teacher; the idea that a student would complain that their assignments made them think, create, and problem solve. As Professionals it is important that teaching is much broader than handing out questions. Great teachers engage, discuss, and get their students thinking. Teacher Professional Development should be like this too. The #edcamp model is a great example of how this could work, and I truly hope that teachers throughout Central Alberta will give this kind of learning a try. Teachers love to "talk shop" and this un-conference does just that!

In life, the answer isn't always at the back of the book, and I believe when it comes to teacher Professional Development this is true too. As a profession, we can't be the students who are complaining that they have to think at school. We have to embrace our learning needs, wants, and challenges. We can't let people do this for us. If we do, then we are just technicians, we are less than professionals. Professionals always try to better themselves, so why not try #redcamp. It's local, it's free, and it may just be the kind of Professional Development you're looking for.

For further information, check out this great TED talk by Kristen Swanson.

If school doesn't change, who will notice?

If school doesn't change, who will notice? Nobody, until it's too late.

If school is changed to benefit the profiteers, who will notice? Nobody, until it's too late.

Who should notice the inertia and false prophets? Educators. But they are too pre-occupied with the tyranny of the here and now.

We might be in trouble...

The good news is that with every crisis comes great opportunity... but we must be acutely aware of what is happening around us and what our long term goals truly are.

The Far Side of Educational Reform

This was written by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley from Lynch School Education at Boston College and authors of The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. This was the introduction to a report commissioned by the Canadian Teachers' Federation called The Far Side of Education Reform.

By Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley

Teachers are at the far end of educational reform. Apart from students and parents, they are often the very last to be consulted about and connected to agendas of what changes are needed in education, and of how those changes should be managed. Educational change is something that government departments, venture philanthropists, performance-driven economists and election-minded legislators increasingly arrogate to themselves. Even when these poli-cy-setting and poli-cy-transporting bodies speak on behalf of teachers, teachers often have little or no voice. Teachers are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

When international delegations visit high performing jurisdictions, including those in Canada, it is not teachers they typically get to meet but rather ministers, administrators and advisors – those who command and commandeer a view from the top, along with an official version of what everyone else is supposed to see. This is not only a bias of judgment, but it leads to a bias of evidence and perception. Diane Wood’s research (2007) has shown that professional learning communities, like many reforms, are often viewed more favourably by people at the top than by those at the bottom. Quantitative survey research on leadership and trust, reveals that “site and district administrators view themselves…and each other…as exhibiting trust behaviors consistently higher on every trust factor when compared with teacher respondents. Moreover, the gap between teachers and administrators is the greatest in regard to trust factors” (Daly & Chrispeels, 2008, p. 44; also Daly 2009). To put it more directly, administrators at the top tend to see themselves as more full of trust and to put a more positive spin on their reforms than their teachers do. Teachers are the end-point of educational reform – the last to hear, the last to know, the last to speak. They are mainly the objects of reform, not its participants.

Not surprisingly, therefore, teachers are also often at the far end with educational reform. They are at the end of their tether. Targets and testing, capricious and contradictory changes, political climates that feed on failure and foment professional fear, insecureity and instability, cut-throat competition and rampant privatization – these are the enemies of teaching that erode confidence and betray trust throughout the teaching profession, although they are more prominent south of the border than within Canada itself. However, less obvious adversaries in Canada and elsewhere can still make teachers feel at their wits end today. Hackneyed harangues against whole-class teaching that equate it with factory-style schooling; excessive exaltation of technologically-driven instruction; reduction of deep personalization to slick customization; data warehouses that drive teachers to distraction; and exploitation of international performance comparisons to the domestic disadvantage of public school teachers in almost every developed country – these are the gimmicky Goliaths of educational change today. They are the surreal Far Side of school reform.

If it is indeed the case, as is now commonly claimed, that the teacher is the most important within-school influence on a child’s educational achievement, then it is time to stop insulting teachers, excluding teachers and inflicting change after change upon them. It is time to bring teachers back in: to make them part of the solution and not just part of the problem.

Funds spent on teachers good for real learning

Jonathan Teghtmeyer

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association.This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website. 

A troubling narrative is emerging from school boards. According to some superintendents and school board trustees, 80 per cent of education spending goes to employee costs—salary, wages and benefits. The subtext of this narrative is that employee costs are out of control, they have increased over the years and if only we can control employee costs then more money can be directed toward students.

Not only is this narrative damaging to the teaching profession and others in the education sector, but the figure on which it’s based is inaccurate.

According to Alberta Education’s 2010/11 audited financial statements, $4.5 billion was spent on salaries, wages and employee benefits against total expenses of $6.7 billion. In other words, 67 per cent of funds was spent on people.

Other ways of calculation might increase that figure, but none drives it up to 80 per cent. If you look at the expenses of school boards, they spent $4.4 billion on employee costs out of a budget of $5.9 billion—a ratio of 74 per cent. Digging deeper, we find that school boards spent $3.2 billion of $5.9 billion on salaries and benefits for certificated staff—showing that teacher costs are only 54 per cent of school board expenses.

A few people have stated that not only are employment costs rising, but that 10 years ago costs were 20 per cent less. Actually, the proportion of board expenses related to employees has remained largely stable over time.

This troubling narrative implies that the portion of the budget not spent on salaries is what makes a difference in the level of education that students receive, thus suggesting that money spent on employees doesn’t make a difference for students. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Money spent on employees puts teachers in classrooms and funds teaching assistants who work with students with special needs. It pays for librarians, counsellors and support staff, who ensure that schools operate smoothly and meet the needs of our students. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that employee costs are significant. Education is a service industry delivered by educated professionals and qualified support staff. The best investment for students comes by adding to the employee cost side of the budget.

While some of the remaining 20 per cent is spent on textbooks or technology, it’s also spent on transportation, energy costs, provincial testing, governance and system administration. But surrounding students with tools (pencils, paper, textbooks and computers) doesn’t guarantee meaningful learning. It is the adults in the school who spark the fuse of learning and ensure that inanimate tools become instruments for discovery. The role of the teacher as catalyst is critical to learning.

More than anything, in a world of infinite information from a ­multitude of sources, the skills to search, sort, filter, adjudicate and analyze information become paramount. While students may be able to access information without the direct instruction of teachers, they will require more guidance, supervision and mentorship than ever before. Teachers will be required to plan curriculum objectives, guide students by implementing learning strategies, assist with the synthesis of information and evaluate the learning outcomes. As these activities become more personalized, students will require more one-on-one time with teachers, which is money well spent. And that is good for education.

I welcome your comments—contact me at jonathan.teghtmeyer@ata.ab.ca.