It has been several months since I compiled a list of transfers from the Ontario government to the province’s teacher federations.  The sum was staggering and that blog post has come as close to going viral as anything I had ever written.  To put it into perspective, my web site’s total bandwidth was used up in 3 days, which shut the site down.

I received a lot of comments on social media and e-mail, both from the left and the right.  From the left, the typical comment was A) I didn’t read the cited document (notice the singular, because my data came from several documents), B) that the money was earmarked for professional development, and C) insert ad hominen attack here.  That’s fine.  My response to this is simple: provide full disclosure of audited financial statements. Everyone should know how these government transfers are spent.  The complete lack of governance with tens of millions in public dollars is troubling, and needs to be addressed.  Note that this is not a slight just on teachers’ federations or on other public sector unions.  I want to be unequivocal when I say that any organization, even a corporation (!), that receives public money should go to great length to demonstrate that the money received from the government clearly went to the government’s stated policy goals – not the goals of the organization!

The other set of comments came from the other side of the spectrum.  Here the comments generally boil down to A) blow up the system, B) fire all teachers, C) charter schools, and D) insert any attack on government and/or unions.  The problem from the right is that the voting public doesn’t want to blow the system up, fire all teachers, or tear apart public education.  What we’re left with, then, is a system that needs to survive, but also one that needs to change.

The overarching problem is that Queen’s Park doesn’t control education nor do the school boards.  So who does? It comes down to a vortex of elite bargaining to which the primary objective is to satisfy the “partners” in education so long as the government’s political objectives are being met.  This kind of “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch my back” mentality permeates the education sector.

There used to be a time when the voting public became skeptical of the lobbying world.  People wondered how it was possible for government to make policy decisions in favour of corporations that were diametrically opposed to the interests of the public at large.  As a result, tighter lobbying rules were instituted to guard against this backroom wheeling and dealing.  In addition, governments created greater accountability and transparency mechanisms.  These included public disclosure of campaign financing, restrictions on donation limits, lobbyist registries to track which groups were lobbying for different things, and so on.

Taking a look at all the legislation, regulation, and policy changes that have recently taken place at Queen’s Park, I ventured over to the Lobbyist Registry to see what, if anything, was recorded.  It turns out that not very much is recorded.  An organization that lobby’s the government is required to file a change in their registration within 30 days.  Yet, the ‘partners’ have many holes.  For example, nobody disclosed the fact that they were lobbying for changes to Bill 122 – The School Boards’ Collective Bargaining Act despite the minister claiming she met with every ‘partner’ (see above video) to talk about the bill.  They all worked on this legislation.  Negotiated amendments.  Debated the amendments some more.  Made more amendments.  This continued for months.  The finally agreed on the legislation, and it ended up being a mess.  You would think that with all this negotiation and lobbying going on, that every ‘partner’ would list on their disclosure that they were working on this legislation, which, again, they are required to disclose within 30 days of the lobbying.  I spent 20 minutes looking for it, and found nothing specifc from anybody between April 2013 and April 2014.  The lack of disclosure is yet another example of how there is too cozy a relationship between education “partners” and the government. What’s more, Bill 122 shows just how the concerns of students and parents are not even considered when legislation is crafted.  There were strikes in some boards, and work-to-rule campaigns in so many more.  This is a great example of how public policy is primarily about satisfying the partnership than it is about making children succeed.

And it doesn’t stop there.  Look at the disclosures by the partners.  There have been many education bills over the past decades, many more regulations and policies.  Yet, those details are not recorded well enough.  As mentioned in my previous blog post on education, unions have received provincial funding, and this needs to be disclosed in the lobbying registry.  Much of these disclosures are uneven and incomplete for most of the partners.

What changes have been made that satisfy the partners and not the people?  Additional Qualifications courses are now offered by the unions.  Yes, these courses are offered by Teachers’ Colleges, but we need more duplication so the government has allowed the unions to do the job too.  In order to accelerate through the grid and receive raises, teachers are required to take these AQ courses.  Unions are becoming gatekeepers for their members to receive raises, and this posses all sorts of conflict of interest problems, but we’re not allowed to talk about it, even though we’re paying for a bunch of new costs.

When the Ontario College of Teachers was created by the Harris government, it had mandated that non-teachers make up the bulk of the membership on the board of directors, which provides oversight to the college.  When the Liberals came to power, the unions demanded that teachers should make up the bulk of the OCT board membership.  The Ontario Liberal government granted teachers their majority share on the membership.  The unions, in turn, started running a slate of candidates to fill the OCT board.  When it comes to something like teacher certification or disciplining a teacher, there are questions pertaining to whether the public interest is being adequately represented.  This was evident with new legislation, called the Protecting Students Act in the previous parliament, which proposed that the College allow convicted sex offenders the opportunity to reapply to be certified teachers after 5 years.  Is there any parent out there that wants this?  I haven’t even seen this bill come back yet, and it makes you wonder whether this issue is being dealt with through other channels now.

Unions have argued in favour of seniority-based hiring.  The government regulates (not legislate it, which would require a vote in the Legislature) the hiring process to follow seniority rules.  Principals and parents have complained preferring merit-based hiring so that the best, most suitable teacher gets the job. This regulation still continues today because the NDP and Liberals voted against legislation that would amend it.  Their argument? Deal with it through collective bargaining. It’ll never change that way.

Using extracurricular activities as a bargaining tool has long been a source of tension.  Withdrawing those activities in a work-to-rule campaign has the benefit of exacting pressure on the government and school boards with teachers still earning a full wage (a strike without actually striking).  Even the Ontario Labour Relations Board ruled that is too difficult to delineate between what is a voluntary and mandatory duty in a work day.  Legislation has proposed including withdrawal of extracurricular activities to be considered as strike action to protect students against the adult fights.  This fails to be proclaimed because the government has no interest putting something on the table that would restrict how a union might protest against the government/school boards that employ its members.  You only have to say it out loud to realize that all this serves is to satisfy the needs of ‘partners’ over the public.  How many student groups protested the latest round of extracurricular cancellations?  Still, the ‘partners’ didn’t like it, so kids lost their extracurriculars.

There are so many more instances of this happening in education, such as the update of the sex-ed curriculum, that I could talk about, but the underlying point is this: so much is happening in education that essentially is subject to elite bargain between ‘partners.’ Even though we elect people to Queen’s Park to propose and debate changes that may fall in line with the expectations of parents and students, the response always comes back to the fact that changes in education can only happen with negotiation between the government and its partners through backroom deals or collective bargaining.  Because of the embedded interests between the government and the partners, one which sees partners politically support the government in exchange for favourable policies, we begin to see the enormous conflict of interest that emerges and the incapacity of the government to deal with it out of fear for the political fallout.

Yet, the conflict of interest in education is an unhealthy one, and it wouldn’t be tolerated in other sectors.  In fact, as I mentioned at the top, the knee jerk response it produces includes radical suggestions such as firing teachers, charter schools, and so on.  Thus, in order to protect public education, there needs to be a disentanglement of interests.  It begins by ensuring that the Ontario Legislative Assembly sets education policy and that the lobbying activity of ‘partners’ is more fully documented so that people can make informed opinions about the policy choices before them.  It also means that more scrutiny be placed on the link between policy decisions, public funding of ‘partners’, and political campaign contributions within the education sector.  It’s time to pay attention!