Alberta Teachers Association respond to UCP

“Instead of addressing the real issues of growing class sizes and a lack of adequate supports for students with special needs, the United Conservative Party election platform proposes new high-stakes testing for six-, seven- and eight-year-old children and for all teachers,” says Alberta Teachers’ Association President Greg Jeffery. “Its priorities are misplaced and misguided.”

“Class size is the unsolved crisis of the past 14 years and unless something is done right away, the continuing failure to support inclusion will be the crisis of the next four years,” said Jeffery. “Unfortunately, the UCP plan fails to make a firm commitment to fund continuing enrolment growth and is absolutely silent on the issues of inclusion and classroom complexity.”

Jeffery was responding to a sweeping 13-point program that would have a UCP government revisit settled issues while failing to explicitly address successive funding shortfalls that have resulted in constantly increasing class sizes while denying teachers the resources and support they need to respond to an increasingly diverse student population.

“The province must fully fund enrolment growth just so we can keep up and schools still need an additional infusion to catch up for years of unfunded inflation and to respond to the constantly growing expectations of parents and the community,” said Jeffery.

Instead of addressing those core problems, the UCP platform will create new challenges for already struggling schools and teachers. Jeffery specifically highlighted the UCP’s promise to implement standardized testing for students in grades 1, 2 and 3 and to increase the weighting of the Grade 12 diploma examinations to 50 per cent of a student’s final mark.

“Let’s not kid ourselves: teachers know better than any bubble-in-the-answer test how students are progressing, whether it be in math and reading in the early years or at the end of a Grade 12 course—these tests are enormously expensive to develop and administer and the notion that more testing will magically improve teaching and learning is nonsensical.”

“Given the UCP’s commendable commitment to focusing existing funding on the front line and the party’s desire to cut bureaucracy and teacher workload, I’m astounded that the UCP would choose to resurrect and even expand on some of the worst ideas advanced by the discredited 2014 Taskforce on Teaching Excellence. Commentary on points seven and 12 of the UCP platform references a taskforce proposal to implement continuous recertification and introduces a new proposal for teacher testing. Now, as then, these proposals are unnecessary and insulting to the province’s 45,000 teachers—just how will this added bureaucracy improve teaching and learning? What problem is it supposed to fix?”

Jeffery also described proposals to revisit curriculum work now completed, to give free rein to charter schools, and reduce protections for LGBTQ students and staff as being potentially disruptive and divisive while providing little of value to the 93 per cent of students who attend the province’s public, separate and francophone schools.

“Teachers live education in Alberta,” said Jeffery, “We have an obligation to speak out and share our knowledge and understanding with Albertans, particularly at this critical time. You can expect to hear from us again as the other parties release their education platforms.”

by Hayley Ferguson

Alberta Teachers Association respond to UCP

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