Possibly the best line to come out of any movie about politics is the final line in the 1972 satirical drama The Candidate.
Having just won a seat in the U.S. Senate after an exhausting campaign, Robert Redford’s character asks his campaign manager: “What do we do now?” and the movie ends with no answer.
Somehow that line encapsulates the “ready, fire, aim” nature of political policy and initiative. It goes some way to explaining the B.C. government’s surprise upon learning that the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, having accomplished and announced an 89 per cent strike vote, might have formulated some strategies to conduct a strike.
Subsequently, government finds itself, after more than a year, still at the bargaining table with the BCTF talking about a 10-year agreement that nobody will ever agree to, and the BCTF finding itself uncertain about whether it has clarified its own position.
That might or might not be an accurate representation of what is happening, but here’s the thing: There is nothing happening — nothing that has seen the light of day — that is of any serious long-term benefit to public education, nothing based on research about improving student results, nothing that demonstrably advances the cause of student learning.
Those aspects of educational practice — issues relating to class size and composition, for example — that might have made classrooms more manageable, even effective, appear to be off the bargaining table and back into the courtroom. Again.
So here, in all humility, are a couple of well-intentioned rhetorical questions that might get the focus back on “what do we do now” about improving educational opportunities for B.C.’s 500,000 kids.
Would it be in the BCTF’s interest to trade off a couple of their demands against the guaranteed provision by government of enough funding to provide time for experienced and successful teachers to act as part-time in-class mentors to first-year teachers?
Each school year, young folks brimming with enthusiasm head into their first classrooms having had a minimum of practical experience. Most think they are ready, but many learn quickly they are not.
Some experienced classroom observation and mentorship, not by administrators but by practising colleagues, at that early stage of a 35-year teaching career, could make an enormous difference to the kind of teaching provided for thousands of kids over the next 34 years.
All we know for sure, and the kids themselves would be the first to tell you, is that endless curriculum revision makes little difference to student success — teaching excellence, or at least competence, does. And competence, much less excellence, as with any profession, takes time and ongoing guidance to develop.
Would it be in government’s interest to recognize that the kind of expertise required to improve teaching skills and, subsequently, student performance already exists within the ranks of B.C.’s 44,000 teachers? It is there, but is not shared with newbies.
Why are there demanding postgraduate mentorships and residencies required in most other professions — medicine, law, even engineering and architecture? In those professions, there is no assumption that formal education is the endpoint of professional preparation.
Again, would it make sense for both government and the BCTF to agree to and fund some system that enables peer mentors to work with teachers who have received a first “less than satisfactory” performance report. Right now, formidable and complex contractual requirements govern the writing of teacher reports, and a misstep at any stage of the process by an inexperienced administrator will almost certainly render the report invalid — without anything happening to improve teacher performance.
Do government and the BCTF have the will and imagination to raise, at the bargaining table, what kind of trading would be necessary to agree to work jointly on the development of better systems aimed at supporting teaching excellence for newly trained teachers and for teachers who have been in the job for a while?
Maybe it is something to talk about as both sides sit there asking themselves: “What do we do now?”
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
