-Frank Macdonald’s Comment
The provincial government is in the process of overhauling Nova Scotia’s education system. I have commented on this in an earlier column, but as the education minister’s intent becomes clearer, the issue needs revisiting.
One of the changes the department of education plans to introduce is to remove regional superintendents and directors from membership in the Nova Scotia Teachers Union. I don’t see a huge problem with this, and have said so. I also cited some problems I foresaw with the new ‘regional directors’ being accountable only to the deputy minister and not to an elected school board, which are being disbanded.
Since the government’s initial announcement regarding the de-unionizing of regional directors, its reach into the role of administrative educators has deepened. The government has announced that it will also force, through legislation, that school principals and vice principals cannot belong to the teachers’ union.
Currently, school principals are cultivated within the education system. They have gone through university programs in the arts, sciences, fine arts, or mathematics. They have all then gone through a Bachelor of Education program. As teachers, they spent several years in the classroom. Only then, and after further education in school administration, do they qualify as candidates for the role of principal or vice principal.
Under the province’s new plan for principals and vice principals, few if any qualified teachers will be applying for those positions. To do so will mean that, having spent 15 or 20 years in the classroom, a teacher will be required to walk away from one or two decades of contributions to pensions and benefits accrued through being a member of a union.
By taking on the role of principal, a teacher who still has another 10 or 15 years of career left, will spend those years in an unprotected position, no longer able to contribute to the teachers’ pension plan, no longer able to draw on the benefit packages if they experience a devastation to their health or some other tragedy. They will be in a position in which they can be dismissed at the will of the minister, or through the closing of a school. At retirement, they will qualify for a only portion of their NSTU pension.
Will qualified, capable administrators of schools in cities, towns, and villages flock to fill openings for principals or vice principals when they stand to lose so much by doing so?
On the other hand, by creating a principal’s role in which Nova Scotia Teachers Union membership is not allowed, the government is opening the door for an influx of school administrators who have no experience in education.
Someone who has successfully managed a corporate or bureaucratic office might nicely fit the bill. Never mind that they have never set foot in a classroom, never had to deal with the pain of a troubled child, never had to cope with the inherent stresses of teaching. They will have never had an opportunity to develop any sort of empathy for the professionals they will now be administrating.
School principals will be required, like the newly created regional directors, to account to the regional director or to the deputy minister, not to parents, not to the teaching staff. His or her role will be to assert whatever pressures are needed to make the education statistics look all nice and shiny for the political masters. The cost of that pursuit of statistical purity can result in an education system that is ultimately devastating to students and to staff.
I know there is a segment of the population for whom teachers are measured out in snow days, summer-long holidays, and too much pay, but in the entire spectrum of our social structure teachers are among the few professions that most directly impact the future, and the children in their care are the essential elements of that future.
If the provincial government enacts this attack on unionized principals and vice principals by replacing them with a political and/or bureaucratic overlordship, the result could be the gelding of teachers in the classroom. Principals and vice principals could become enforcers pressing teachers to meet an education minister’s statistical requirements instead of the students’ needs.
If that happens, Nova Scotia’s entire education system is at risk.
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