This Might Change Everything: An open letter to Alfie Kohn

Perhaps the most rewarding part of my work with the Calgary City Teachers' Convention is being able to dream-up and actualize sessions that will provoke teachers and potentially lead to transformation of their practice or outlook. Of course it is always a pleasure to schedule keynote speakers , but a few stand out in my mind as being 'the right speaker at the right time'. 

Last year, Naomi Klein was such a speaker.  Naomi was hired as a replacement for Jian Ghomeshi, who we had chosen as a cosmopolitan, multifacted speaker who could articulate what it might mean to be a Canadian in 2015.  As Jian's termination from the CBC and subsequent legal mess stink-ified, we took stock of our geopolitical situation in Alberta and cast our net in a different direction.  Naomi and I spoke on the phone about Wild Rose floor crossings, the provincial and federal government putting all their eggs in one resource basket, but also about hope; optimism emerging at the grassroots, creativity leading to new directions in an oil-soaked enterprise, renewal of democracy.  Whereas many keynote speakers simply deliver a canned address that could be watched on TED or Youtube, Naomi's talk was specific to Calgary and Alberta, current up to that day (refering to info from the morning's paper) and was exactly the message that teachers in the city needed to hear at exactly the time they needed to hear it. 

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Visual summary of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything talk at the 2015 Calgary City Teachers' Convention. (By Postive Culture)

In one of my doctoral classes at the University of Alberta, Dr. Dwayne Donald asked us "What is curriculum and what is it for?".  The class responded with the usual 'mehs' and complaints about 'the man'.  Then Dwayne shared his definition and it was a clarifying moment for me.  "Curriculum," Dwayne said, "is the stories we tell our children about the future and why they're important".  Of course!  Education isn't just about job preparation and global competition, it's about hope for the future, and optimism, and overcoming limited ways of thinking and acting!  Since this point, I have been a lot more positive about the potential of teachers and students to effect change and a lot more pugnacious when confronted by those who can't see past the way things current are (or always have been).

This year, the Calgary City Teachers' Convention is bringing back assessment and motivation expert, Dr. Alfie Kohn.  He's presented before (way back when "formative assessment" was a new word), but we feel now is the time for teachers to get a refresher on how hopeful their work is, how to resist the external pressures of competition, and how to include student happiness as a worthwhile outcome.

What follows is an excerpt from my most recent email to Dr. Kohn in which I share my feelings on where we are as Alberta teachers and what we might need to truly change everything.

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For the keynote talk, we’re hoping that you can address how schools get caught up in 'Feel-Bad Education' in their pursuit of higher standards and performance. In Alberta, we have been caught in this sort of tension for sometime.  The previous progressive conservative governments (in power for 44 years until the left-leaning New Democratic Party swept into power last May) was very caught up in data collection and global competition.  As you point out in your “Feel-Bad Education” essay, this is not to say that government officials in the Ministry of Education had any sinister intentions, but their complicity in Canada’s neoliberal education-industrial complex created policy directions and actions that were not always in the best interests of students.  

Data from provincial achievement tests written by all grade 3, 6, 9, and 12 students were released to the public every year in the conservative think tank, the Fraser Institute’s, “Report Card on Schools” which lead to side-by-side comparison and ranking of schools.  Luckily, unlike in the United States, school funding was not tied to student performance on these exams, but these tests, especially the grade 12 diploma exams, were co-opted over time; ever becoming less about student learning and public assurance, and more about competition.  This trend has been exacerbated by PISA testing.  Over time the conversation about Alberta being a respected leader in education with great teachers, students, and curricula, has changed to be about "falling behind” and the need to “catch up” with other jurisdictions.  As Alberta’s classroom teachers work harder than ever (with an average of 56.5 hours per week, and twice the classroom complexity of other OECD jurisdictions) they find their work increasingly devalued by public voices including elected officials, celebrity entrepreneurs, and CEOs.

There is a strong grassroots movement taking hold in Alberta.  A government position paper called Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans was released in 2009 and led to some pretty lofty curriculum redesign initiatives by the previous government. Although many of these have waffled due to ‘old management trying to do something new in the same old way’ roots have taken hold across the province and will continue regardless of the directions that the new NDP government takes.  There is greater recognition that assessment needs to be an ongoing conversation; that a diversity of formative assessment trumps a few high-stakes summative evaluations.  Teachers of all levels are experimenting with de-grading their projects, classes, and schools.  In one case in Edmonton, a principal’s refocusing on learning rather than marking decreased the school’s attendance and discipline problems to such a degree that he was able to get rid of an assistant principal and hire more teachers and education assistants. Talk about what curriculum should be has led to teachers enacting the program of studies through the lens of the student and the community with amazing new initiatives and programs popping up around the province.  The idea that joy should be a learning objective is spreading.

So there’s a lot here to discuss and many aspects of your talks on achievement, competition, and standards would have a profound effect on our teachers at this time.

I’ve attached an ATA publication called Renewing Alberta’s Promise: A Great School For All to this email.  It provides a short, but thorough account of where the province is and what’s changed over the past few years. You don’t have to read it, but it passes the time by the fire on cold winter nights as well as anything.

For your smaller session, I’m hoping that we can play with the topics of motivation and engagement.  Although on some level teachers know they shouldn’t, they often fall into the trap of offering extrinsic rewards.  At the younger grades, stickers and frowny-faces still plaster many classroom walls; external indicators of who is good (at sitting still) and who is not.  ‘Good' students are still rewarded with high grades for regurgitation and memorization, while ‘bad' students (who may be hungry, exhausted, or requiring psycho-educational supports) struggle to get by.  Neither group, by and large, is engaged in any sort of meaningful transformation; some are just better (or more prepared) for the game than others.  Engagement is critical. Nowadays, there are countless companies like ClassDojo who have ‘engagement for sale’ for schools and teachers who want it.  Kids do work online (what fun!) and earn credits for good work that they can use to update their avatars (yippee!). The game-ification of education is a scary reincarnation of stickers and candy, yet teachers are flocking to its altar.  

What’s important is that we reinforce that teachers are the designers of learning.  In Alberta, they are able to take the program of studies (“the curriculum as plan”) for their subject area and enact it in any way they wish (“the curriculum as lived experience”).  Any time a teacher blames “THE” curriculum, they are relegating their tremendous creative power. They have the ability to make the learning meaningful and connected to students’ lives and the community outside the school.  They have the ability to connect content across disciplinary lines.  They can engage students in ongoing, meaningful growth.  They just need to be reminded that the power is theirs.  They just need a few starting points.

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My feelings aren't peer-reviewed or evidence-based, but I think most of you can see the truth in what I've written.  We can either carry on down the road of Pearson-alized learning with adaptive computer assessment tests and global competition being what drives us, or we can focus on making school and learning positive for our students first and foremost.  This is about gathering inner strength as a profession and resisting the darkness that confronts us.  Insert Kylo Ren, Han Solo, Star Wars: The Force Awakens reference here.

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Download the ATA's Renewing Alberta's Promise: A Great School for All

Learners in a Dangerous Time

School boards cancelling and suspending international trips for fear of terrorism makes me morose. It's not that I don't empathize with their situation. I do. No parent wants to pull their kid from an international trip when their son or daughter's friends are still going. No school wants to put aside a year of fundraising and planning. So it falls to the school board to make a tough decision for all.

But is this the right decision? Certainly if something were to happen on a trip, all involved would be deeply tramautized and there could be law suits. Although not terror-related, we need only think of the STS avalanche and Lost Coast rogue wave to remember the way that mass casualty incidents effect school communities. Yet there is no way to know when and where a terrorist attack (or mass shooting in the states) will happen. They are, more or less, random events. In the case of terror attacks, isn't postponing our normal goings-on due to fear what 'The Terrorists' want?

This is truly an impossible situation and I don't personally like how fear and liability are driving what educational experiences are offered to our children. I also question the logic of suspending or cancelling trips for "this school year", which is the approach taken by two of Alberta's largest metro school boards. What metrics will determine that next year will be safer than this? Do we expect that terrorism will cease according to a school calendar and that we should put a moratorium on all international study until this point? If that's the case, our students may never study abroad again.

We live in the most secure era in human history yet we are driven to see the world only as inherently dangerous. That's a real shame.

Sunshine Lists- Not the Droids We're Looking For

Dear Premier Notley,

I am deeply disturbed by Bill 5: The Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act.  Under this new act, individuals receiving compensation greater than a defined “threshold” level will be identified on an annual ‘sunshine list’ with their names listed next to their salary and benefits.  

The publication of such lists are often held as a means of providing more transparency and accountability.  Justice Minister Ganley’s statements to the press last week confirm this to be the case with Bill 5.  In some cases, this sort of reporting makes good sense. The compensation of members of the province’s agencies, boards, and commissions is largely unknown and undisclosed to the public.  Absurdly high salary, benefit, and severance packages of senior bureaucrats, school superintendents, and university presidents have been widely reported over the last few years.  Yet evidence may not back up the assumption that releasing their compensation leads to greater transparency and more careful management of the public purse strings.

The effectiveness of sunshine lists to reduce the varicose compensation packages of senior public sector employees is dubious. As Gomez and Wald (1) report, “there is no evidence suggesting that salary disclosure has much of an influence in off-setting... factors affecting salary growth”.  In fact, the authors suggest that publishing public salaries and benefits can have an inflationary effect whereby individuals use others’ remuneration to negotiate for more lucrative compensation for themselves.  “Basically, the only thing it’s done in Ontario is drive up salaries,” offered Daniel Cohn, an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at York University in a CBC story on that province’s sunshine list (2). In the same article, Finn Poschmann, Vice-President of Research at the C.D. Howe Institute is reported as saying, “A skilled negotiator will make very good use of [the information in a sunshine list] and will put upward pressure on salaries and total compensation packages as opposed to downward pressure”.

David Turpin, the new president at the University of Alberta, for example, certainly referred to outgoing president, Indira Samaresekera’s, $544,000 in salary and over $1.1 million dollars in total compensation (3) when considering his move to the U of A.  Samaresekera’s remuneration, not the position’s base salary of $400,000, almost certainly became the starting point for Turpin in his contract negotiations.  Furthermore, the availability of this information does nothing to reduce the growing inequality between the compensation of university administrators and their faculty members, nor does it provide sufficient pressure for the U of A president (in-coming or out-going) to take meaningful action on an ongoing grievance with the staff association, ironically one related to faculty merit pay (4).  Public accountability needs to be about more than salaries.

Suffice it to say, I am concerned about the ineffectiveness, not to mention the privacy implications, of the province’s current sunshine list and the expansion proposed in Bill 5: The Public Sector Compensation Transparency Act.  I am greatly bothered, however, by part 10 of the bill which specifies the information that education bodies shall be authorized to disclose if the bill is implemented as currently written.

In its current verbiage, education bodies shall be authorized to disclose:

(a)  the names of all employees or of all employees in a particular class of employees of the education body;

(b)  any position, appointment or classification held by each employee named pursuant to clause (a);

(c)  the amount of remuneration and benefits provided to each employee named pursuant to clause (a);

(d)  the amount of severance, if any, provided to each employee named pursuant to clause (a);

(e)  the documents, records and other information in respect of employee remuneration, benefits and severance determined by the education body.

Whereas “threshold” amounts have been listed for employees of the Government of Alberta ($104,754) and public sector bodies ($125,000), no threshold amount has been listed for an “education body” (which is defined in the bill to include all public, separate, Francophone, charter, and publicly-funded private schools).  While Bill 5 grants each education body to release this information “in the form and manner and to the extent” of its choosing, I have very little faith that most of the province’s school districts will proceed with anything less than a full release of teacher and employee compensation information.  As collective agreements come up for renegotiation, some school districts will no doubt see the publication of teacher compensation lists as a political wedge that can be used to divide the public.  With the province’s workforce so off-balanced during the current economic downturn, the narrative of “Look how much your son or daughter’s teacher makes!” is a powder keg.

Crown prosecutors argued for, and won a Court of Queen’s Bench ruling that saw them removed from sunshine lists because it could put them at risk (5). While teachers, in general, do not need to worry about being physically harmed or extorted by their students, there is a social risk for individual teachers’ names being associated with particular salaries. Ask any school administrator and you’ll hear that at the beginning of the school year they field countless requests from parents who want their child to be in the ‘best’ teacher’s class.  Imagine the result of giving parents access to teacher pay information.  How might teachers’ names next to their salaries become a false indicator of efficacy?  A list of teacher compensation provides no information about an individual’s training, experience, or classroom context.  While a sunshine list is not meant to rate and rank teachers or schools, in our neoliberal age, we know how this is going to go.

The creation of a sunshine list that includes public school board employees is, by and large, unnecessary, since the compensation of all but the senior administration is governed by collective agreements.  

For central office staff who are not bound by collective agreements, there is no reason to believe that the release of their salary and benefits will result in anything except voyeurism by colleagues and inflation of their compensation over time, as seen in Ontario.  The sunshine list’s intended purpose, to make an education body more accountable for their use of public funds and more careful with how it compensates senior staff, will likely have the unintended result of inflating superintendent salaries, benefits, and severance.

Collective agreements for most public school teachers and staff include information on all matters related to salary, benefits, and severance.  Public sector bargaining units do make use of the information from other collective agreements in their negotiations with employers which leads to gradual increases in compensation over time, rather than the run-away increases seen in senior administration and appointments to the province’s agencies, boards, and commissions where individual negotiations take place.  These collective agreements are easily available for most public sector employers including school boards. A sunshine list is not necessary.

I encourage you to propose a number of amendments to Bill 5.

First, the bill should define employees such as teachers, nurses, and police officers, et cetera, as “front-line workers” (or another appropriate label) and should grant these individuals the same rights to privacy as granted to Crown prosecutors.  Where remuneration is not negotiated behind closed doors, these individuals should be secure that their names are not publicly available and that only the information included in collective agreements is released.

If this is not possible, employees working for education bodies whose compensation is outlined in a collective agreement (such as teachers working in public school boards) should be omitted from the list.  It will be the duty of the employer to ensure that collective agreements are easily accessible to the public.  Employees in education bodies whose compensation is not governed by a collective agreement (including senior administrators in public school boards, and staff in charter and publicly-funded private schools) can be included on the list, but a threshold amount, similar to the ones defined for Government of Alberta and public sector bodies must be determined.  If deemed appropriate by the education body, data on the number of individuals working at different ranks on pay scales can be published but should not identify any individual by name.  The benefit of releasing such information, however, is not apparent to me.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the results of making public sector compensation public must be studied.  Sound public policy can only come from having good evidence.  It is quite possible that sunshine lists are totally ineffective and that we’re letting the narrative of transparency erode the privacy of our fellow Albertans.  While I am concerned about cronyism and misspending of public dollars, I’m more worried that sunshine lists are a non sequitur that will do little more than sow discontent.  It just might be that they’re not the droids we’re looking for.

Sincerely,

Dan Grassick
Calgary, AB

1 Gomez, R., & Wald, S. (2010). When public-sector salaries become public knowledge: Academic salaries and Ontario’s Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, Canadian Public Administration, 53(1), 107-126.
2 Stastna, K. (2014, April 1). Sunshine list 2014: Ontario’s list drives salaries up, not down, CBC News. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/o6pj3nl
3 Howell, T. (2015, January 13). Compensation of Alberta’s top university and college execs reignites calls for review, Calgary Herald. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/k49twtj
4 Association of Academic Staff University of Alberta (2015, November 16). UofA administration refuse to pay academic staff their merit increment pay. Retrieved from: http://www.aasua.ca/home/
5 Ramsay, C. (2014, January 30). Alberta’s sunshine list will not include salary information of Crown prosecutors, Global News. Retrieved from: http://tinyurl.com/nzub35v

Data: The New Stupid

In the period between the election of Alberta's new NDP government and the sweaing in of its new premier and cabinet members, a deputy director of education announced the mandatory pilot of Student Learning Asssessments (SLAs) for grade three students in the fall of 2016.  The fall pilot of 2015 was a disaster with multiple implementation issues that resulted in weeks of extra work for teacher with very little return for their students.  Despite these issues and crystal clear feedback from teachers across the province, Alberta Education has decided to continue with its announced mandatory pilot for all grade three students.  For more information on the short dark history of SLAs, click here.  You can try to decode the oxymoron of "mandatory pilot" if you like, but if you're going to give it any thought I'd recommend avoiding the cognitive challenge and just writing your MLA to ask for SLAs to be cancelled and for grade six and nine provincial achievement tests to occur from now on using the census model that assesses a random sample of schools and subjects each year.  With the economy taking a downturn, this will save millions of dollars.  

The Alberta Teachers' Association posted the following on its Facebook page this afternoon: We want to hear from teachers with opinions on the Grade 3 Student Learning Assessment program! Do you have concerns? What aspect(s) concern you? Are you feeling hopeful that there will be a smoother implementation this year? What should be done with this program? Post your responses below.

So I posted my response.  I wasn't brief, but it can be found below.

Although educational negligence is not really defined, it is a helpful concept to consider in relation to the province's testing regime. There are three types of negligence: nonfeasance (doing nothing when something should be done), misfeasance (doing the right thing incorrectly), and malfeasance (doing the absolutely wrong thing intentionally). The government (past and present) seem all too willing to commit combinations of all forms of negligence in relation to testing. Despite overwhelming evidence and lobbying, for years they took no action on cancelling the grade 3 PATs even though there seemed to be ample political and public support for doing so; thus nonfeasance. Rather than abolishing the test, Alberta Education created the SLA which was to be of assessment value to teachers but created confusion, frustration, and outrage when piloted last fall; ergo misfeasance. A year later, after nothing but consistent and conclusive feedback from schools and the profession, the decision to continue with a mandatory province-wide "pilot" (ordered by a bureaucrat during the period between the election and the new party's assumption of power) certainly must qualify as malfeasance.

The three goals of the SLAs as stated by the deputy minister who called for the mandatory pilot in May and clarified the department's direction in June are as follows:

• to improve student learning (primary purpose);
• to enhance instruction for students; and
• to assure Albertans our education system is meeting the needs of students and achieves the outcomes of the Ministerial Order on Student Learning.

At the very least the final goal is at odds with the first two.

My favourite issue of Educational Leadership has an editorial which describes the "new stupid" of the neoliberal education industrial complex's addiction to data. I had hoped that Minister Eggen would have quickly moved to disenthrall Alberta Education from the student achievement data cravings it had developed over the past thirty years, but, alas, we see no such indication since May. Testing 8 year-olds is wrong. Commiting so much time and energy from the halls of the government to the classrooms of the province to such an endeavor is wasteful, shameful, harmful. Not taking the opportunity to immediately set a new path for a more progressive education system is a loss. The profession through their association have been vigilant and vocal on the issue of grade 3 SLAs, but Alberta Education has been negligent.

Everything you do says everything about you

Today it was announced that Canada's premiers universally support all 94 recommendations in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission's final report.  They have vowed to enact these recommendations in their home provinces and have agreed to work together to explore the cases of tens of hundreds missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls. 

The full story is here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/premiers-commit-to-commission-recommendations-after-meeting-with-native-leaders-1.3152840

Any word from the government of the day on the TRC report or its recommendations yet?  No.  To be fair, Harper and his MPs have been very busy this past month.  They were busy channeling their moral outrage at Tim Horton's for pulling Enbridge advertising from their in-store televisions.  They were going to jail for violating the Canada Elections Act.  They were avoiding the Climate Summit of the Americas in Toronto.  They were flipping pancakes at the Calgary Stampede.  They were comparing the Harper government to Jesus and claiming that CSIS knew about the Air India bombing but failed to act.  They were releasing statements through the PMO saying that the global economy is fragile right now so we can't take risks on Justin Trudeau. 

As a salty sea captain once told my students and I on a grade nine sailing trip, "Everything you do says everything about you".  Absolutely right.  So what do the actions of Harper and his ilk say about them?  It says that they are not interested in making Canada a better place.

Is it too much to ask that our federal government govern?  Address systemic racism?  Protect the environment?  Stand up for individual rights and freedoms?  I don't think so.  I hope that in 96 days, the majority of Canadians agree with me.

The straw that broke the camel's back

What is it that finally got me blogging?  It has to do with skateboard politics and outgroup homogeneity (my new favourite term that I will work into any sentence or situation; just like I did with "reticular activating system" in 2010).

Calgary has a very progressive Skateboard Amenities Strategy (found here: http://calgaryskateboarding.com/skateboard-amenities-strategy/) and a super active advocacy group (CASE- the Calgary Association of Skateboarding Enthusiasts) that has been working well with the city for years.  If you read the strategy document, you'll know that the city is aware that it needs more skateparks and they're actively working to deliver.

The problem is homeowners who don't want noise in their neighbourhoods, who believe that skateboarding is dangerous, who can't shake their tunnel-vision to realize that their anti-skating antics are really calls for kids to stay inactive indoors.

Edgemont was scheduled to have a new park opened.  After much consultation and planning, there was sudden pushback when construction was about to begin.  A Calgary Herald opinion columnist (isn't it always the opinion columnists) stoked the fires with this unintelligible rambling called "Edgemont Skateboard Park Would be Hell on Wheels": http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/lakritz-edgemont-skateboard-park-would-be-hell-on-wheels.  CASE responded with a letter to the editor called "Skateboard Parks Aren't a Bother": http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/letters/letters-for-monday-march-2.  Months of wait-and-see and re-examinations follow . . .

There is a brief flare-up in anti-skate rhetoric when city councilor Evan Woolley proposes that Calgary strike down its anachronistic no-skateboard-ramps-in-backyards bylaw.  The Herald Editorial board responds. CASE responds.  Things quiet back down . . .

BLAM! A new Edgemont Community Association executive is elected and they immediately cancel the skatepark and impose a three year period of time where potential locations for a new skatepark will not be discussed.  That was it.  Full of anger I did what people now do, I turned to the internet and started typing.

Below is my letter to the editor of every Calgary newspaper.  This is just the beginning.  Expect a Skater vs NIMBY article by the end of the summer.

DEATH OF A SKATEPARK

And so it comes to an end.  After years of effort and thousands of dollars of planning, the Edgemont Community Association (ECA) has killed its new John Laurie skatepark before shovels could touch dirt.

As has become the norm in our city, progressive pro-citizen ideas have met opposition from regressive NIMBYists. Truthiness, not fact, is the new ground on which political decisions are made.  One only has to look at the recent uphill battles fought for bike lanes, secondary suites, and school construction sites to see that skatepark debates fall into an unsettling pattern where vocal citizens (supported by carpetbagging amateur and professional politicians) derail actions that are for the greater public good.  Those-who-own-homes lobby against secondary suites which could house those-who-rent because of potential parking issues.  They are against bike lanes because it will make their single-occupant-SUV commute to downtown more difficult.  They sue the public school board because relocating a centre for children with special needs could result in traffic.  Now they shut down a well-planned and much-needed skatepark because of anticipated noise.  This isn’t the Yeehaw neighbourly spirit that I grew up with in Calgary.  This emerging character is bitter, jaded, and divisive.  

After the ECA struck down the new park (and put in place a three year “cooling off” period during which skateparks will not be discussed) did its members go back to their homes feeling good about themselves?  Did they smack each other on the backs and congratulate themselves for keeping their kids sitting indoors in front of the TV? Did they pop a bottle of sparkling wine and toast three more years of silence in their neighbourhood’s outdoor spaces?

This is another failure of democracy; another lesson for Calgary’s youth about how politics really works. Over the next three years while the ECA plays Voldemort with “the parks that shall not be named”, I hope pro-skate teachers and students at local schools take this issue up with vigour and really make some noise.  Community associations, councillors, and newspapers that contributed to the anti-skate movement should prepare themselves for a storm.

This is about community health.  This is about the future Calgary where we want to see our kids grow up.   

Disgusted.

Dan Grassick
Teacher
Calgary

And so it begins

After years of ranting (about politics, punditry, and power) I have decided to finally put all my thoughts online in one place.  This should make it easier for my cult-like following of intelligencia to take shape while providing a single place for my enemies to find and attack me.  Hint to enemies: This is a trap.