Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

While we wait as the Obama administration and the teachers’ unions slowly circle each other over Race to the Top funds and NCLB reauthorization, we have to look to our neighbors to the north for some comic relief.

The hilarity began with the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association (VESTA) promoting a workshop put on by the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN). Vancouver will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics.

The event was scheduled for October 28 at Strathcona Elementary School. But someone tipped off the Vancouver Sun, which had a reporter research the Olympic Resistance Network. The ORN website is saturated with its views of the Olympics, but this small excerpt will give you a taste:

Far from being simply about “sport,” the history of the Olympics is one rooted in displacement, corporate greed, fascism, repression, and violence. Only the political and corporate elite – from real estate developers to security corporations – have anything to gain from the Olympics industry. The effects of the upcoming Winter Games have already manifested themselves- with the expansion of sport tourism and resource extraction on indigenous lands; increasing homelessness and gentrification of poor neighborhoods; increasing privatization of public services; union busting through imposed contracts and exploitative conditions especially for migrant labour; the fortification of the national security apparatus; ballooning public spending and public debt; and unprecedented destruction of the environment.

As is generally the case with such controversies, once the newspapers got hold of it the people involved ran for the tall grass faster than Usain Bolt. School officials and its parents’ advisory committee claim no one at Strathcona Elementary approved the event. The union backpedaled even faster, issuing a press release stating, “VESTA is not associated with the Olympic Resistance Network or the organization called Teach2010. VESTA has not endorsed any positions they have taken or any materials they have produced.”

But British Columbia is not the only Canadian province that can boast teacher union funnies. The Society for Quality Education in Ontario created the Sunshine on Schools project, which provides basic financial and student achievement information for each school district in the province. Here’s a link to the data for the Waterloo region, just as an example.

The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, however, was “concerned,” and sent out this statement:

The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) is concerned about how some information about student achievement and education spending is presented on the Sunshine on Schools website managed by the Society for Quality Education.

At OSSTF/FEESO, our goal is to protect and enhance education. To this end, we approve of and encourage the discussion and sharing of information relevant to our education system. However, we are wary of any presentation of such information, no matter how statistically accurate, which presents a misleading picture of that system.

The Society for Quality Education, with its goal to introduce competition between schools and school boards, presents data about school boards and allows direct comparison using graphs. Although the results may look scientific and professional, such comparisons lack genuine relevance because there is no context provided. Because of the regional, cultural, historical and socio-economical differences between school boards, a simple bar graph provides a woefully insufficient illustration.

Instead of helpful discourse, the website only provides raw data and ambiguous comparisons. It is our hope that those who are truly interested in the wellbeing of our education system will recognize the site as a simplistic tool serving a particular political agenda.

Without ambiguous comparisons and simplistic tools serving a particular political agenda, what good would this document be?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 07:57 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.