Most people, teachers included, are surprised to learn that as employees of a board of education, teachers are specifically excluded from the provisions of the B.C. Employment Standards Act, which provides basic protections, including notice and compensation, against abrupt or frivolous dismissal.
In the U.S., tenure protection for public school teachers is, in many states, covered by legislation, but not here in B.C.
The only protections teachers here have against unwarranted dismissal are contained in the collective agreements that individual teacher associations and boards of education have negotiated.
This might explain why the B.C. Teachers’ Federation gets a might tetchy and heads into court when government seeks to arbitrarily enter or ignore other sections of teacher collective agreements.
There is a kind of umbrella collective agreement negotiated between the BCTF and the B.C. Public Schools Employers’ Association, but that agreement does not cover the specifics of teacher evaluation and/or dismissal procedures. Those are outlined in the 60 district agreements.
Last week’s column about the move in California to remove tenure for teachers from state legislation brought a slew of emails about getting rid of “bad teachers,” but almost all emails failed to distinguish between dismissal for lack of competence and dismissal for misconduct.
Teacher misconduct in B.C. is now dealt with by a branch of government called the Teacher Regulation Branch, which in 2012 replaced the BCTF-controlled B.C. College of Teachers.
The evaluation of teacher competence is a different and lengthy formal process, normally conducted by a principal, and requires a series of observations conducted over a period of time, usually about 18 months.
Teachers can be evaluated on criteria that include knowledge of subject matter, evidence of preparation and planning, instructional skills, classroom management and student achievement and management of records. There are only two endpoints to an evaluation — “satisfactory” or “less than satisfactory.”
There is no standard course or program that qualifies principals to become evaluators.
And so we arrive at the heart of the problem: Teacher evaluation requires that people not specifically trained to do so follow a rigorous set of evaluation requirements that can, and almost always are, challenged through the grievance procedure in the event of a “less than satisfactory” result.
That, in itself, is a lengthy and expensive procedure that sometimes focuses on the alleged lack of competence of the evaluator, not the person being evaluated.
There are about 45,000 teachers in B.C., and common sense tells us that while there are many excellent teachers, there must be a few, as there must be in any profession, who should be considering their career options.
While it is not necessarily in the BCTF’s interests to make such a broad admission, teachers themselves will admit that, once in a while, they have worked in a school with someone who, in their professional opinion, shouldn’t be in a classroom.
How does that happen? To begin with, there is no rigorous pre-screening program, as there is with most other professions, through which would-be students of education must pass before they are even admitted to teacher-training programs.
Once students are admitted, universities, having accepted the fees, are reluctant at the end point of teacher preparations to take students aside and tell them: “You would be a marginal teacher at best — this is not the profession for you.”
Teaching students, having completed all course work and practicums then — with some difficulty these days — find a job. That is basically the end of any further formal peer mentorship or training for the next 35 years.
Teaching competence is the single factor that improves student performance. Maybe government and the BCTF, as part of their endless negotiations, could come to a meeting of the minds that recognizes how to agree and what to do about that.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
