The Alberta Teachers’ Association

The following media excerpts do not necessarily reflect the views of the ATA.

Expect fireworks

Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson must be wondering what to do now. Having secured the agreement of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) to a deal that has some elements they were seeking—a focus on conditions of practice in response to a clear set of data that shows that teacher workloads are “out of whack” with any reasonable expectation of work/life balance and unsuited to the kind of curriculum transformation needed—but not others, he now is facing a rebellion by school boards. … Johnson sees himself as CEO of a large, multibillion-dollar corporation (he is ex-Xerox). If the “branches” of the corporation are not falling into line, the first instinct of such leaders is to reorganize the corporation. With a premier seeking to show that she can be tough with unions and determined to be right in both action and ideology, we should not be surprised to see the government take on the boards and change their mandates—the boards owe their entire existence to the provincial government. We can expect fireworks.
—Stephen Murgatroyd (Troy Media columnist), Red Deer Advocate, March 27, 2013

Turning teachers into picture police a bad idea

With hindsight, introducing digital cameras to mobile phones with Internet connectivity pretty much made sexting inevitable. But one proposed solution to the problem just shows how far away we are from any real progress: If there is an effective way to stop sexting, it’s not going to be turning teachers into cellphone censors. … Teachers have had more and more behavioural policing downloaded onto their existing educational duties over the last several generations. We see it all the time with zero-tolerance policies for bullying. More often than not, this has resulted in the teachers going the extra mile to see no evil and spare themselves the hassle of paperwork, angry parents and obstinate students. This will be the case here, too. Even the victims will want to hide it from teachers and spare themselves the embarrassment of being caught engaging in sexting. The only real solution to sexting is better parenting, perhaps aided by technology—imagine, for example, a tool that copies every photo sent and received by your kid’s phone directly onto yours for later review. Trying to turn the teachers into the naked picture police is a nice idea that simply won’t work.
—Matt Gurney, Globe and Mail, March 21, 2013