The Children Are Our Future

10 Replies to “The Children Are Our Future”

1. bully pupilt

2. What, someone considers that teachers associations and teachers unions are there to support good education? How silly would you have to be to believe that.
   They are there to: 1) provide for their own financial well-being, 2) support socialist indoctrination (wittingly or not).
   There is no bullet point that says ensure children can perform adequately in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Nope, none at all.

3. Every time the ATA contract comes up for negotiation they always claim that the number one issue is class sizes. So various governments, both PC and NDP, have committed billions to this without any measurable results. Anyone care to guess where the money went?
   And of course the ATA has the solution: Hire more teachers. I don’t recall the ATA ever proposing a salary cut to make hiring more teachers possible.
   Failing grade? Alberta spent $2.7B in botched effort to cut class sizes: AG
   “Albertans, particularly parents, should be disappointed in that they’ve never had a full explanation of whether this investment of their money … made a difference.”
   The program has received $2.7 billion since it began in 2004, including $293 million in the 2017-18 fiscal year.
   But the education department doesn’t have any systems in place to figure out where exactly that cash goes, thanks to a 2008 change in which school boards were no longer required to report how they were using the funding.
   Not one question was asked about the initiative during all-party budget estimate committee meetings, he said Thursday — a worrying trend for a $300-million program.
   “This is something that has been put into the public arena as a class-size initiative. If (funds) have morphed into base funding, it should be described that way,” he said.
   Alberta Teachers’ Association president Greg Jeffery said too many students are falling through the cracks thanks to overcrowded classrooms. He called for extra funding in this year’s budget to hire an additional 2,000 teachers to begin closing the gap.

4. Maybe picketing the talk when Wells shows up would be a good idea. If there’s more pickets than people at the event, the message will be amply delivered.
   I know its hard to get 25 people together, but have a go. Its for the children, y’know.

5. The teaching profession has become a welfare program for SJW’s. Summers off. Generous Holiday time off. Full benefits. UNION shock troops. And they get to indoctrinate children … a captive audience … with their entire catalog of anti-Western civilization tripe.
   The same thing has happened to our military. Transgender military. Gay military. Lesbian military … even a “green” military … anything and everything EXCEPT a National Security prioritized military. We aren’t just selling the ROPE with which to hang ourselves … but we have provided the Liberty and Freedom with which to destroy our thriving Capitalist society.
   The moral MAJORITY better stop being SILENT … or nothing will be left for our (grand)kids. We cannot allow the fringe EXTREMISTS to make the loudest sounds.

6. The genie is out of the bottle for good when Alberta is aping Ontario in providing these “supports” for its children and teachers. The Bible Belt with all its good and bad features (mostly good) is no more.
   As we know, when a society becomes corrupt and decadent it eventually falls prey to its enemies. What short-sighted, self-centered idiots we Canadians have become. Our children and grandchildren will pay for this stupidity one day.

7. How did I ever have a future in such a crowded classroom?
   Grade two classroom from 1947-48

8. Upper admin soaks up a butt load of that money. The average starting- STARTING- salary for superintendents is right around $200K. They’re not $200K jobs, let alone $400K+. Plus, we know that admin contracts are not written to protect the taxpayer. A Calgary superintendent announced his retirement with well over a year to go in his contract, only for the taxpayers to learn that he gets to collect his regular paycheque for the duration of his term despite choosing to retire. This kind of thing does not seem unusual, so you can bet that millions of dollars are falling through other cracks.
   Elected officials use the old claim that we have to pay these high salaries to get good people. Unfortunately, this theory is disputable on two fronts. One is that you will look high and low to find a school superintendent that has any experience outside of the school system. They ALL are government careerists. All managerial theory points out that managerial dynamism is a must, and that it is best achieved by having at least some of your upper management having experience outside your core business. This is the opposite of what is happening with the administrations of school divisions. It can even be argued that the systems are closed to “outsiders.”
   Then there’s the fact that they never test the theory by capping the earnings. What’s the worst that might happen if you took every person in a public board that earns “X” and told them on a Monday morning that they were now earning “.7X” going forward, on the basis that the money is no longer available? They’re not going to quit and go work in the private sector. They’re simply not. Most of them would be hard pressed to retain half their earnings in the private sector, and they all know it. If you get the hard cap low enough, you create organizational dynamism by making it attractive for some of your best and brightest to vacate for the private sector, which means you replace from within.
   The high salaries are justified by a dual falsehood. One is that there is no effort to attract dynamic players from outside the internal feed, despite the high earnings offered. In fact, that avenue is either directly or indirectly blocked. The other is that the theory itself is never tested by reducing the salaries offered in order to see if it actually reduces the quality of the applicants.
   I’ve met a few local super’s, and I’ll guarantee you these are not $200K+ guys. Their earnings are the product of a rigged system.

9. I counted about 45 pupils. That’s very large, also a happy looking bunch. I was in Grade 2 for 1956/57 and I seem to recall our typical classes were about 30 throughout our educational process. We were an orderly bunch, the fear of the strap kept us in line. That and parents who were relatively strict compared to the current style of parenting. Also living in a small town, no drugs per say and little crime, certainly no shootings.

10. It isn’t only the school system that’s like that. I saw a lot of that nonsense while I was a post-secondary educator.
    For example, the teaching staff had to scrape by with minimal salary increases with each successive contract while there was more than enough money for new carpeting each year or two in the institution’s administration offices.
    Then again, my institution took great pride in paying the lowest salaries compared with similar such establishments throughout the province. One year, it was one place above bottom. The following year, we were restored to our rightful place, namely in the basement.
    I can tell lots of similar stories about the university system.