A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

    A looming strike/lockout in B.C. schools gets my attention more these days due to living with my son and his two school-age boys, who are bracing themselves for disappointment now that their final month of school is about to be disrupted by lockouts and rotating strikes.      One of the boys is worried about losing out on his band trip to Tofino this week, which looks pretty likely. The younger one will probably have to give up a field trip to Victoria. I'm sure there are kids like them all over B.C. who - far from cheering for more days off in the event of a work shutdown - are really worried about what this latest work action at their schools is going to mean to them.     Way to go, government and teachers. Stick it to the kids just because you're completely incapable of settling a contract like grownups.     As a CBC report rightly notes, the essence of the problem between teachers and their employers is that " this is a dysfunc...

Not enough just to measure 'school satisfaction' Our public schools are in the news right now, for issues ranging from funding problems to whether principals are "dumbing down" the education process by letting students rewrite tests. But I've yet to see much discussion about findings that flag much deeper problems in B.C.'s public schools, as identified by the students and parents using the system. Satisfaction surveys have their limitations, but they still reveal a great deal about how the "customer" perceives a service. Done regularly, they're also valuable for tracking whether customer satisfaction improves as problems are identified and dealt with. Take a look at the 2007-08 surveys of B.C. public schools, however, and what you'll find are a whole lot of dissatisfied students and parents who have been identifying the same problems in our schools for more than five years now, with virtually no sign of improvement in the areas they identify...

Tomorrow's disasters visible in report on kids in care June 1, 2007 I spoke to a Grade 10 class about homelessness a few months back, and was profoundly discouraged to realize that to them, the problems in Victoria’s downtown were just the way it was. They’d never known any different. The sleeping bags, the shopping carts, the drugs and the craziness - these kids had no way of knowing that just 10 years ago, most of that didn’t even exist. On the one hand, the problems all seem so new. But as a report released this week makes clear, creating homelessness is in fact a slow, sad process. Where did the trouble come from? People ask me that a lot. I then recite a long list of best guesses, starting with the drastic cuts to Canadian mental-health support that started in the early 1980s and carrying right on through two decades of missteps and flawed thinking. We’ve now reached a point where we not only provide less help to people who need it, but also create the conditions that lead to ...

Fraser Institute findings ought to worry us May 25, 2007 The Fraser Institute’s annual ranking of B.C. schools is one of those things that sparks controversy every time among teachers, principals and parents. A bad ranking really spoils people’s day. Critics of the annual ritual say the good of a school simply isn’t evident solely on the basis of how its students perform on assessment tests. There’s much more to doing a good job than test scores can ever measure, they argue. Those are valid points. Schools are complex places, and tests are simplistic tools. But with all due respect to the many hard-working school teachers out there, the institute’s school-by-school analysis is still worth talking about. Uncomfortable as it may be, we have much to discuss in terms of the significant gaps the institute identifies between B.C.’s schools. In its most recent report, the institute rated the province’s elementary schools. The ratings are primarily about how well a school’s young students did ...