A Decade of Successes and Challenges: The Ebb and Flow of Teacher Labor Gains and Losses in Ontario

• In Event: War and Peace: Unions and Teachers in Illinois and Ontario in an Era of Standardization

Abstract

Beginning in the summer of 2012, Ontario became the site of a major political struggle between teachers’ unions and the provincial government. After a contract was imposed on most teachers in the province affecting wages, benefits, hiring, staffing and other issues in Ontario schools, a majority of the province’s teachers undertook a variety of job actions for most of the 2012-2013 school-year. Under a newly elected provincial premier, the government and teachers’ unions reached a tentative agreement and most job action was halted. Although this year has been an important one for education and labour in Ontario, it is better understood within a deeper and longer historical trajectory of teachers’ struggles for education in the province. This paper traces the path journeyed by teachers in the Canadian province of Ontario, from the mistrust of imposed teacher testing that characterized education in this jurisdiction at the turn of the millennium, to the trust that then unseated it for close to ten years and which led to some of the most astonishing education gains ever seen in North America. The tensions between maintaining system regulation while building teacher autonomy will be examined, and concrete examples of gains and losses will be shared. Finally, the events of how Ontario lost the trust it had worked so hard to build and where it might go from here will be discussed.
The paper has three main objectives. First, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of the way in which gains and losses have been produced within the specific context of Ontario education over the past decade, in order to contextualize the current struggles of teachers in the province. Second, this paper aims to contextualize the Ontario case within the broader intra- and international contexts of teachers and teacher unionism. Third, this paper will identify the ways in which academic research can support education and education politics which better serves students, communities and teaching.
The paper relies upon a review of literature on teacher unionism in Ontario specifically, public sector unionism more generally, education policy, best classroom practices, and statistical analysis of public data sets. Additionally, data sources for the paper include the author’s experience at the Ontario Teachers’ Federation and other organizing activities in the Ontario context, and numerous other sources.
This paper provides a formal account of the recent labour and government unrest in Ontario, the results of which will deeply inform education labour relations going forward. Additionally, by providing a detailed and insider analysis of the Ontario education context from the year 2000 onward, this paper extends the scholarly literature on teacher unionism and situates current events within a broader historical and political context. Finally, this paper places this discussion within a comparative context as well as within the research context of the large-scale survey, enriching scholarly understandings of unionism, teacher practice, and education policy and the relationship between these areas.

Author

• Lindy Amato, Ontario Teachers' Federation