A reader directed me towards Heather Mallick’s column in today’s Toronto Star, concerning the Star‘s recent expose of high-school credit mills, where those students who can afford the tuition are able to “jump the queue” of University and College admission standards, through inflated grades.  The Star’s series of articles was summarized in an earlier blog post, which in turn generated at least one reader’s response.

Mallick’s column is deservedly pointed.  While I’m not sure that the repeated references to her colleague’s book benefit her argument, she offers a forceful reminder about why we hold education as a social value, and the way that the fetishization of academic credentials threatens to pervert the educational system.

The article is reproduced below:

Credit mills grind up young futures

by Heather Mallick, Star columnist

Revelations about Ontario “credit mills” offering underachieving high school students a way to buy inflated marks are both a shocker and a warning.

Yes, the unregulated fly-by-night schools, as revealed by Star reporters Jennifer Yang and Robert Cribb, are a disgrace to the Ministry of Education’s grip on what we most value, our children’s future. But it gets worse. Students who take the path of least resistance — who fork over money to avoid studying — are headed for a permanent grief.

The grief continues when they cheat — and that includes cheating another genuine hard-working student out of a place at university — only to discover that university or college is too tough for them. You can’t buy your grades at the University of Toronto. You have to do the work.

So your misspelled essays and disastrous multiple-choice tests in first year force your university to put you through makeup classes more appropriate to Grade 10 students. Tenured professors shun teaching such students so they hand over classes to an army of underpaid adjunct professors, with PhD students to do the marking.

When you bought your marks from the pathetic non-credentialled teachers at unregulated schools taught out of garages, you infected the education system. Proud of yourself?

Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. It’s not really your fault. Students are hustling like this because they’re frightened, and who can blame them?

That was the shock. Here’s the warning: They’re reacting to a world we built for them and it’s our job to fix it.

Credentialism has overtaken education. You don’t want to learn in high school, you want the diploma. You don’t want to study in university but you want the degree. In fact, you don’t even want the degree so much as the job you pray it will get you. When you’re told that a BA isn’t enough, you get an MA to set you apart.

But what sets students apart is their ability to think, spell, create, interpret, generate ideas, do the work and in general be the product of what the education system was intended to be: an improver of human beings, an enlarger of personal worlds.

When we regard universities as job factories, increasingly filled by students popping out of credit mills, then who cares about the content of the courses?

I have nothing against vocational schools. Indeed I wish we had more of them because you either know how to take a photograph/engineer a bridge/maintain a machine or you don’t.

But instead we have a chain of lowered standards, starting with credit mills and moving on to credential generators feeding “job” factories. In 2010, Toronto author Russell Smith wrote a novel called Girl Crazy about this world, his protagonist the depressed (but still idealistic) community college teacher named Justin who suspects his students are being forced to buy marks.

Smith, one of Canada’s finest writers, dares to approach an unthinkable subject, an approaching class warfare in which everyone fights for status measured out in money but also in degrees.

We are told the arts don’t matter, but little has made the educational struggle as real to me as Smith’s stark scary novel of modern Toronto.

Justin straddles worlds. He has the credentials his students yearn for. He teaches strivers like the ones Yang met when she went undercover. But he is miserable because credentialism got him nowhere and yet he knows credentialism makes the world go round.

The corrupt reptilian school administrator in Girl Crazy sums up the attitude that is killing genuine learning: “It’s not really an education that helps you do well in the world. Nope. What helps you . . . is skill at a particular job . . . How are you going to do that if you don’t have a foot in the door? Hey? We provide that foot in the door.”

“Why would we make getting that thing more difficult for them?” he asks.

Because it’s immoral not to. Because it costs them money they don’t have. Because they’re going to crash and burn with an education that teaches nothing.

The Ontario government has to shut down credit mills. It has to end credentialism because it doesn’t educate and doesn’t lead to jobs. This can’t go on.

hmallick@thestar.ca

In response to my last post — on the Toronto Star expose of disreputable high-school “credit mills”, our most frequent correspondent explains how a commitment to academic integrity necessitates that we extend our vigilance beyond our personal practices as teachers, and towards the trends taking place in both our educational workplaces and the larger educational system within which they are situated:

The Toronto Star has done a great service by giving wide publicity to this issue. Unfortunately, it is only one of a host of related concerns about the quality of education at all levels.

I urge college educators to become alert to all sorts of institutions including allegedly postsecondary schools which grant “degrees” and might easily fool unsuspecting admissions personnel and other authorities into granting advanced standing for dubious credits.

Even more, however, we should be vigilant about our own practices. When the colleges were first established in the late 1960s, there was a common purpose and something of a common set of standards across Ontario. In the intervening forty years and more, we have witnessed a growing chaos, now reaching its most intense level as Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology have been tossed into the world of competitive marketing.

One superficial aspect of that is the “rebranding” of institutions as they call themselves all sorts of new names, advertising what they take to be their strenghts. Another, more serious, innovation is the plethora of certificates, diplomas, degrees, “articulated” programs in which colleges and universities offer joint programs leading to the awarding of a college diploma and a university degree, and what are commonly known as “postgraduate” college programs. Moreover, as colleges get into the “business” of cooperating with private sector firms to offer “designer” courses to meet whatever “need” the corporate sector may demand, a further confusion will inevitably occur.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not necessarily objecting to any of these particular innovations or to adaptive change in general. I am just warning about what can happen when market-driven modifications in academic programming become the determining factor in educational philosophy and practice.

We might all benefit from reading a little about this sort of thing. As a start, I urge that we pay attention to a book published the late and much lamented Professor David Noble of York University. His Digital Diploma Mills (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), parts of which are available on the “Net,” is a commendable exploration of one element of this overall trend.

Call it the commodification of education, the “dumbing-down” of curriculum or any other catch-phrase you please, the upshot is that we are caught in a profound alteration of what it is to be a college, and it may be time to insert the concept of academic credibility into the mix, before the entire system is put at risk.

I don’t know whether you’ve seen it, but the Toronto Star has spent the last couple of days unveiling the results of its investigation of private high schools in the GTA.  The investigation appears to have been undertaken jointly by Star reporters and Ryerson students; this post includes links to five separate articles that the Star has published online (some of which might not have made it into the print version) — I encourage you to read them all.

To begin with, The Star reports a fact that some of us likely already know, which is that certain private schools inflate grades considerably (to an estimated 20%-30%), often seemingly in direct proportion with their tuition fees.  And the Star‘s main article leads with the significant fact that such a system skews the university-application and scholarship-granting process in favour of students whose parents can afford to send them.   In particular, the article reports that:

Provincial inspection reports obtained through freedom of information requests and interviews with students, teachers and principals, reveal:

• Grades at some private schools arbitrarily increased upon request
• Credits granted with less than half of mandatory class hours completed
• Outdated curriculums, no lesson plans, no course outlines and missing student assessments
• Difficult questions removed from exams
• Teachers without proper qualifications and those who “do not understand” evaluation and assessment
• Students permitted to take courses without the mandatory prerequisites
• Rewriting of tests for $100
• Students left to write tests with little supervision and access to the Internet.

The fact that some of this information came from provincial inspection reports is significant, since it indicates that — while reduced funding for education may limit the government’s ability to inspect schools — even when that inspection reveals abuses, the Ministry of Education remains unwilling to punish schools for violating ministry standards.

As an example, another article reports that one school:

. . . was inspected at least four times between 2005 and 2009 and consistently failed to assess and evaluate students in accordance with provincial standards.  Nevertheless, the Scarborough school was allowed to continue operating and granting credits. Between 2005 and 2009, at least 651 students have obtained high school credits from [it].

In fact, as the first article points out, there are over 358 credit-granting private schools today, yet, Since 2006, the Ministry has revoked licenses only eight times.  And even if a school’s license is revoked, “school operators are often permitted to reopen under different names.”

These articles do strain to differentiate between some of the less-reputable schools and their more prestigious, “legitimate” counterparts (who occasionally happen to purchase advertising space in that paper) — often by emphasizing the strip-mall locales of the credit mills.  But quotes from three different University officials indicate that they can or do make no such distinctions.

“As long as the ministry’s approved them I take the grades as they are. That’s the ministry’s job to verify the schools,” says Janice O’Farrell, director of admissions at Carleton University.

Right.  The ministry’s job.  We’ll get back to that later.

Another article brings to light the frustration felt by the humble public-high-school guidance counsellor or principal, in the face of this widespread academic fraud that has been perpetuated with (and through) the provincial ministry’s benign neglect.  And, in fact, it seems that guidance counsellors have been the most pro-active in trying to rectify the abuse:

Since 2009, the ministry has received a total of 30 complaints about inflated marks from public school officials, according to records obtained through freedom of information legislation.

In most cases, the ministry’s response is listed in the records as “reported to regional office.” In only once case is an enforcement action indicated.

Evans says she’s phoned and written the ministry numerous times complaining about “overinflated” grades from private schools.

“I’ve never had a response from the ministry. It’s one-way communication. We’ve stopped because it falls on deaf ears.”

The two remaining articles offer first-person accounts of what goes on inside the classrooms at these schools.  In the first, a student seeking higher grades in a math class reported that he managed to achieve them, thanks to:

Lax attendance policies, “unqualified” teachers who would walk out of the classrooms for exams, leaving students to share answers or use the Wi-Fi connection to find answers on their phones. . . .

“I (would tell the teacher) ‘I can’t do this,’ and I asked her how would you do this question and she just said don’t worry about that question”. . . .

[He] walked out with a 95 per cent which was transferred to his high school transcript [and] entered Waterloo in September 2009 with an entrance scholarship based on an overall average in the 90s. . . .

The second article is written by Jennifer Yang, a Star reporter who went undercover to take a class at Toronto Collegiate Institute, for $550.  She offers a short illustration of how she managed to achieve a “mathematically impossible” final grade:

Going into my final exam, I had a middling 60 per cent average. I was told my final exam would be worth 30 per cent of my overall grade — that means the highest mark I could hope for was 72, but I would have to get a perfect score on my final exam.

I did not score perfect on my final exam. Yet, I wound up receiving a final chemistry mark of 72 per cent anyway — and then, the teacher arbitrarily boosted that by another 13 percentage points.

My final grade: 85 per cent.

Which brings us to the relevant issue for this forum: The question of teachers’ responsibility.

Firstly, a little context.  One of the schools discussed reports paying teachers $20 per hour (presumably per class hour).  The principal of another school tried to blame the teachers for the fact that “his school gave out credits to students who received as little as 50 hours of instruction, less than half of the 110 hours stipulated by province”, claiming that “they (teachers) were not meeting the required number of hours.”  Needless to say, no mention was given of the number of hours they were asked/paid to teach.

Half the teachers at yet another school lack certification from the Ontario College of Teachers, since, “unlike public schools, private schools are not required to hire teachers certified by the Ontario College of Teachers and no education or training is necessary to open a private school”.

In his defense, the principle of that school claims that “by far the worst teachers I’ve had have been accredited (by the Ontario College of Teachers) . . . . Not everybody is a good teacher just because they get through teachers’ college.”

And indeed, Jennifer Yang’s report on her chemistry class would appear to confirm this.  Her teacher (who is listed on the College of Teachers’ website as having recieved a B.Ed. and a Ph.D. from universities in India) is depicted as utterly deluded, if well-meaning.

But the techniques that this teacher employed to ensure high grades are somewhat significant: Grade curving, teaching to the test, review sessions that specifically tackle questions that will be featured on the exam, stressing certain points of instruction right before handing out the test, arbitrary grade curving.  These are classic strategies employed by teachers who have a vested interest — not in their students’ education — but in their students’ grades.

They are the strategies employed by teachers whose continued employment or whose school’s funding depends upon the students’ receiving high grades.  They are, in short, the strategies employed by teachers who are pressured to “perform”, and whose performance is measured exclusively in terms of student grades, (short-term) student satisfaction, and student retention.

And indeed, in the final article, reporter Jennifer Yang reports that her teacher admitted to “fixing marks”, following “a lengthy, closed-door meeting with [the] school director”.

Personally, I take two lessons from this series of articles: The first is that tenured employment (in whatever form) for teachers is the foremost precondition of academic integrity.  Yes, obviously, tenured teachers are capable of inflating grades, but they are also the most able to resist outside pressures (whether from managers or students) to do so.  Just as we cannot speak of academic freedom where job stability is absent, so too must we recognize the threat posed to academic integrity when teachers can lose their jobs at the whim of a manager, rather than for any demonstrated malfeasance or incompetence.

The second lesson that I draw from this is a prediction: The Ministry of Education obviously needs to do a better job of enforcing its own educational standards — the Star articles implicitly suggest that one first step would be to bar the managers of schools found to violate ministry standards from working in Ontario schools thereafter.  Regardless of how the ministry might choose to crack the whip, if it continues to fail to do so, then Ontario colleges and (especially) universities will ultimately require all applicants to write a standardized test (much like the SATs in the U.S.), since the grades that would appear on high school transcripts would increasingly bear no relation to academic performance.

And that outcome leads to its own implications: Kaplan test prep courses for those who can afford them, and the general diversion of high school resources to prepare their students for that test.  In short, it would result in virtually all high school teachers being held responsible for grades on standardized tests — with things like merit pay for those whose students have good test scores, and increased scrutiny and job instability for those who do not.

Of course, this model for may have been precisely what Mike Harris desired for public high schools when he relaxed the regulations surrounding Ontario private schools in 1995.

But ultimately it would cause all high school teachers to resort to the exact same sorts of measures that were taken by the teacher who was mentioned in the Star‘s article.

In short, if the province permits private schools to continue to undermine provincial educational standards (and the quality of our graduates), then postsecondary schools will lose the faith in grades as an indication of those standards.  The consequent need for standardized testing would ultimately pressure all Ontario high schools and high-school teachers to adopt the same priority as the schools targeted in these articles: An emphasis upon grades over education.

Too many of our own students may already share that priority, and no doubt there are any number of directions from which they have been taught to do so.  In turn, job security for competent teachers (i.e., employment that does not simply hinge on student grades or student satisfaction) is one of the foremost elements that can help to maintain academic integrity, by limiting teachers’ personal stake in their students’ grades, permitting the teachers instead to privilege their stake in the students’ education.

And that’s a lesson that bears great significance for Ontario’s colleges and universities, where an increasing number of faculty are not full-time, and an increasing number report feeling that their continued employment depends on keeping students satisfied (care to guess how?) and on avoiding grade appeals (care to guess how?)

The long-term interests of our students, their prospective employers, and the province of Ontario all depend upon a powerful assurance that grades provide an honest reflection of academic achievement.  The ever-growing reliance on contract faculty in Ontario’s colleges and universities threatens that assurance.

E-mail your own related insights and experiences anonymously to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com

Well, according to WordPress, this week marks both my 100th post and my 40,000th hit.

So far, the celebration has been muted — it involved only a (possibly temporary) change of theme and tagline.

But if you read the blog, this seems like an opportune time for me to invite you to consider subscribing, using the button on the right-hand side of the screen.

That’s it; celebration’s over.  Time to get back to work.

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Probably many of you checking in nowadays are looking for news about the Support Staff strike.  So let me take a moment to pass you on to the excellent strike blog at: http://strike2011.wordpress.com.  In particular, if you haven’t had the chance to read it, I recommend the essay by Ryan Patrick Way that the blog featured in its first post.  That essay happily starts to crunch some of the relevant numbers, bringing a welcome measure of empirical data to one’s understanding of the negotiations.  The blog also features a useful explanation of the union’s current bargaining position, in layman’s terms

In the next day or two, I hope to discuss some of the current initiatives undertaken by student organizations, in light of the current election campaign.

Two letters arrived, in response to one that was included in yesterday’s post.

The first is from a support-staff worker currently on the picket lines:

I empathize with everyone affected adversely during this strike.  I know everyone has tough issues to deal with, myself included.

I refuse to be bullied by the powers that be because I know they will continue to erode my rights until there is nothing left.

What will you do when the college decides your job is only required part-time, or contracted out, or eliminated? Who will you turn to for help then?

Will these college saviours be so quick to provide you with a job when they can get support staff for a dime a dozen?

The second is from a prof in the GTA:

The dilemma this fellow faces is real. It would be presumptuous to dismiss his real pain. It would be a moral conceit for me, a faculty member who is also “crossing the line,” to denounce him as a “scab” or presume to condemn him morally.

At the same time, where I come from, when your union is on strike, you do not work. End of story. No excuses, no complaints. Everyone is in the fight, or the other side wins.

I will not judge this person as an individual, but I will say three things:

1. In cases of legitimate hardship, does the Union not have the means to assist? It seems to be that it does. Has this fellow even tried that route?

2. Can his wife not delay her education for a time? Yes, it’s a sacrifice, but I’ve been a union member throughout my working life, and we all have to make sacrifices. As things stand, all Support Staff are paying his way.

3. As presumptuous as it may sound, there is a matter of principle and a matter of politics at stake.

The principle is one of selfishness vs. solidarity. Putting your own needs and desires first buys into the very market model of society that the authorities endorse … and it leads to poor wages, an end to full-time employment, the end of our pensions (just you wait!), the end of Medicare as we know it, and the creation of the sort of dog-eat-dog society that is not only ethically unsustainable, but in which middle- and working-class Canadians lose even more.

The politics are simple, too. No one I know has ever gone on strike for the fun of it. It’s the last resort and one that is, in my experience, always provoked by management. Make no mistake: the employer (and its friends in the government) figured this all out in advance. They have a plan and they’re sticking to it. The alternative is to cave in (as faculty did to our everlasting humiliation in our most recent “settlement”).  So, when a strike is forced upon us and we do what we must do, Union members either stick together or we don’t. If we don’t, the employer wins by default [. . .].

In the meantime, I have no energy to rail against this fellow. What we all must do is to find a way to make college faculty aware of the situation, [and] do the necessary education and mobilization to [. . .] stand together with the Support Staff in every possible way.

So far we haven’t, and so it is just self-indulgence to label one man who says he is 100% on-side but frets about “hostility” from his brothers and sisters who are working for their collective benefit (and in the long-term interest of the colleges, the faculty and the students).

When college professors join together and really support the Support Staff, we will have earned the right to criticize individual strike-breakers. For the moment we have our own sins to atone for, our own penance to take and our own redemption to achieve.

A valid point.  And although I can’t speak to its redemptive value, I’ll be happy to pass along the address to the Strike Hardship Fund, if I can obtain it.  Maybe one of the more effective ways that we professors could show solidarity with our support-staff colleagues would be devote a portion of our current incomes to supporting their own solidarity, inter se.

As I’ve said before, I don’t really know the details or merits of the offers and counter-offers; I only know that the strikers are the people who’ve been there so consistently when I’ve needed them, and who have helped me to accomplish my own aims.  I welcome the chance to return the favour.

Today I’m reposting two letters from readers, which represent different views on the charged topic of crossing picket lines for the purpose of strikebreaking — an act that the college administrators have been encouraging and facilitating, and one that OPSEU has been equally vocal in opposing.

Needless to say, these letters represent the opinions of the senders, and not necessarily my own.  Please feel free to send your thoughts or responses to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com.

The first takes offense with the colleges’ invitation for strikers to cross the picket line:

I am one of the support workers on strike.  This is the first time for me and walking that picket line for hours in the cold and the rain is not easy or fun — I’d rather be back at work. But unfortunately my college doesn’t care if I’m “out on the street”; in fact, they are willing to leave me there.

Obviously they do not value or respect me or my work.   If they did they wouldn’t be sending emails telling me that’s it’s okay to cross the picket lines and that the union is lying to me. I have read the constitution and the union is not lying and it’s not okay to cross the picket line. They must think I’m stupid, stupid, stupid to believe that they only sent out the email that it was okay to cross the picket line to let me know my rights.  I guess they also think I don’t have any morals or values and would turn my back on my fellow members 

If they valued and respected me they would be telling the College Employer Council to get back to the table and bargain in good faith.  They wouldn’t be on the front page of our local paper fighting like children and pointing fingers and blaming the union for everything.  If they really valued and respected me I wouldn’t be on strike at all.

The second laments any hostility fostered by those involved in the strike towards those support staff who feel compelled by circumstance to work during it:

I agree 100% with support staff going on strike.  I am also a support staff worker.  I am concerned however about the hostility I’ve felt for having to return to work.  I am married with two children.  My wife is a full time college student.  I am the sole breadwinner in my family.  I have bad debt from some previous bad investments.  My wife commutes to college and we spend $500+ a month on gas.  Both of my children are in daycare [. . .].

I will continue to support my fellow support staff workers in any way I can, and I regret that doesn’t include walking the picket line with them.  If I wasn’t one paychecque away from being evicted, things might be different.

Our most frequent contributor provides his perspective on the Support Staff strike:

The question of the Support Staff strike is not difficult. The position of professors has been systematically undermined by the build-up of part-time positions, so now something like two-thirds of teaching is done by non-full-time faculty, all working on-the-cheap without benefits and job security. The position of support staff is similar, with more and more jobs (e.g., security, cleaning) being contracted out to non-union people who are working on-the-cheap with few benefits and job security.

Even if we were not both unionized employees (and in the same union at that), we’d have every reason to do what we can to help them out.  The fact that they’re our sisters and brothers in OPSEU seals the deal.

As for management, it will say anything it can to undermine workers. Look at ex-President Miner’s statements about how we were all underworked and overpaid during our strike! Of course, it’s always possible to get around the money issue by saying that the capital budget for expansion doesn’t affect the operating budget for wages, but that’s a lot of codswallop too.

Although I have no access to the mind of management nor to the tactics of the Government of Dalton McPhussbudget, I can look at history. I joined the picket lines in the last Support Staff strike in 1979 and I’ve participated in all of our strikes ever since. What have I learned?

1. Management will keep college personnel out for two to three weeks;
2. The provincial government will legislate people back to work;
3. Arbitration will impose a settlement and (Hey Presto!) management will find the money for a modest pay raise – largely from the savings gained by not paying people for two or three weeks.

Unless something strange is happening, the entire affair has been scripted, choreographed and orchestrated. In an election year, it may be the same thing only more so!

So, what would Jack do? He’d have supported Support … and found some time to campaign for Andrea Horwath too.

As I said in my last post, there seems to be an almost inevitable tendency in the media to report on academic labour conflicts in ways that associate unions primarily with strikes, rather than the work that they perform happily for the vast, vast majority of the time.

One “macro” way to address this might be to recast strikes in terms of their socio-political significance, i.e., in relation to larger social phenomena.  The other — “micro” — way would be to place attention on the stories of individual workers, rather than merely talking about “the union” as a monolithic entity that somehow exists outside of the individuals who comprise its membership.

So, in the spirit of that latter approach, I wanted to pass along two messages that I received from support staff workers.  I thank them for sharing their stories with us:

I have been a member of the support staff for more than 30 years.
I work as a student advisor, logging at least 10 extra hours every week (with NO extra pay) just to keep up with the volume of inquiries from students, faculty and administrators — trying to make sure folks get the info they need in a timely fashion. Most of my fellow support staff are hard-working, dedicated, kind and diligent workers, much like you describe: smiling, professional and helpful, pitching in to help wherever and whenever needed.

I have 4 college diplomas and certificates.  Updating my education and remaining current  is essential to what I do.  I pride myself on being a college graduate and only wish the council of regents would recognize the value of those educated at the institutes we work in   Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

I love what I do, otherwise I would not have stayed in the field. However, there is a time for the college administrators to show their respect for support staff, and the time is now.

BTW, everyone who comes to my office gets a piece of chocolate!

And the second…

As one of those “Why don’t you get a job?” strikers, here are some of my comments from the other side of the cardboard OPSEU sign………….

I started my work supporting post-secondary students 15 years ago as an EA graduate and was considered “casual part time”, meaning that I was to work no more than 24 hours weekly, with no benefits and no guarantee that a job would be there for me at the beginning of each new semester, yet I still stayed in that job, to give support to our students. There was an amazing reward each and every semester from students who found that, with our helpful support, they could in fact be successful, when so many others had told them that they would not achieve success at the post-secondary level.

As a widow trying to raise a son on limited wages, I knew that post-secondary sector was where I wanted to work, and when a full-time position was posted at our college for a Learning Facilitator, in the Learning Support Services area of my college, I jumped at the chance to have job stability, decent benefits and the ability to show my young son that his Momma can rise above life’s challenges and provide for him.

Work ethic I have, my love of what I do is obvious, and when I was asked as part of the collective group to stand up for present and future jobs at our college, I readily agreed.  If I don’t do this for our future young people, who will? Certainly not the people who drive by giving us the insulting hand sign as we are trying to get our information out to the community. Certainly not the people who yell out of their truck windows as they speed by…”Why don’t you get a job?” 

Why are some people so misinformed and polarized in their anger with us for doing what we believe is the “right thing”?   This is our challenge… to keep the lines of communication open to inform those care enough to learn.

My immediate hope is “the powers that be” see that coming back to the table to resolve the outstanding issues is the productive way to demonstrate to our young people that issues can be discussed, modified and subsequently resolved in a timely and mature manner.

Okay, well, this post was originally going to be entitled: “Why I Hate the Way that Newspapers Treat Academic Workers’ Labour Negotiations”.

Actually, to be honest, it was actually going to be devoted to calling out a single journalist for deliberately obfuscating the context for the current support-staff strike (which I have discussed in this previous post).  I had all my sanctimonious denunciations lined up, but then I took the time to actually learn about the specific journalist in question.

And actually, she seems like a pretty cool person.  I think that I’d like her, if I knew her.  And, no less importantly, I don’t know how much of her finished article is the result of an editor’s intervention.

So I realized that it’s not really about her or any single journalist, and what follows is really about the way that the reportage of academic labour issues in current newspapers seems to be inevitably biased, and how we as workers will have to work pretty hard to change the lens through which the media automatically, reflexively view and represent labour struggles in the education sector.

So here are the first paragraphs of the article, from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, on Sept. 2:

College classes not expected to be disrupted by strike

WATERLOO REGION — When Rori Brown first learned about the support-staff strike at Conestoga College, she thought, “Not again.”

“Luckily for me, I got everything done before the strike except my OSAP,” the third-year accounting student said Friday.

Brown lives in Waterloo, so she got her parking pass, registration and most of her books out of the way in August, before support staff at Conestoga College walked off the job Thursday. They are among more than 8,000 support staff represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union on strike across the province.

This is the fifth time staff at provincial colleges have walked off the job since 1984. The last strike, by teaching staff in 2006, saw classes cancelled for three weeks. In 2010, the colleges narrowly avoided another faculty strike.

Okay, so what’s the problem here?  Well, let’s break it down: The story chooses to start with human drama — namely the character of the threatened student, cast in the role as “innocent pawn” or “stake” in a clash of wills between strikers and management.

Now, I can respect that choice, although I do recognize that it tends to cast the strikers in a worse light than management, simply because they’re the ones who become the agents of the labour stoppage.

But that’s not really my problem.  My problem is that the article chooses to begin with the words attributed to the innocent bystander in the first paragraph: “Not again”.  Now the dynamic shifts.  Automatically, before introducing a single fact or contextual detail about the struggle, we have the image of the innocent, who gives us the understanding that she has been repeatedly victimized by labour strife at her college.

We are led — as a consequence of the author’s and/or editor’s choices — to believe that the student’s educational experience has been plagued by repeated occasions when her education has been disrupted by workers on strike.

And the contextualizing evidence given to support that student’s (and now, the reader’s) impression is:

This is the fifth time staff at provincial colleges have walked off the job since 1984. The last strike, by teaching staff in 2006, saw classes cancelled for three weeks.

This is the fifth system-wide strike at provincial colleges in . . . 27 years.  An average of one strike every five-and-a-half years.   Moreover, it is the first strike to affect Conestoga in the last five-and-a-half years.

In fact, if these numbers are to be believed, it is somewhat improbable that a third-year accounting student could respond to a strike at Conestoga with the thought “Not again”, unless that student were seriously misguided.

But seriously misguiding, I believe, is the inevitable effect of newspaper articles like this one.

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that this is the first strike by college support staff in 32 years.  Rather, the article magnifies the frequency of strike-actions by mentioning that, “In 2010, the colleges narrowly avoided another faculty strike”, thus conflating “near misses” with actual events.  The fact that there has been no strike in over five years is rendered less important than the fact that there was almost a strike 18 months ago.

(One of the risks of this journalistic approach, in my opinion, is to increase the likelihood of strikes.  Why?  Because if the media and the public remember only the workers’ threat to strike, rather than their ultimate choices not to do so, then unions have to live with the bad press regardless of whether or not they actually go on strike.  Consequently, unions have less to lose by actually going on strike, since they’ll get no credit from popular opinion — nor from newspaper articles in the K-W area — for choosing not to.)

The rest of the article (linked here) carries on with the typical things that I expect to hear: The strikers’ work being recognized exclusively in terms of what’s disrupted in their absence, and the college president calling strikers unreasonable, rather than asserting the value of their work.  And what’s missing, predictably, is any discussion of the two sides position, with any analysis of the strikers’ demands in relation to — as the Conestoga president puts it — “macroeconomic circumstances” (one of which includes, as I have said before, the dwindling of Ontario’s middle class).

And again, what I want to stress is not that this article represents a particularly egregious example of poor coverage of an academic labour dispute.  It is utterly typical, and utterly depressing in its typicality.  Because of the framing narrative and contextual detail that a journalist (even a potentially-sympathetic one) and editor chose to include, the support-staff strike is presented as  a commonplace occurrence that plagues the educational experience of Ontario’s college’s students, when in reality it has never occurred before in the lifetime of either the journalist or the student she interviewed.

And there’s no way that we can say that that serves to present the case objectively, or with respect to its particularity.  It’s a distortion of the situation, and it needs to be addressed as such.  Because it’s the kind of distortion that results from lazy journalism: From a journalist’s or editor’s unconscious belief that one event can be simply treated as an indistinct moment in a larger pattern (i.e., unions striking again, ’cause that’s what unions do… .  Cue victimized student…).

And what we need to do is recognize and announce the degree to which these unconscious journalistic choices result in an anti-worker bias, which is communicated to readers as objective fact.

The solution is definitely not the godawful “strikers say/ but management says” reporting of contradictory claims, with no concern for actual truth.  Interestingly, this article escapes that dynamic by presenting only the management’s side, and doesn’t even try to address the reasons why the union is on strike — not a single union member’s words are included.  Presumably, the author or editor felt that it went without saying.  And frankly, where newspapers are concerned, most labour issues do indeed go without being said.

But maybe one solution to this pattern of distortion is to try inspire journalists to treat a strike as something new, something specific to a particular time and place, and to the specific factors thereof.  Perhaps we actually need to invite journalists — and more importantly editors, who determine the length of articles –  to think more about the “macroeconomic circumstances” (like, say, the underfunding of postsecondary education in Ontario, or the increase of temporary workers in the province) and the role of workers within them.

Just like my opinion about the journalist and her article changed when I tried to learn about her as an individual, so might newspapers change their tune if they tried to understand strikes as specific, particular events, and strikers as individuals with their own particular needs and motivations.

Journalists like narratives, and I can’t blame them.  I love stories, too.  Stories help us to understand the world, absorb knowledge, and to ascribe meaning to events.  So, if I have to complain about journalists or editors, I guess that I’ll complain that they’re choosing the wrong stories: They see an instance of labour conflict only as an episode in a larger story of more labour conflict (with its dramatis personae of antagonists and victims).  We need to encourage them instead to see that instance as an episode in a larger story of the trends that confront our economy and society, and of our collective values and vision for our province.

And maybe, if we accomplish that, we can turn what seems to be a simple moment of opposition and conflict into an opportunity to foster discussion and community.

Yesterday, I posted “Some Musings on the Support Staff Strike” — feel free to check it out, if you haven’t done so already.

Well, I don’t think anything I’ve every written has garnered so many responses so quickly, and I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of them, and thank everybody who took the time to write in:

From St. Lawrence College:

Beautifully said – Thank you!

From Georgian College:

As a support staff member it is refreshing to read this. I have given my heart and soul to mentoring students and do not regret a day of this. It is very difficult to be out on strike. I appreciate you validating our contribution to education and the economic growth of our communities.

From a family member:

As a parent of one of those support workers, I can attest to the fact that they do their jobs happily. They certainly did not want to strike and it is sad that the media almost always makes it about money, when in fact it has more to do with job security. Is a secure job with a living wage and decent benefits not part of why students attend college in the first place??

From a retired prof in St. Catherines

As a retired prof, I know what these folks mean to the system and how their efforts, more often than not, go unnoticed and unrewarded.  They need support from students, profs and the general public during this strike…. God knows, they will never receive it from administrators or the fuzzy-headed media that write on these issues.

And lastly, from a support staff worker at St. Clair College – a sentiment that manages to warm and break my heart, simultaneously:

This was the most rewarding comment I have ever heard in all the 32 yrs I have worked at the college………..thank you so much….

To repeat my original point — whatever you may think about a worker’s control over their own schedule, whatever you may think about the difference between 1.5% and 2% in wage increases, the work that college support staff do is important and worthy of recognition and respect.  And offering that respect doesn’t bind anybody to a political agenda; it simply affirms the value of the people who live and work beside us.

As ever, feel free to send your thoughts to ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com