Like teachers’ unions everywhere, the teachers’ union in this province has been campaigning relentlessly against standardized testing for many years.

Its opposition to the testing is of course absolutely futile, since the nature of a public school system that is compulsory requires public oversight of some kind. And since unions oppose all other forms of public oversight or feedback loops, testing is pretty inevitable no matter how much opposition is mustered. That's why we see testing in almost all jurisdictions.

But unions require campaigns of this sort for a variety of reasons relating to the nature of their business, as in fact does the government, however much it appears that the government speaks on behalf of the people. So the eternal squabble persists, with neither party being blameless for the perpetuation of this largely ceremonial dance. If not about testing, the two would be in apparent dispute over other matters. But while their mutual dependence on these games is clear, the boundaries of the playing field often are not - the boundaries are (to succumb to an irresistible pun) constantly being tested.

In such cases, a referee is called in, and in the most recent dispute, the teachers’ union won. Students have now been declared a legitimate part of the turf. Arbitrator John Kinzie ruled on May 2nd that teachers were within bounds to deliver anti-testing pamphlets to parents by giving them to students to take home (http://www.bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Professional_Responsibility/Kinzie20080502.pdf).

This is not an isolated victory for the BC Teachers’ Federation in its bid to expand the playing field. In 2005, another arbitrator ruled that parents were a legitimate part of the turf. It was decided in that case that teachers had the right to unilaterally decide to spend time in parent-teacher interviews discussing education politics. That decision was later upheld by two out of three judges in the BC Court of Appeal (http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/Jdb-txt/CA/05/03/2005BCCA0393.htm).

It is my view that both arbitrators and the appeal judges erred gravely in their rulings, but the error they made is so common in public policy-making that they, like all policymakers, are probably oblivious to it. Indeed, so are we all, or else we would not stand for it.

The error occurs in three parts: first, the interests of individuals are presumed to be uniform and to align precisely with those of the collective to which they appear to belong in this context (teachers, parents, students); second, the parties seeking arbitration are the only parties granted voice in the proceedings; and third, the rights and freedoms of people who are without voice in the proceedings are considered subsidiary to the rights and freedoms of the people in the room, and in fact are deemed an asset to be distributed among the combatants like spoils of war.

The model for democracy to which such arbitrators and judges appear to subscribe is that of citizen as any one or all of: inanimate object, empty vessel, hapless tool, bottomless well of time and energy, and/or undifferentiated part of a faceless, robotic mass.

The error is, in aggregate, to entirely dehumanize citizens and to render them devoid of individual decision-making capacity.

As a result of the 2005 ruling, for example, parents can no longer determine how they wish to spend their time. What they choose to attend under the guise of parent-teacher interview can be changed to an entirely different topic regardless of their plans (that’s the inanimate object model). The teacher can make the meeting predominantly about education politics regardless of whether the parent wants any information on that topic (that’s the empty vessel model).

And as a result of the current ruling about the FSA pamphlets, students must act as couriers for the BCTF, for free and irrespective of their own or parental consent, even if they are too young to work legally (that’s the hapless tool model). Although the arbitrator had material that made this point (which atypically even included a comment about employing children from an unrepresented source, in this case school parent and 24 Hours columnist Erin Airton), he gave it no apparent credence.

That the union carries out campaigns against child labour is a delicious irony that in no way renders this situation more palatable.

The arbitrator’s decision has effectively pimped the services of children as couriers to the BCTF, and herein lies another irony that would be delicious if it did not so patently victimize people. The arbitrator gave parents no opportunity to consent to their children being used to ferry home a pamphlet that is encouraging them to use the power of consent to undermine FSA testing. This is to say that the arbitrator has enabled the teachers’ union to manipulate parental consent to challenge the government, but fails to grant parents the ability to use parental consent to challenge the BCTF.

Given the apparently mandatory nature of the courier assignment, one is also driven to wonder what the consequences might be for students who decide not to deliver the pamphlet at home, or for students who fail to ensure their parents read it.

And in neither arbitration case was any recognition given to teachers who wish to behave other than as one with the BCTF, the collective to which they are required to belong (that’s the robotic mass model). This is particularly piquant in view of the fact that the grievance was originally generated by the actions of school administration after being approached by a teacher who felt uneasy with the directives of the union to use children as couriers.

These outrageous infringements on the self-determination capacity of teachers, students, and parents are mostly justified by the arbitrators on the basis of freedom of speech. But while it is allegedly the freedom of speech of teachers that is on the table, the net effect is to give the union greater control over teachers. In the arbitration, what passed as their freedom of speech was in fact their freedom to deliver the union’s message, not their own.

Given the culture of fear within the union and the many ways in which teacher belief and behaviour are manipulated, the award actually amounts to a reduction in freedom of speech for individual teachers. What has been awarded is freedom of speech for the organization: freedom to impose its will on teachers, and freedom to impose its message on families. That organizational freedom has been acquired at the cost of reduced individual freedoms. Individual freedoms have been the spoils of war between two organizations.

Freedom for individuals appears, in fact, to be more evident in the private marketplace than in the arena of public education. You can hang up on telemarketers, you can refuse a spritz of perfume in the cosmetics department, and you can leave the room during TV commercials, but two arbitrators and two judges have decreed that you cannot evade the message of the BCTF.

And herein lies the most fatal error made by the arbitrators and judges. They seem to differentiate the organizations under their jurisdiction from the private sector. In doing so, they reveal a tragic misunderstanding of the nature of the union business. They appear to believe they are adjudicating within the confines of the public education system, and that the government and the union both have the same democratic legitimacy that will assure that they use their representative powers ethically.

But make no mistake, a teachers’ union is no public body; it is a private corporation. It is not a non-profit society, nor is it a beneficent public agency working for the common good. It is commercial; a business with a growth plan, a business strategy, and a payroll to meet, and a business, moreover, with whom citizens have no more direct a relationship than we do with the suppliers of the coffee machines in which our espresso is made at the local café.

An indirect, sequential relationship certainly exists, and we have a vested interest in the type of coffee machine purchased, but it makes no more sense for the union to communicate directly with citizens than it does for the maker of coffee machines to communicate directly with café customers. It is the café ownership and staff that interacts with the coffee machine, and so any dispute between them about which machine to buy or the terms of the service contract should certainly consider the customer, but it need not involve the customer. Similarly, it is workers, in this case teachers, who engage a union to represent them in the relationship with their employer. That the employer happens to be the government that the citizens collectively elect is coincidental, but not relevant to the resolution of any dispute. Such disputes are private, and should have no discernible effects on citizens. While unions have taken a place in the theatre of public policy, they have no natural role there. If they are there, it is because it serves their business interests to be there.

As such, to view these cases as issues of freedom of speech for teachers was completely misguided. These cases should have been regarded as an inappropriate incursion into the schools by a private corporation. The outcome should have been no different than if students were asked to take home a flyer from a big box store.

Any organization that wants to disperse information to the general public is free to do so, but it cannot use the schools to do so for free. It has to use a paid distribution mechanism - partly so that the consumer is not misled into believing the information to be unbiased.

Sometimes our opinions in education politics are so firmly set that we are unable to see the discordance in a situation if the organization with which we sympathize is winning. As such, someone who is “pro-union” might be constitutionally unable to see a problem with union information being delivered by force.

An objective view can sometimes be obtained by imagining the opposite scenario. Consider, for example, the Fraser Institute, an organization that supports FSA testing and in fact uses it to compare schools. Could the Fraser Institute rankings be distributed home via students? I imagine the union, and many teachers, would strenuously object.

Or consider whether this website could obtain court approval to compel teachers to tell parents about this site in parent-teacher interviews. It simply wouldn’t happen.

The arbitrators in both these cases, then, erred not only in discounting citizens and in giving teachers the capacity to intrude grievously on the rights of families, but also in misunderstanding the nature of the union’s business and its relationship with teachers. The arbitrator in the current case even evaluated the truthfulness and accuracy of the pamphlet that the union wanted to deliver to students, an issue that would be recognized easily as being entirely irrelevant if it had been WalMart, the favourite whipping boy of the anti-corporate campaign to which unions are enthusiastic parties, using students to take home an advertising pamphlet to their parents.

My perception of this arbitrator ruling is based on the belief that life in a democracy should be different from life in a dictatorship. If I lived in a dictatorship with compulsory public schooling, such as Castro’s Cuba, or in Saddam’s Iraq, what freedoms that I now have would I lose?

Of course I could never write an article such as this one. Nor could teachers or their unions, should they be able to unionize, oppose the government. But what of the citizen experience? How would it differ? What would be the experience of a mom, checking school notices and attending parent-teacher conferences?

Here, in a democracy, you have no control over whether the teacher brings you in for a meeting to tell you about your child or to subject you to a treatise on class size. Here, in a democracy, our children are required to bring home information that is unrelated to their schooling. Does it really matter whether this unwanted intrusion comes from a third-party organization upheld by democratic courts or directly from an autocratic ruler?

Ian Shapiro, in his illuminating book “The State of Democratic Theory,” defines democracy as "a life without dominance." His point appears to be not who does the dominating, but whether there is dominance. It seems to me that it is not the presence or absence of a dictator that determines the true nature of our society, but rather the presence or absence of dictatorial behaviour and our power, or lack thereof, to evade it. These arbitrators and judges have upheld dominance over me and my children, not freed us from it.

From where I stand, the arbitrators and the courts have dropped the torch that was thrown to all of us from failing hands in Flanders Fields, and I do not think that this should be taken lightly.

Edited by Karin Litzcke (05/22/08 05:59 PM)