Quote:
Originally Posted by wave46
The big fight will be with the teachers unions. The billions in savings will come from having fewer teachers as most of the costs in education are salaries (as is the case with most government operations).
The rationalization will mean layoffs and they will not go quietly into the good night. The big losers will be the teachers at the bottom - they'll get cut and be in a very bad job market for teaching in general.
I think that's why the province is reluctant to get into this mess, constitutional reasons aside.
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Actually, the number of teaching jobs would stay almost the same. The system allocates teachers to school boards and to individual schools based on the number of students. So smaller schools simply get fewer teachers.. and in general, they don't make exceptions. A lot of under-enrolled elementary schools only have three or four teachers total and they end up having consolidated grades--ie. one classroom is kindergarten and Grade 1, another is Grades 2 and 3, another is Grades 4/5/6, etc. That's one of the reasons why the government is pushing so hard to close small rural schools, because of the negative consequences of having kids of such different ages being taught by the same teacher in the same classroom.
In high schools, schools with smaller student populations who thus have fewer teachers end up having fewer elective courses available, or courses are only offered in alternating years. I went to a very small high school and in my school, for example, Grade 11 Physics & Grade 12 Physics were only offered in alternating years, the Grade 11 course in the first semester and the Grade 12 course in the second semester. So both grades take Grade 11 physics together in the first term, and both grades take Grade 12 physics together in the second term.
The billion dollars in savings would come from reductions in administrative staff, efficiencies of having the same bureaucracy, and from savings in transportation from smaller catchment areas.