Well, it seems that the the B.C Teachers voted to strike by a very large margin yesterday.  I got the email this morning that the BC “yes” votes were more than double the “no” votes.  I voted no yesterday as did my wife. 
  I think that all of the issues which are being bandied around -class size, IEP students per class, wage increase, ability to negotiate class composition etc. are of varying interest to me.

Here’s my take on the above issues

Class Size-  Has never effected me.  I must plan harder for larger groups, but if you are teaching using a strategy akin to Engelmann’s “stimulus locus” concept, size of group is irrelevant.  Tight structure with attention to ‘faultless presentation’ will trump size of class.

IEP- In all of my years of teaching students that have been labeled with categories such as ‘extreme behaviour’ to ‘mild learning disability’  I have found the IEP process to be bogus.  A meeting is done at the beginning of the year, and some strategies are decided upon by a few ‘specialists’ and the parent and the teacher.  There is never any consideration that the student’s difficulties could have arisen due to poor teaching.  The label excuses the teacher and says, “Well, this student certainly cannot achieve like a normal student, because of an external reason.”  We cannot control the student’s outside-of-school experiences, so we must modify the in-school-experiences.  Calls for social change could perhaps fix the problem, but that is like an engineer calling for a tear-down of an auto factory because there is a problem with a certain vehicle’s break system.  Wouldn’t it be better to whittle down the problem to its most specific manifestation and correct THAT, rather than call up the wreckers, and try to solve the problem with a re-do of the entire factory?
  I examine each kid and apply this rule to the problem:  “If the student doesn’t learn, the teacher hasn’t taught.”  I have found all brains -even addled ones (my wife teaches a brain-damaged student)- to be logical.  The brain tries to apply a rule to what is presented to it, using sameness and difference of examples as its modifiers.  When you present new information this way, learners have something very clear to hang on to.  Amount of practice becomes the variable.

Wage increase:  Well, who doesn’t want more money, but I am not on the side of paying people more money for doing a poor job at what they do.  Would you pay a mechanic an hourly wage which was above shop-rate, for a rough, or even totally ineffective fix of your transmission?  Only if you didn’t care about your car. 

Negotiating class comp:  Sounds like bad teachers trying to get out of the ‘bad-teacher spotlight”, that are needy students.  If you are an ineffective instructor, it is the needy students that fail most profoundly in your class, and thus show-up your lack of effectiveness.  Negotiating a limit to the amount of difficult students is like shirking your responsibility.  If you were confident that your learners DID learn while under your direction, and that they moved forward in measurable terms that correlated to your efforts, who cares what the class composition is. 
CAVEAT
This stance only remains as long as the world keeps passing students on through grades w/o regard to their abilities, and admin keeps touting the party line that heterogeneous groupings are better for students “socially”.  This is nonsense, and I am for negotiation of composition if it means a banishment of teaching an ability range of grade 1 to grade 9 in one grade-group.  Teaching this way is do-able, just ridiculously hampered, and it doesn’t need to be.  More realistic passing and failing of students could solve this, but only if the teaching were done in a solid, legitimate way.  Teaching isn’t done this way, so passing and failing students reflects on the teachers’ abilities as well as the students’.  This must be concealed, thus everyone passes now.  Students don’t know anything, and teachers can’t teach them, but by gosh,  ‘students matter, teachers care’!!