The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Public education has faced significant challenges over Alberta’s 113 years. In those times, Alberta’s teachers have taken up the mantle of leadership to promote the cause of public education and preserve this foundational institution.

An alliance is born

The Alberta Teachers’ Alliance was born out of concern for sustainable public education in Alberta. Before the ATA’s founding, public education was at best a hit or miss affair. Each town’s ratepayers contributed to a local school board, so there were more than 2,600 school boards. Standardization was lacking in curriculum, teaching contracts, school inspections and even the length of the school year. Schools opened or closed at the whim of the board. Teachers, qualified or not, were often hired or fired solely due to local political squabbles.

This dearth of leadership, collective effort and professional voice prompted like-minded educators to advocate for professional status. In this way, teachers could bring professional vision, collaboration and collegiality into a partnership with government to produce a first-rate public education system. From 1921 until 1935, the United Farmers of Alberta formed the government. Under premiers Herbert Greenfield, John Edward Brownlee and Richard Gavin Reid there was but one minister of education, the formidable Perrin Baker. Baker and the ATA’s John Walker Barnett worked together—often in concert, occasionally in cacophony—to construct a teaching profession for Alberta and its students.

The Second World War—Public Education at Risk

Upon the enactment of The Teaching Profession Act in 1935 and important amendments thereto in 1936, the original Alberta Teachers’ Alliance gave way to a worthy successor, the Alberta Teachers’ Association. In the 21 years between the World Wars, Alberta teachers had built their organization into a mature and ever strengthening voice for public education.

In 1939, the Second World War called young men and women from their classrooms to take up military service. A teacher shortage threatened the stability and efficacy of public education precisely as teachers worked to bolster active, democratic citizenship in students. Teachers’ efforts were seen as vital, not only to the war effort, but to the longed-for period of recovery to follow.

The ATA and government undertook cooperative action to address the wartime teacher shortage and preserve the public education system. A new teaching certificate, the Junior Certificate for High Schools, came into being as a result of this cooperation. It required post-secondary training, and it licensed the certificate holder to teach Grades 7–11 for an initial period of three years.

Trained and qualified educators remained at the head of wartime classrooms just as those classrooms and school houses were coping with an influx of new students. British school children were arriving in Alberta; young people evacuated from the relentless bombings and imminent threat of death and destruction by frantic parents and a British government preparing to operate in exile. Alberta teachers asked themselves how public education could help care for and support these children.

The stakes could not have been higher. Teachers answered the call to service in their classrooms, on the battlefields, in the Red Cross, and in every benevolent organization dedicated to the relief of human suffering borne of the war. Teachers found their common ground, put aside differences of politics or philosophy and united in the face of great calamity for their profession and, most importantly, for public education and their students.

The Boomers arrive—and all falls before them

Sometimes challenges to public education arrive in waves. By 1950, the enormous influx of five-year-old baby boomers were poised to enter Alberta’s public education system. Their arrival was a socially seismic event and a challenge to the capacity of that system on every front. In sum, the Social Credit government now under Premier Ernest Manning (1943–1968) could not build schools or hire teachers quickly enough to meet the demand. Class sizes were enormous, classes became more complex, resources were stretched and yet the kids kept coming! Public education struggled to deliver on its promise of equal access to education for all Alberta students. The grand brick school facades of the 1920s were too impractical and time-consuming to build and, besides, they were far too expensive. The school experience was, for some students, shiny and new.

In his book Born At The Right Time, author Doug Oram describes this experience from the viewpoint of a school-aged child.

It was exciting to start in a brand new school. The blackboards weren’t black at all, but green! The room was lighter and more colourful than those in the old school. The desks were new, light-coloured, Formica-topped, and unblem­ished by decades of predecessors’ minor acts of vandalism. It was fun to have a playground filled with the latest in slides or swings. If the playground wasn’t ready and was still largely mud, that was fun too.

This challenge to public education went beyond new buildings and playgrounds. Rapidly expanding a profession while maintaining high professional standards precipitated a huge uptick in professional development efforts. The Association responded in that decade with proactive, far-reaching initiatives including the creation of specialist councils (councils of collaborating subject-expert teachers). Specialist councils immediately began establishing conferences, workshops and opportunities for teachers to advance their professional practice.

In addition, teachers began to organize and publicly raise their collective voice on the importance of public education. The boomer years saw teachers undertake important, effective and always nonpartisan advocacy and public awareness campaigns. Meetings with the Ministry of Education were ongoing and routine. Cooperation underpinned these meetings, but teachers remained resolute in their commitment to providing their students the best possible public education.

Economic threats to public education

Reliable and adequate funding for public education has been a perennial threat to the viability of Alberta’s public education system since the province was founded. However, funding emerged as a profound crisis in the mid-1980s and into the early 1990s. In 1992, matters came to a head during Premier Ralph Klein’s administration. Having achieved the premiership on the promise of fiscal restraint, Klein enacted severe cuts to public education and health care. Teachers responded with public advocacy campaigns and concerted study of the issues surrounding the impact of funding cuts.

By 1997 teachers felt it was time for historic action. On World Teachers’ Day that year the teachers of Alberta came together en masse to express their collective commitment to public education. On that day, more than 15,000 teachers gathered on the grounds of the Alberta legislature and demanded restored and renewed government support for public education. Unprecedented and powerful, the event was a watershed moment in the history of public education in Alberta.

Maggie Shane is the ATA’s archivist.