EDMONTON—The United Conservative Party’s education platform is getting a failing grade from the Alberta Teachers’ Association.

“The priorities in this platform are misplaced and misguided,” ATA president Greg Jeffery said Tuesday.

Jeffery held a press conference in Edmonton at the union’s headquarters to outline the group’s issues with the platform a day after UCP Leader Jason Kenney rolled it out.

The United Conservatives released their education plan on Monday ahead of the province’s April 16 election, promising that if they formed government, they’d do their own look at education, separate from the NDP’s ongoing curriculum review.

The party said they’d maintain or increase education funding, continue building schools, and reduce bureaucracy, a move applauded by the ATA.

But Jeffery also raised concerns about several elements of the UCP platform, from more standardized testing for both teachers and students to protections for gay-straight alliances, as well as a comment from Kenney about whether or not principals should be in the association at all.

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The UCP said it wanted to introduce “regular assessment of teacher performance” in the province, where educators would be tested on their knowledge and expertise in certain subjects.

Jeffery said this harked back to 2013, when there was a government task force on teaching excellence in place. The task force put added weight on the shoulders of teachers and stymied professional growth, he said.

“If you’re going to make decisions just based on an exam on the teacher’s ability to teach, a whole bunch of things are going to get left behind,” said Jeffery.

The task force eventually completed a report in 2014 and included a number of proposals that took away from education professionals’ ability to effectively do the work, according to an ATA-provided information sheet.

Furthermore, Jeffery slammed the UCP platform’s suggestion of bringing in standardized testing for children in grades 1, 2 and 3.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, teachers know better than any bubble-in-the-answer test how students are progressing,” he said.

“They need time and resources to actually work one-on-one with students.”

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Jeffery also defended Bill 24, which stops teachers from telling parents if their child is in a gay-straight alliance (GSA). Kenney said Monday that a UCP government would replace the current School Act, which includes Bill 24, with the Education Act, which was brought forward in 2012, but never proclaimed.

The Education Act includes provisions for schools to set up GSAs, but wouldn’t stop teachers from telling parents if their child joined one, which advocates have criticized as harmful to LGBTQ students whose families aren’t accepting.

Kenney said a blunt law stipulating teachers can’t communicate with parents isn’t the most effective way to meet all students’ needs. He added that it should be up to teachers to inform parents if there are concerns about bullying or mental health issues relating to their children’s involvement in a GSA.

“I say, let’s have a moderate, common-sense approach: yes to GSAs. I believe in the vast majority of cases, teachers are not going to communicate with parents about this, but in some unique cases … engaging the loving support of a parent is entirely reasonable,” Kenney said.

But Jeffery said Bill 24 provided “comfort for teachers, because they knew where they stood,” and insulated them from pressure to disclose to parents.

Before the ATA press conference, Kenney was in Edmonton to discuss a proposed trade school plan.

Responding to questions from reporters afterwards, Kenney said that he believed including school principals in the ATA had a built-in conflict of interest since they were managers.

“They have a responsibility to manage the teachers and to manage human resources in their schools. So to be a part of the same union (as) the same people they’re managing does seem to me a conflict of interest,” Kenney said.

Jeffery countered that taking principals out of the ATA would “reverse the collegial and co-operative relationships that exist amongst teachers and principals and replace it with a more adversarial and potentially combative relationship.”

No binding decisions have been made on that front though, Kenney said.

The ATA has about 43,000 members and includes school principals in its ranks.

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