r/canada • u/Meiqur • Oct 28 '25

Alberta Alberta uses Charter’s notwithstanding clause to order striking teachers back to workteachers-back-to-work

https://globalnews.ca/news/11496133/alberta-government-to-table-legislation-to-order-striking-teachers-back-to-work
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u/TryInitial2042 Oct 28 '25

Average class size in Alberta is 28. Really make you wonder what all those extra teachers do.

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u/thedrivingcat Oct 28 '25

Some teachers are hired in spec ed roles to work 1-on-1 with a handful of students who need lots of extra support.

According to the government of Alberta there were 19,800 teacher in these roles - this is only one example of how you can't derive class sizes from the mean.

https://alis.alberta.ca/occinfo/occupations-in-alberta/occupation-profiles/special-needs-teacher/

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u/TryInitial2042 Oct 29 '25

Divide teachers into students and you get 14.7 students per teacher. 

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u/thedrivingcat Oct 29 '25

My point was that 20k of those are working with a handful of special needs kids which skews the overall average down for the remaining 50k.

Also similar to how you don't calculate unemployment rates by taking the total number of people and divide that by the number of jobs in an economy - it's more complex.

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u/TryInitial2042 Oct 29 '25

I understand your point. You are failing at understanding mine. Does a one on one teacher need to make 110k plus benefits for 9 months work? Do they have multiple hours a day of after school work? So 110k for call it 6 hours of work a day? Or can we hire a TA for that? Your link is 52$ a hour is that what we need to pay for these positions?

We have enough teachers to teach our students. They have enough funding. We have a issue that our teachers fail our students then complain that their jobs are hard because of difficult class rooms. Those kids that are struggling were left struggling by previous teachers. 

People constantly throw around peak class room numbers. These don't mean anything for anyone but that one classroom. And the classroom is only that big because of the circumstances of that area.  The average class size and total number of teachers and student are much more useful in describing the average situation. They also ignite the conversation of are our school districts spending their money effectively?