I doubt very much you can make a blanket statement about school boards based on the views of principals. The principal is one member of the board only. There may be another teacher as a staff rep. The principal is actually the board’s employee. He or she may have some powers delegated to him/her but not necessarily the representation of how the board feels on such a matter as this.

I’ve written elsewhere that the leadership of most TUs is heavily stacked with hard core political activists. I think that is very easy to prove. Therefore knowing that to be fact it begs the question of exactly how much of this campaign really is representing the views of members and how much is political campaigning for its own sake. It cannot be just a coincidence that a major left wing party has announced its policy would abolish the standards.

The bulk funding campaign was similar and claimed the heads of two PPTA presidents who pushed their political views too far and lost support of their membership. That is a relevant piece of history to this particular situation. Tolley has stood up to it by calling the union’s bluff on its interference with school boards. It remains to be seen who will blink first.

National standards already have existed for years, just not the reporting requirement of them.

Some schools are quite willing to implement this policy, trial or not. The schools that want them to be guinea pigs aren’t being very generous, are they.

For example they could choose to continue private discussions with the government instead of public campaigning. They could choose not to write to all the boards as they have done.

1. Industrial relations – high majority as everyone benefits from getting better pay and conditions etc

2. Political activism – likely to be a much smaller bunch of people unless it crosses over into (1). This is pretty much a given, the top people in every union I can think of are well known political campaigners and activists in all the major left wing political parties that have ever existed.

I suggest you can accurately measure (2) by the level of participation in national conferences which in most organisations full stop is a minority. As the PPTA found to its cost in the bulk funding campaign in the 90s when they lost two presidents in a row (Tobin and Cooney) because they took an extremist viewpoint out of step with many rank and file.

The current campaign is politically driven by a hard activist core and as such we are reasonably entitled to ask exactly what percentage of the union membership is being represented by the positions taken.

Also I think the voice we are hearing the loudest is the union’s – not necessarily the rank and file members.

School boards have slightly more freedom, but still have to operate under the legal constraints set by governmental legislation and accountability for public funds.

The government is accountable to all of us through the ballot box. Most people seem to accept that for what it is.

Officials follow whose decisions? The teachers or the government’s?

It’s already been observed that it is more correctly the teacher’s unions that Tolley is seeking the battle with. Unwittingly or not. Probably not in fact.