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Lorne Gunter: Classroom complexity finally getting attention it deserves

In Edmonton public schools, 34 per cent of classrooms have “high complexity,” meaning 11 or more students with complex needs.

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Classroom complexity — essentially how many students in a classroom have additional needs — was the real issue in last fall’s teachers’ strike. It wasn’t salaries or educational funding (except to the extent that funding is tied to complexity).

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The willingness of the provincial government and local school boards to relieve classroom stresses caused by students with disabilities, poor comprehension of English, behavioural problems and overcrowding is the best way to show teachers they are respected and their concerns are being heard.

The level of classroom complexity in Alberta’s four largest school divisions — the Edmonton and Calgary public systems and the two cities’ Catholic separate divisions — is staggering.

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A report released last Thursday by the provincial government defines complex classrooms as those having one or more students with individualized learning plans, a disability (anywhere between mild and severe), difficulty speaking and understanding English or who are refugees, Indigenous, gifted or awaiting assessment.

Low complexity is a classroom with four or fewer such students. Moderate is five to 10 and high complexity is 11 or more.

Eleven!? Or more!? What teacher could possibly teach the curriculum to the bulk of the class with so many special-needs students pulling her or him in so many directions at once? It’s not fair to the students with special requirements nor to the other students in the classrooms.

And it not fair to teachers.

Now here is the shocker. In Edmonton public schools, 34 per cent of classrooms have “high complexity,” meaning 11 or more students with complex needs.

In Calgary, nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of classrooms have 11 or more students with complex needs.

The remaining top 10 school boards in descending order of complexity are Rocky View, Peace Wapiti, Elk Island, Chinook’s Edge, Black Gold and Red Deer.

It has made teachers’ jobs so much harder.

The Alberta Teachers Association’s strike demand of 3,000 additional teachers is related to the complexity issue. The theory is if more teachers are hired, classroom sizes will be reduced and the students with additional needs spread around better.

Perhaps surprisingly, the government report also admits class size is a factor in complexity.

For years, the Alberta government has denied that the number of students in a classroom has a negative impact on education outcomes. And that is largely true. Plenty of studies have shown that classroom sizes of up to 35, especially in high school grades, plays very little part in how well students learn.

But that assumes all the students in the room have no complex issues. Not every student with additional needs takes up a lot of a teacher’s time, but if the average attention paid to each special-needs student is double that paid to the average student, then having 11 complexity students in a classroom is the equivalent of adding 11 additional pupils. Thirty students becomes the equivalent of 41, which is stretching the limits.

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According to the government, the largest classroom size in the province is 60. That in itself is unmanageable. But say that 20 of those have complex needs and suddenly we’re talking about the equivalent of 80 students.

Yes, a lot of teachers (most?) feel disrespected by the way they were forced back to work last fall, but their strike was the result of simmering resentments over how classroom complexity has been allowed to fester out of control.

So if you want to improve relations with teachers, make complexity an even higher priority tied to the hiring of thousands of addition teachers.

Last week, the province announced $143 million to fund 476 “complexity teams” made up of one teacher and two educational assistants who can parachute into K-6 classrooms with the greatest complexity, mostly in Calgary and Edmonton.

This isn’t entirely the province’s fault. No two large cities in Canada have grown faster than Edmonton and Calgary since 2020.

However, the fix will have to involve more than hiring a few hundred educational smokejumpers to put out the worst complexity wildfires.

lgunter@postmedia.com

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