Rationale:

• • • Attract and retain top talent: Competitive wages help recruit skilled educators and reduce turnover.

    • Support quality education: Better-paid educators are motivated to provide high-quality education.

    • Equity and respect: Teaching assistants and adjunct professors often receive low wages despite essential contributions.

  • City Role:

    • Advocate at the provincial level for increased funding to school boards.

    • Support City-led grants, childcare support for educators, or tax breaks for underpaid TAs/professors working in Edmonton.

    • Work with local institutions (MacEwan University, NAIT, U of A) to improve treatment of sessionals and grad instructors.

• Vision:
  Blow up the outdated, one-size-fits-all model. Replace it with a system that treats every student as a unique, gifted individual — not a widget on an assembly line. Education should ignite purpose, not suppress it.

• 🔧 Key Pillars of the Overhaul

🔹 Career Paths by Grade 7 — Earlier If Ready

• If a student already knows their passion — engineering, welding, music production, software, law, medicine — they should start building toward it by Grade 7, with optional career stream selection.

• Schools will offer modular, exploratory tracks — think pre-apprenticeships, studio art intensives, or robotics tracks — alongside core academics

• Students can mix tracks or pivot if their interests evolve.

🔹 Fast-Track for Gifted & Motivated Learners

• End the ceiling on potential. Gifted students may test out of grades or accelerate through curriculum at their own pace — no bureaucratic hand-holding.

• Independent study, online enrichment, and dual-credit courses with post-secondary institutions will be available from middle school onward.

• “Too young” is no excuse when ability and drive are present.

🔹 Student-Led, Teacher-Coached

• Educators shift into roles as learning coaches, mentors, and facilitators.

• Students have personalized learning plans co-developed with parents, teachers, and career counselors — updated yearly.

🔹 Less Testing. More Thinking.

• Ditch obsessive standardized testing in favor of portfolio assessments, public presentations, hands-on projects, and problem-solving labs.

• Build up financial literacy, civic responsibility, emotional intelligence, and media discernment.

🔹 Real-World Partnerships

• Partner with trades, universities, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), tech incubators (start-up support hubs that provide mentorship, space, and funding), and co-op placements (structured work-learning opportunities, usually paid, where students gain experience in their field of interest) to offer mentorships, internships, and shadowing — even in junior high.

• 🎯 Bottom Line

• Let kids run if they’re ready. Let them build lives, not just pass tests. Alberta should be the first province in Canada to fully embrace learner-driven education with real-world purpose, and prove it is successful as the ideal “student-led teaching” model