Stubborn unions stoke shortfall in Ontario teachers

Refusal to boost retiree workdays cheats students

Having a qualified teacher in every class, every day, would seem the most basic thing one could expect from a public education system. Ontario is failing to meet this standard in spectacular fashion.

A March report by the advocacy group People for Education found 24 per cent of Ontario elementary schools and 35 per cent of secondary schools have daily teacher shortages. The information comes from a survey that included principals from 70 of Ontario’s 72 school boards. The survey included 21 per cent of publicly funded schools.

The problem reached ludicrous depths this week when the York Catholic District School Board awarded students in some Grade 12 classes marks of 100 per cent because their teachers had been on leave for much of the semester and the board had be unable to find consistent substitutes. In effect, the board chose to pretend students had learned something so as not to hurt their chances of university admission.

The story behind this mess is one of incompetent personnel management by the provincial Progressive Conservative government and its Liberal predecessor, exacerbated by teaching unions’ pigheaded decision to limit retired teachers’ ability to help.

For years, Ontario had a surplus of teachers. Despite flat enrolment, its teachers’ colleges continued to churn out graduates with no real regard for the job market. As a result, in 2014, 34 per cent of education graduates were unemployed in their first year after graduation. Even for those two to five years post-graduation the unemployment rate was still 17 per cent, according to the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT).

Then-premier Kathleen Wynne tackled the mess in 2015, but in a way that would prove short-sighted. Wynne turned the one-year teacher education program into a two-year course, almost halving the number of annual graduates. Between 2008 and 2011, Ontario graduated 9,100 students annually from the one-year course. From 2019 to 2022, that number dropped to 4,671.

Including out-of-province teachers, the flow of new teachers dropped from 12,138 in 2011 to just 5,795 by 2019.

The OCT, the province’s teaching regulatory body, has been sounding the alarm about the impending misfit between supply and demand for years. There was no magic to its calculation. The main driver of demand for new teachers is teacher retirement, a predictable figure.

The obvious solution to the problem was, and is, to increase the number of places in teachers’ colleges. For reasons that remain opaque, the Doug Ford government chose not to match labour supply with demand. In fact, it made the problem worse by adding 3,000 teaching positions since 2018 without ensuring there would be people to fill them and enough left over to cover teacher absences.

Now, students in the province’s schools are paying the price and everyone is pointing the finger at someone else. Education Minister Stephen Lecce has said teachers take an average of 16 sick days in a 184-day work year. That’s not good, but it’s not the root cause of the trouble, either.

Lecce’s preferred shortterm solution is to allow retired teachers to fill in 95 days a year. That would seem useful, but not to the Ontario Teachers’ Federation (OTF), an umbrella group representing teaching unions. In the topsyturvy world of Ontario education, the working rights of retired teachers are controlled by their unions, not the government. The OTF insists on sticking to the contractual limit of 50 days of filling in per year, despite allowing the larger number for the past three years.

Why should the OTF do something to benefit its own retirees and help the province’s students when it can attack the government, the unions’ favourite activity? Beating a familiar drum, the province’s elementary teaching union says its members are “underpaid and undervalued.” In fact, Ontario teachers with 10 years’ experience were the highest paid in the country in 2020-21, earning just over $100,000.

In its defence, the Ford government points out that the teaching shortage is not a problem unique to Ontario and the number of teachers’ college graduates increased in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available.

The teacher shortage in Ontario will be fixed when the government adopts the simplest possible solution: expanding teacher training. The college of teachers, the experts on teaching supply and demand, estimates that Ontario needs to train about 1,400 more teachers a year now and increase the number to 1,500 by 2030.

That doesn’t seem like an insuperable problem, but the teaching unions are making the challenge worse by contending that the job is underpaid, underappreciated and generally hellish. Presumably, there must be something good about the work or they wouldn’t do it. Maybe they could talk about that once in a while.

THE STORY BEHIND THIS MESS IS ONE OF INCOMPETENT PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT.