New teachers facing an uncertain future
Hiring processes are vague and easily manipulated by school boards
It hasn’t been an easy time for young people entering the workforce in the past few years. Jobs are scarce. Secure jobs with benefits are even scarcer. The term precarious employment is a defining phrase for our time. Young people have been told for years that they would not likely follow a path of working in one job for their careers. Instead, they would work in a variety of jobs through their lives, some of which didn’t even exist yet. What no one told them is that they would likely be minimum wage jobs with no security or benefits.
So perhaps you decide to pursue a career like teaching, long considered to be a stable, secure and well-paying job. What does your career path look like?
For the past 15 years, it has been pretty grim. You need to get an interview to get on the supply list of a board. You then begin supplying on a daily basis, hoping eventually to acquire a “long-term” position, replacing a teacher on leave. Permanent teaching jobs are rare. So you put your head down and work away, having no idea how you might achieve a permanent job. There are supply teachers in the HWDSB who have been working successfully for 7-10 years as LTOs in this very position. Absurd!
Part of the reason for the scarcity is simple demographics — there haven’t been a significant number of retiring educators during these years. Universities that offer teacher degrees bear responsibility here. For more than a decade, teacher’s colleges have graduated twice as many new teachers as there are retirements.
Add to this declining enrolment, and we have an overabundance of teachers.
As a former head of a large department in a secondary school for 16 years, I had extensive experience working with supply teachers and learning about the challenges they face. I also interviewed several people working as supply teachers for this piece. I made contact with members of the HWDSB, including the director, chair, superintendent of human resources and my local trustee — no one was willing to discuss the issues with me.
There are provincial regulations that guide hiring processes, but they are vague and easily manipulated by boards that seek to maintain strict a secretive approach to hiring, a problem identified in a 2014 study of hiring practices in Ontario school boards.
The overarching concern identified by the study is the lack of a clear path to permanent positions. Ask yourself this — how is it possible that a teacher has worked for eight years as an LTO, semester after semester, and still has no guarantee of a permanent job? Hiring processes are vague, utterly nontransparent.
New teachers are exposed to an absurd number of interviews, even after they have demonstrated their competence as classroom teachers. People feel like they are continually jumping through hoops in this process.
The only way to get a permanent job is to get a placement on the “LTO List,” which is interview based, as supply teachers are rarely evaluated in the classroom. The fact that administrators are not required to evaluate newer teachers on a regular basis speaks to misdirected expectations of administrators by school boards.
The problem identified re: the LTO lists is that boards manipulate the process by keeping the list unreasonably small. The HWDSB has interviewed twice for this list, with only a minuscule percentage of supply teachers making the list. So once qualified teachers on the list are hired, the board now has complete control over those they hire, leading to concerns of nepotism and favouritism, hiring not based on experience or any kind of seniority. And candidates have no idea when they might have another chance to make the list.
Imagine — after working as a day-today supply teacher, you have been deemed competent and capable of running a classroom. You are hired to LTO positions, semester after semester, for years. Then you fail the big interview, and are not placed on the vaunted LTO list. Only 10 per cent of your colleagues were chosen. How is this possible? And you are told only “the best of the best” make the list, a completely condescending evaluation. Now go back to your classroom tomorrow, teach your heart out, volunteer and keep smiling.
No wonder the study found these new teachers feel “deeply discouraged” and suffer from “low-morale”. They feel disposable and interchangeable, working in a climate of fear, afraid of making a mistake, afraid of making waves. They feel intense pressure to volunteer for committees, and teams, etc.: an abused, compliant, fearful workforce. Is this any way to treat teachers new to the profession?
School boards love to use words like transparency, fairness, equity, etc. One way to determine a board’s commitment to those values will be to watch their hiring practices. One would hope that boards will not abandon those who have been toiling in uncertainty over these past many years by finding ways to ensure those teachers they deemed excellent enough to teach in classrooms will be rewarded.
Ken Durkacz is a former educator who lives in Hamilton.