Another boom and bust cycle

The local Catholic school board can expect Education Minister Steven Lecce to respond very favourably to its call to help solve a teacher shortage by allowing retired teachers to spend more days in the classroom while continuing to collect their pensions.

But as Band-Aid solutions go, this one barely covers a fingertip. We know Lecce supports the idea because he floated it himself a week earlier.

We know he knows it will not solve the problem because the same deal was struck both last year and the year before — and the shortage persists.

Allowing retirees to work a total of 95 “double-dip” days instead of the current limit of 50 will be some help, but at least one teachers union wants a simple, much more effective change.

As a bonus for the Doug Ford government, the change involves reversing a policy first proposed by former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty and implemented by his successor, Kathleen Wynne.

During the 2011 provincial election campaign, McGuinty promised to make teachers college a two-year program, doubling the time required to graduate.

He also said no new teacher college spaces would be created, effectively cutting the number of graduates in half.

McGuinty pushed the change as a way to improve teaching quality, but made the promise at a time when a glut of unemployed teaching graduates was growing bigger each year.

McGuinty won a minority government, but didn’t follow through on his promise. That was left to Wynne, who took over in 2014 when 9,000 newly minted teachers were coming onto the market each year to compete for just 6,000 job openings.

Wynne took even more drastic action. The degree requirement doubled to two years and teachers college spaces were reduced.

Four years later, the glut had become a shortage. That’s the way it has been for decades in Ontario, a boom-and-bust cycle of too few, too many, too few.

The COVID years accelerated the shortage. Offering both live and online classes required extra bodies, and some teachers who stepped away under the pressure of the pandemic did not return.

Early in 2022, the province and unions agreed to temporarily adjust pension agreements to raise the limit of 50 days retirees could teach while still collecting their pensions. The deal ran to the end of the school year, then was brought back in 2023.

Now there is a call for a three-peat. Sticking on the same undersized bandage is not the answer.

Neither is paying teachers more. Teacher unions might not agree their members are already handsomely compensated, but it’s true.

Ontario’s average teacher salary is about $95,000 annually, the highest in the country. Their benefit and pension package is the envy of almost any private sector worker, and spring, summer and holiday season breaks make for a total of 12 weeks paid vacation from year one.

It is also true that teachers do important, sometimes stressful work. Something that can be said of many workers in many fields. So, back to the teachers college curriculum. Teachers can be sufficiently trained in one year, as they were for decades. Shifting back to that model could be immediate.

But it needs to be done with some finesse. If 9,000 graduates were too many and 4,000 too few, there must be a better number somewhere between.

The annual flow of graduates will never exactly match the spaces to fill, but can come close. Best to err slightly on the side of too many and be ready to adjust enrolment again as situations change, which they will.

Ontario’s average teacher salary is about $95,000 annually, the highest in the country. Their benefit and pension package is the envy of almost any private sector worker, and spring, summer and holiday season breaks make for a total of 12 weeks paid vacation from year one