How did we get here? Although teachers are still entering the profession in Canada, fewer and fewer are staying . The current crisis has been decades in the making. Reasons for leaving are numerous: a decline in professional autonomy, unrealistic workloads given the high needs of students, health and safety concerns and an overall decline in the status of the profession .
Multiple crises , including a health-care professional shortage and the climate crisis, are competing for our attention at the moment.
Solving the teacher shortage will take all of us — educational experts, government, school boards, parents, educators and all voters — coming together around a shared desire to create an educational future that reflects genuine aspirations for our children and future generations.
Long-term visioning
Economists have long understood that well-educated, healthy constituents contribute to a healthy economy, a thriving community, and a good life.
Achieving this “good life” requires an inspired long-term vision; one that exceeds any particular government’s term. As a society, we can no longer afford to ignore a problem until we are in a crisis. Doing so narrows available options to reactive, quick fixes that often ignore the broader systemic infrastructure needed to sustain them.
Broad systemic change is difficult and can be costly both financially and politically. Short-term reactive measures may appear easier than the thoughtful, sustained leadership, planning and investment required to build the positive and trusting relationships necessary to make meaningful change across systems.
Teachers seen as glorified babysitters
We need to reckon with how we think and speak about education’s most valuable resource: its teachers.
The shortage of teachers yields a markedly different response . Schools remain open, scrambling in some areas to fill the classroom with, well, almost anyone.
Such a narrow perspective casts teachers simply in terms of the economic capital they afford parents in the workforce. But it is quality education that yields the socio-economic benefits and the innovation desperately needed to face society’s known and future challenges.
Quality education needs to be acknowledged
Researchers have long acknowledged the increasing complexity of knowledge and skills required to teach in today’s classrooms and Faculties of Education have redesigned teacher education programs in response.
The lack of an aspirational vision ignores decades of research about the growing demands of a difficult profession that looks easy . It ignores any understanding of what it means to be a professional, and the reality that educators are on the front lines with students, engaged in the fallout from all of the big issues that have been marginalized or collectively ignored.
Virtually all parents want the very best for their children. But there is little acknowledgement of what it means for our children when our teachers are under-resourced, disparaged and demoralized.
Influential international organizations (like UNESCO , the World Bank and the World Economic Forum ) emphasize two important points: First, that healthy and well-supported educators are critical to the success and achievement of students .
Second, just as policies designing roles for women required women to be at the policy table in the 1960s, policies designed to create sustainable, innovative programs for our children and youth require educators — experts in the field — to be at the policy table.
Must invest in long term planning and resources
The International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 assembled in 2008 to address the anticipated shortage concluded: “teaching should be a valued profession and every learner should be taught by qualified, motivated and empowered teachers within well-resourced, efficient and effectively governed systems to foster learning and achieve inclusive and equitable quality education for all.”
We have so far failed to invest in ways that make quality education a priority.
It is time for Canada to mature in our thinking about our teachers — for our children’s sake and for future generations.
Kathy Hibbert is Distinguished University Professor and Associate Dean, Teacher Education, at the Faculty of Education, Western University. She has received funding from Western University in support of research in Teacher Education and SSHRC in support of various studies in education.
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