“I loved you, I love you and I will love you”, sings Francis Cabrel. This is exactly what the main players in public schools would like to hear from the new Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville.
They took advantage of February 14 to make him understand. An event on this theme was organized to highlight his visit to Montreal. “Bernard, be the Valentine of education,” read one banner.
They say they “need love”.
They are right.
We had further proof of this when The Journal of Montreal reported earlier this month that approximately 4,000 teachers have quit in Quebec over the past three years. It is not normal.
Well, let’s be rigorous, this figure includes teachers who left their establishment to join another. And we know that in Montreal, there were many of them during this period (in particular due to the pandemic and the repair work on the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel).
It is evident, however, that many teachers continue to leave the profession prematurely.
We know, for example, that a high number of new teachers (between 20% and 40%, say experts) leave it during the first five years.
We also know that there are too many teachers at the end of their careers who retire earlier than expected, exhausted.
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Recently, our journalist Marie-Eve Morasse revealed that the Montreal school service center is looking for teachers who are not legally qualified to lend a hand to “at risk” students in elementary and secondary school.
Asked about this, Bernard Drainville… blamed the Liberals for the teacher shortage.
Quebec society has not yet finished paying for the budgetary restrictions imposed on education by the Liberals of Philippe Couillard. It’s true.
But it’s too easy for the party in power for four years to blame its predecessors. What would be helpful is to come up with better solutions.
Because the CAQ, which repeated even before its victory in 2018 that it wanted to revalue the profession, has not completed its mission.
If she were to be given a report card for dealing with the teacher shortage after her first term, she certainly wouldn’t get an A. Or a B.
Here too, let’s be rigorous: the CAQ has acted. Among other things, it has revised upwards the remuneration of teachers, which was too far from the Canadian average. It is important to underline this.
The problem is that the accounting approach of the Legault government, in the education file, has limits.
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What the education sector needs to curb the shortage is a real action plan to increase the number of teachers.
We are talking here about multiplying the initiatives that will make it possible to recruit new ones, of course.
But we must also increase both the attractiveness of the profession and the retention of teachers who are already in the network.
We are not talking here about salary increases, but rather about finding more ways to lighten the workload of teachers in the public network, who can no longer take it.
Bernard Drainville suggested adding “classroom aids”. It is in fact a project that was launched by Jean-François Roberge and which solicits the contribution of daycare service employees.
A good initiative, which deserves to be extended, but which is not enough.
There is an urgent need to find ways to solve what has become a structural problem: the heaviness of classes in so-called ordinary public schools (as opposed to public schools that offer special programs and private schools).
That a teacher can end up with a class where half of the students are handicapped or have learning and adjustment difficulties is highly problematic. And untenable.
Reviewing the composition of classes has therefore become an unavoidable issue.
As long as this problem is not addressed head-on, teachers will have the impression that the CAQ government does not like them very much.