Last May, the Ministry of Education announced a new pilot project for teaching assistants, which will be introduced in about a hundred elementary schools in Quebec starting in September. According to the ministry, this aid would allow teachers to concentrate on the task to which they aspire: teaching. The staff hired, called “support staff” – we are talking about school employees and educators in school daycare services – would lend a hand to teachers for non-pedagogical, so-called “related” tasks.
The Minister of Education believes that this program “will help us meet the biggest challenge we have in the school network at the moment, that of the shortage of manpower”, we read in The duty last May, and the project could eventually be extended to all elementary schools in Quebec.
Of course, teaching assistants will lighten the workload of teachers. But will this measure really contribute to alleviating the shortage of teachers? I doubt. Without wanting to diminish its effects on their daily lives, in my opinion it is a “secondary measure”, which will not fill the gaping hole that we know.
In 2019, the Institut du Québec (IQ) published the report Quality of education and shortage of teachers: the State must focus on the essentials. The Higher Council for Education published (CSE) a similar report in 2021, in which it took up certain ideas of the IQ while defending a different point of view. These two reports, which state the crucial ethical issue of the need to maintain the quality of teaching while accelerating the “production” of qualified teachers, do not accord the same importance to the training of teachers, and their recommendations testify to this.
While the CSE does not shy away from the importance of initial teacher training and, as a result, it relies on qualifying master’s degrees – a program which, it should be remembered, lasts four years part-time —, the IQ, supported by several studies and examples from edifying countries (Singapore, Finland, the Netherlands, and even… Ontario!), strongly affirms that the quality of teaching has very little to do with do with training. The result is the recommendation of a twelve-month full-time teaching program (including internships), which could be added to a relevant bachelor’s degree in the discipline. The program would be enhanced by two years of supervised practice and mandatory continuing education.
I do not have all the keys in hand to understand the complexity of this titanic issue, but I admit that the audacity of this proposal seduces me. Why was she not accepted? For lack of realism? Either way, both reports agree on one thing: the government lacks transparency. Both recommend better monitoring of the education community and field analyzes published more quickly, in order to encourage feedback and avoid projects that miss the mark.