On numerous occasions, the media have highlighted the problem of the shortage of school personnel. Before addressing the solutions to this problem (which we will do in another text), it is necessary to clearly identify the causes.
First, there is a drastic drop in the admission rate to university education programs at the primary and secondary levels, and then a significant percentage of dropouts during the four-year studies. In the six universities in Quebec, 50% of students leave their studies at the end of the first year, and among those who stay, another 50% drop out at the end of the second year. In the baccalaureate for secondary education, only 53 to 55% are graduates, and 68 to 70% for that of preschool-primary. So fewer teacher candidates. For what ?
Workload too heavy and increasingly difficult
For those who arrive in teaching, the first cause of dropping out is the very difficult working conditions. They cause the departure of approximately 25% to 30% of them after the first year of teaching, and up to 50% after five years (Létourneau, 2012). When you can’t do your job in a minimally satisfactory way, you quit.
Too many classes, with a large number of students requiring weekly monitoring by the primary school teacher and the secondary school tutor; frequent incivility by students who pose serious problems in class management and take up a lot of time in and out of class, etc.
We even go so far as to ask them to take charge of new arrivals to help them! For a competent teacher, demanding of herself and her students and passionate about her work, a working week is easily 45 to 50 hours per week (at ridiculous wages). We should also mention the lack of structures and professional integration measures for newcomers, who are left to fend for themselves. They have been demanded for decades by unions and education specialists, but are increasingly rare, shortage demands!
It’s not just newcomers who drop out, experienced teachers too, because for them too the task continues to grow, not to mention the degradation of the conditions in which they have to work.
It should be noted that there are enormous differences between education in subsidized private schools (25% of pupils), in special selective public projects (25% of public pupils) and the so-called regular classes where a large number of new teachers; as there are differences between schools, depending on their socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
Devaluation of professional skills
What is obvious for those who taught at the end of the 1960s and up to the 1980s, like us, is also the loss of professional autonomy and academic freedom of the teaching body, which is increasingly experiencing a process deprofessionalization and deskilling. This is due to the new management of the education system. For more than 20 years, the school has been managed like a business according to the precepts of New Public Management (NGP), which advocates results-based management, endorsed and supported by recent Quebec laws, including Law 124, Law 88 and Law 105.
It is indeed a vicious circle: the more difficult the conditions, the more there is abandonment; the greater the shortage, the more difficult the working conditions, leading to departures. In short, we will not get out of it without the Quebec government seriously reviewing the current management of the school system. This shows how inadequate Minister Bernard Drainville’s “solution” is.
Read tomorrow: “Teacher shortage: what are the solutions”