It was difficult not to feel dizzy watching the ballet of teachers in a class of 1D year that my colleague Marie-Eve Morasse described on Wednesday. In a single class, students, who are experiencing a pivotal year in their school career, have seen around fifteen people parade since September1.
First there was Mme B who, from the start of the school year, replaced the incumbent, Mme A, who was to be back on the 1ster october.
Then, like Mme B had to be absent before M’s returnme A, entered the scene Mme C, just in time for the parents’ meeting, which had to be postponed, since no teacher who knows the children in the class at all was on duty.
Then, new tile: we inform the parents that Mme A will not return on the scheduled date and Mme C will be replaced by Mme D… Are you following? Maybe not. And it’s just October. So, imagine a 6 or 7 year old child who is having difficulty at school and who will see the entire alphabet passed through, or almost, until the end of the year.
The big losers in this whole story are 1st grade students.D year who are trying to learn to read and write in a dysfunctional education system incapable, in the midst of a teacher shortage, of offering them the minimum of consistency they need.
The 1D However, the primary year is a crucial year in a school career.
These are classes that we should entrust to our best teachers, psychologist Égide Royer, a specialist in the issue of academic success, has often repeated. Investing in early detection with the support of professionals would not be a luxury, but a necessity if we really care about the success of all children. Neither does ensuring that students are entitled to a certain stability.
With 1,000 teaching positions to be filled in Quebec schools, 600 vacant special education technician positions and 460 psychoeducator, speech therapist and psychologist positions still looking for takers, we are very far from these noble objectives. One legally qualified teacher per class is the jackpot. The objective of the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, on the eve of the last school year, was more modest: one adult per class… perhaps.
What shocked me even more than the sad ballet described by Marie-Eve Morasse was the big “meh!” » that this unacceptable situation has aroused among the very people who have the responsibility to put an end to it.
Instead of worrying about the fact that a school service center (CSS) is incapable of doing correctly what it should do – offering quality school services to all its students – the spokesperson for the CSS de Montréal retorted to my colleague that we needed to “put the situation into perspective”. This class had picked the wrong number. Ugh! It happens !
Sorry for the children who lost the right to education lottery! Best of luck for their future in another life!
A second “blah!” » in high places came from Minister Bernard Drainville, called on Wednesday to comment on this affair. “This is not a situation that is acceptable, except that it is a situation that we unfortunately have to live with given the shortage of teachers2. »
In short, it’s not acceptable, but we accept it…
Minister Drainville obviously cannot remedy the shortage with the snap of his fingers. It cannot miraculously make legally qualified teachers appear where there are none. Nor can it accelerate skills training in education in order to recruit more graduates from other disciplines more quickly if universities oppose it.
But the fact that this complex problem is neither new nor specific to Quebec does not authorize the minister to consider it as inevitable. Nor does it authorize him to tolerate the intolerable while waiting for the shortage to subside.
In his report made public in May 2023, the Auditor General of Quebec sounded the alarm about the impacts of the shortage on children, particularly students in difficulty who suffer even more than others. Decrease in the quality of teaching in particular due to the high number of non-legally qualified teachers (more than 30,000!), reduction in the consistency of interventions with students due to numerous teacher changes during the year , increased insecurity, instability and anxiety…
Despite the warning signs of the shortage, the Ministry of Education and the CSS examined did not have complete and reliable information to properly identify the causes of the shortage and the issues related to the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers. , lamented the report. As for the monitoring mechanisms aimed at ensuring the quality of teaching, they are insufficient.
The Auditor General recommended that the Ministry of Education correct these deficiencies and implement, in conjunction with the main stakeholders, a comprehensive and coherent action plan to deal with the shortage.
Since then, Minister Drainville has set up an education dashboard, which collects certain data3. We have also launched here and there initiatives to compensate for the shortage of qualified teachers. But the comprehensive and coherent action plan, which would, for example, set a limit on the number of teacher changes per student and give exhausted teachers who are thinking of leaving the profession the support they need to stay, is still awaited.
A dashboard in the cockpit is very good. But a pilot in the plane who doesn’t just shrug his shoulders and acknowledge that the crash is inevitable, that would still be more reassuring.
1. Read “A ballet of “teachers” in 1D year ”
2. Read “A situation that is not “acceptable”, says Drainville”
3. Consult the Quebec government’s education dashboard