Commentary
Teacher shortages are occurring across the country. As a result, many school boards are hiring non-certified teachers to work with students.
As of December 2024, Quebec had 9,184 non-legally qualified teachers on long-term contracts in public schools. The number goes much higher if you include substitute teachers. In May 2023, Quebec’s auditor general estimated that approximately one-quarter of all teachers who taught in Quebec during the 2020–21 school year were uncertified.
It’s a similar situation in Ontario. Faced with shortages in specialty areas such as French immersion, Ontario’s Ministry of Education projects a teacher shortage across the entire education system beginning in 2027. No doubt this will result in more non-certified teachers working in Ontario schools. Meanwhile, British Columbia recently experienced a 76 percent increase in the number of uncertified teachers working in schools.
Why should we care? Because just as we would be concerned if hospitals were staffed by untrained doctors or if amateur engineers were designing bridges, we should wonder why so many uncertified teachers are working in our schools. But before we rush to open the government spending taps for teacher signing bonuses and international recruitment campaigns, it’s important to define what teacher certification means and see whether it matters.
To be certified, teachers in every province must complete a Bachelor of Education degree. This means someone with a master’s degree or even a doctorate in mathematics cannot become a certified teacher. Even an award-winning Nobel prize winner can’t be certified to teach high school unless they also have an education degree. This, of course, leads to an obvious question: Is the training provided by university faculties of education essential to good teaching? For the most part, the answer is no.
Related Stories
That’s because the uselessness of most education courses has been an open secret for decades. In many cases, these courses are taught by professors who haven’t set foot in a K–12 classroom in decades—if they ever did. The disconnect between the theories taught in education courses and the reality of working with actual K–12 students is wide and growing.
However, Bachelor of Education programs also require teachers to complete a teaching practicum where prospective teachers work in K–12 classrooms under the supervision of an experienced teacher. This is a useful part of an education degree because during this practicum teachers learn the nuts and bolts of managing classrooms.
Thus, one way to tackle the teacher shortage is to streamline the Bachelor of Education program. By cutting out useless education courses such as “Educating for Activism” and beefing up the teacher practicum, prospective teachers with a bachelor’s degree in hand could earn their certification in one year rather than two. This would shorten the total length of teacher training without sacrificing the program’s quality.
Unfortunately, some provinces are heading in the opposite direction. For example, the Manitoba government plans to remove all subject prerequisites for anyone looking to enrol in a Bachelor of Education program. This means prospective teachers will no longer be required to take a prescribed number of courses in subjects such as math, history and science during their initial bachelor’s degree.
In other words, someone with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies will become just as eligible to teach high school pre-calculus as someone with an honours degree in mathematics. This is patently absurd. To make matters worse, the University of Manitoba’s dean of education defended this approach by arguing that teachers will learn how to teach these subjects in their education courses—the same courses widely derided as useless by teachers.
We will not solve the teacher shortage by lowering standards. Rather, we must redefine teacher certification so it focuses on skills that really matter. Ensuring that all teachers have solid background knowledge in subjects they teach, and having them complete a rigorous teaching practicum, should be minimum requirements for certification.
It’s time we focus on what matters most when training teachers. If we don’t, the current teacher shortage will get much worse.
Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
