TITLE: Economic Council of Canada

From the perspective of the learning continuum, how can coherence be established between vocational education and training, on the one hand, and the needs of the labour market, on the other?

First, the secondary school system has failed to provide relevant and attractive vocational programs... The result is that too many young people are doomed to spend months, if not years, of trial-and-error career search - ‘dabbling’, in effect, in a variety of dead-end jobs.

At the college level, there are promising developments involving partnerships with business and courses tailored for specific needs. But enrolment in science and technology course do not seem to have paralleled the evolution of those needs. The decrease in enrolments in this area, as a proportion of total enrolments in career courses generally, has only recently begin to level off... The rapid growth in the popularity of private colleges, by contrast, reflects flexibility and placement success. p. 24-25

Next, the apprenticeship system needs a major overhaul... Finally, employer-based training... widely judged inadequate by international standards, is sorely lacking in the small-firm sector p.25

How might coherence be further enhanced? … improved career counseling

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2. Promoting Partnerships

Partnerships between business and the school system offer one way in which this situation could be substantially improved... direct communication between teachers and employers; improved student info about prospects... employers assure themselves of adequate supplies of relevant skills enhanced by an exchange of personnel, by ‘mentoring’, by loans or donations of equipment, or work experience of students through cooperative or apprenticeship programs, p.25

3. Developing Cooperative Programs

cooperative programs, in which students alternate periods of study and related work experience

At last count, 35 universities and 48 colleges were offering such programs to over 40,000 students in vast array of disciplines. Canada has more coop students per capita than any country in the world; indeed the University of Waterloo, with 10,000 students in such programs, is the largest postsecondary co-op institution in the world.

Enrolments have burgeoned similarly at the secondary level, and there are now close to 100,000 secondary school students in government-funded programs. p.25

Pros and Cons (few evaluations) at secondary level provide greater relevance and motivation, reducing absenteeism and drop-out rate; gain experience and employer chance to screen for good candidates for future permanent employment; at post-secondary, additional benefits include chance to earn money and gain edge in employability over non-co-op students; draw back limited course selection and curtailment of the ‘whole campus’ experience. p.25

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E - THE TEACHING PROFESSION

Teachers are the backbone of the education system, bearing the responsibility for transmitting to children and young adults the knowledge, the skills and... the values identified by society as most important... in 1990-91, full-time teachers numbered 293,000 at the elementary and secondary levels, and 62,500 at the postsecondary level. p.26

The economic and social environment is being transformed by the knowledge explosion and by the dizzying pace of technological change, as well as by globalization, growing competitiveness pressures, and changing social structures ... In big-city schools, one may hear a dozen mother tongues... Many students are hungry ... broken homes ... mentally and physically handicapped ... have been integrated ... In many cities, violence in the schools has grown...

Compounding the problem is the fact that school no longer has the attraction it once had, when education was the recognized path to social promotion.

... teachers are ill prepared to meet these challenges. In addition, they must swing wit sometimes vast changes in educational philosophies and methodologies, only to find that the pendulum has begun to move back towards the original position. p.26

1. A Profile of Teachers in Canada

Teachers are getting older... This changing age profile reflects the fact that, perhaps more than any other occupational group, the timing and additions to the teaching force are determined by the changing demographic structure...

What has changed very little is the male/female composition... Close to three quarters of elementary school teachers in 1985-86 were women, but... only one third... at the secondary level... fewer than one in five school administrators... were women... At each successive administrative level... the proportion of women decreases sharply... while 25 % of male educators... filled administrative positions, only 6% of women... The scarcity of women at the secondary level, particularly in scientific and technical fields, and under representation in managerial positions provide few role models.... p.26

All across North America, declining enrolments in the 1970s and well into the 1980s led to a smaller number of teachers being recruited... resulting in an oversupply of newly trained teachers. In the United States, teachers’ earnings declined and the quality of new entrants ... deteriorated seriously... Canada was different... Teachers’ earnings remained high... reflected the view that higher earnings would attract higher-quality applicants... teachers’ unions showed considerable strength at the bargaining table. p.27

Interest in the pursuit of teaching as a career has remained high... number of applicants remained high, faculties of education have been able to chose those with high academic achievement

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2. Teacher Demand and Supply

The labour market for teachers is entering a new phase of growth in demand... So the potential supply is there, but a bottleneck may exist in the capacity of faculties of education to produce new graduates.

Moreover, such overall estimates of teacher demand and supply mask serious shortages ... both a vocational and a subject-content aspect...

Remote communities... But shortages also are becoming apparent in some inner-city locations

A more general concern is that of shortages of teachers in some subject areas, notably mathematics, the sciences and technical fields... this results in out-of-field teaching...

Shortages of teachers of mathematics, the sciences and technical subjects are part of a complex web of trends that are affecting most developed countries. The pressures to introduce new technology in order to meet the demands of global competition continue... Thus growing demands are likely to be placed on the education system to provide children and young people with the knowledge and skills needed to support an economy and society readily adaptable to scientific and technological change. Yet the number of students enrolling in mathematics, science and engineering at the post-secondary level has been stagnant. That, of course, reduces the size of the pool from which teachers in those fields can be drawn for elementary and secondary schools. p.27

This raises an important aspect of our ‘coherence’ theme - the question of signals. Is the quality of the scientific and technological education offered to students sufficiently high to attract their interests? Why girls... are not attracted to these fields? And male postsecondary enrolment in these fields was stagnant during the 1980s. Furthermore, many of those who do actually graduate with science and engineering degrees do not work in those fields after graduation. As the Science Council has argued, this phenomenon occurs because Canadian industry is unable to absorb the skills that these people bring to the labour market, with the consequence that the long-run attractiveness of scientific and technical occupations in Canada is low. On the other hand, occupations in law, medicine and accounting, for example, offer greater potential returns to individuals in the long run; as a result, more people are being attracted to these occupations. p.28

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3. Teacher Training

Issues include: initial teacher training, integration of new teachers, and professional enrichment

Recent U.S. reports call for a massive overhaul of the education system, beginning with pre-service and in-service teacher training. Similar views are being voiced in Canada... Human Resource Development Committee of the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology. These groups stress that earning a teaching degree cannot be a one-shot deal that provides all the knowledge teachers will need throughout their careers; instead, training must be on-going and carefully shaped to meet the changing needs of society and of the teacher. p.28

Teachers’ collective agreements provide for several days per year of ‘professional development’, but those days are spread throughout the year, and cannot offer teachers in-depth training... Not only new teachers require special skills to meet the present and future demands, but so, too, do those who have been teaching for some years.

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4. Teachers’ Earnings

An instructive comparative study of teachers’ salaries in a number of advanced countries was completed in the United States in 1988 [Barro and Suter]. While the wide variety of teaching conditions found in different countries could not be taken into account, care was taken to standardize earnings internationally and to develop a range of indicators. The results show that the average salaries of Canadian teachers during the first half of the 1980s were substantially higher than those of their U.S. counterparts, and higher still than those of teachers in Japan, South Korea and West Germany.

Another indicator considers teachers’ salaries relative to gross domestic product per capita as a measure of economic status and of the relative economic attractiveness of teaching. On this score, Canadian teachers outperformed teachers in the United States by a wide margin... On the whole, therefore, Canadian teachers are among the highest-paid in the world and occupy comparatively high positions on the economic ladder.

How well do teachers’ earnings compare to those of other occupations in Canada? p.28

We found that in 1986, for example, secondary school and community college teachers compared very well with other occupations near the bottom of the earnings distribution and while the position of elementary school and kindergarten teachers was not as strong, their earnings at this lower level were nonetheless higher than those of seven of the 14 occupations being compared. p.29

So, generally speaking, teachers fare relatively well in terms of starting salaries. But a crucial question for the retention of good teachers and theory continued motivation and commitment is: what are their future prospects? pp. 29-30

When the earnings potential of the teaching occupations is compared with that of other occupational groups, it is found that while elementary school teachers rank near the middle, secondary school teachers in 1986 ranked last in each province. p.30

What conclusions... First, as a group, teachers are relatively well paid, on average. Second, teachers appear to do very well... in terms of starting salaries. Third... secondary and college teachers face relatively weak career/earnings prospects, even though this is an important incentive for strong performance on the job. p.30

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5. Career Structure

The individual teacher is placed within two large bureaucracies: the large administrative systems of school boards and provincial ministries of education; and the network of teachers’ unions. Both bureaucracies have worked to ensure that all teachers are treated alike, regardless of their performance. In this, the educational bureaucracy has been motivated by the need to provide more or less standardized education programs to millions of school children. p.30

The outcome is that promotion within the teaching ranks occurs in lock-step fashion, with annual increases dependent on educational background and years of experience... Otherwise, personal initiative and motivation do not come to bear on earnings to any significant extent. Teaching has been referred to as a ‘strangely career-less career”. p.31

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6. Summary

Today’s teachers are highly educated and well paid, have several year’s experience, and as we have seen the pupil/teacher ration drop substantially in recent years. Yet there has not been any significant improvement in student achievement. On the contrary, we conclude that the performance of the education system in Canada is just not good enough to assure Canadians of an improving standard of living in coming decades.

But the bureaucracy, including the unions, has been very successful in protecting the jobs of teachers who are just not good enough. At the same time, excellent teachers have not been sufficiently rewarded.

A useful first step is to screen teachers-in-training more carefully. Conventional training methods give novice teachers too little classroom exposure.... Another useful step is to explicitly recognize that not all teachers are equal in ability and performance.

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