Jim Grieve claims hiring boom in Peel Board, but new teachers still under-employed

The Toronto Star today discusses the increased need for teachers representing minority groups in Ontario schools. With 40% of the population representing visible minorities, and 7 in 10 high school students (at least in the Toronto District School Board) being non-white, school boards are looking to foreign trained teachers to fill the gap.

In booming Peel Region, where the public school board is hiring hand over fist to serve an explosion of new Canadian families, schools need more diverse teachers than universities can churn out, so they’re turning to foreign-trained teachers to fill the gap, said education director Jim Grieve. (The Toronto Star)

That is a confounding statement when one looks at one school in Peel, where for the first time in 20 years, 7 teachers have been declared surplus. In total 57 teachers in the secondary panel have been declared surplus by the school board. They are all contract teachers and have to be placed before anyone new can be hired. In the midst of this ‘hiring boom’ we have 57 surplus teachers who will be placed before any new teachers can be hired.

What gives Jim Grieve? when you say ‘hiring boom’ are you talking about hiring teachers in general, or specifically a hiring boom for foreign trained teachers? The goal of hiring teachers should be to hire the best teachers available, regardless of other considerations. A good teacher can motivate, teach, and connect with students regardless of race or creed.

‘Apply to Education’ is the thorn in the foot of teacher employment in Ontario

Now that we have looked at a few over arching reasons for the surplus of teachers in Ontario it is time to look at the day to day problems faced by teachers seeking work that stem directly from policies and techniques put in place by school boards to deal with the endless surge of applicants.

The major problem affecting the hiring process in Ontario is the use of Apply to Education, a website that facilitates the posting of employment opportunities, and the distribution of required documents from applicant to school. Apply to Education removes all the personal connection that should exist in the application process and turns applicants into numbers. It allows schools to ignore applicants and grant interviews to individuals who can craft the resume full of the current most popular catch phrases. Don’t get me wrong, this is the same problem that exists with other employers who use Workopolis and similar websites. Apply to Education charges $10.50 for each region an applicant would like to have their package submitted. I am entirely against having to pay to apply for a job and think it is immoral. They justify the cost by claiming it would cost an applicant that much to mail their documents to a school. I understand the desire to manage candidates, and track their path through the system, but this is not being accomplished with Apply to Education. All it does it send a nicely formated PDF to the school. The real frustration with Apply to Education is that if you want to apply for positions in different regions in Ontario then you will have to spend $10.50 times the number of regions. An applicant who is open to working anywhere in Ontario can spend upwards of $200.

Another common problem with websites like Apply to Education is that because it is so easy to apply to jobs (just click apply) applicants tend to apply to any and every job that is posted. Applicants start to subscribe to the mind set that if I send out enough resumes, if I apply to enough jobs, I’m bound to get an interview. This process results in positions receiving hundreds of resumes, and real applicants are lost in the crowd. No one has time to look at 100 resumes, so hiring managers tend to skim resumes, and when they find 4 or 5 they like the rest never get looked at — if they even look at that many, because we all know most teaching positions are posted because they have to be, while in reality the school already has a candidate lined up.

Those candidates that like to go out, meet the principals and investigate the schools where they might like to work, are currently not able to do so. To many schools in large Ontario markets turn away potential teachers insisting they ‘visit the website’ for all employment announcements. If I was were in a position of hiring I’d much rather hire someone who takes the time to understand my schools culture and inner workings rather than a candidate who sits at home and sends out 15 applications while eating their bowl of Maple and Brown Sugar Oatmeal.

Schools are in a tough position because the reality is that there are hundreds of applicants for jobs, and it is not practical to have those 100 applicants stopping by a school disrupting the day. The solution must first start with schools only posting jobs that are actually available, instead of following ‘union rules’ and posting positions because the rules say they have to. When a teaching position has been fully qualified as open the school should set up a hiring panel that meets to read all the application packages received. For candidates that are not selected for an interview a short automated form email should be sent out, so that the candidate at least know their package was received and read by a human. If a candidate wants feedback on their application they should be able to contact the school and have a short conversation with someone on the hiring panel. Since proper notes should be taken on a resume documenting the reasons for and against granting an interview it is a simple task to relay this feedback.

These suggestions relate directly back to the ways teachers conduct their classrooms. A teacher would never return an assignment to a student with a simple percentage grade sitting alone in the top right hand corner of the documents final page. A teacher provides feedback so that the student understands why they were assessed in this way, and how they can improve on future assignments. Teachers submitting their applications deserve the same treatment. Does it take time? Yes, undoubtedly yes, but if we want the best teachers working with our students then these are the steps that must be taken. Apply to Education provides little in the way of benefits to the hiring process in Ontario, and appears to an outside observer to be nothing more than a cash grab supported by school boards who are already overworked and making $4 in funding spend like it was $6. Teaching is a very personal profession, so why are teachers forced to navigate a very impersonal hiring process?