
Some school districts are getting around this problem by contracting with universities to offer custom-made programs for designated groups of teachers that are worked out jointly to do a particular job. This has some obvious possibilities, though there is sometimes a certain tension between the professional-development priorities of teachers and the academic assumptions of universities.Various provinces are now suggesting that there is a way around all such problems—change the certification of teachers. As things now stand, once teachers graduate from an approved training program and have done one or two years of successful teaching, they get a teaching certificate that is good for life. They can be dismissed only for good cause. Some provinces are considering changing this to a system of short-term certification, so that a teaching certificate is good for, say, only five years and can be renewed only on the completion of an approved upgrading program. This suggestion is unpopular with teachers’ unions, which understandably see it as a threat to teachers’ rights and insist it is something that has to be negotiated, not imposed by government. Nonetheless, supporters of the
driveway gates move see it as a way of ensuring, first, that teachers’ salary increases are tied to training that will be directly useful in the classroom and, second, that in-service training and professional development will be more systematically organized. The danger is that the idea of useful training might be too narrowly defined, so that teachers are prevented from pursuing a more general education. It could well be, for example, that a good program in philosophy and history might be of more use to a teacher than a rigidly defined program of workshops and short courses in specific classroom problems. There is also a risk that any attempt to tie teachers’ certification to a continuing upgrading program may result in teachers collecting a random grab-bag of credits for attending conferences, going to seminars, taking workshops and so forth, which are little more than busywork. It is impossible to tell whether limited-term certification is a good idea or not in the abstract. It has some obvious possibilities, but everything would depend on how it was implemented. Simply to convert teaching certificates from life to a limited term would in and of itself achieve nothing of significance.