The evolution of professionalism - Centre for Policy Studies in ...

accompanied by acknowledged standards, competencies, and expectations. Over
the past 15 years, the policy environment has changed dramatically to allow
school agents to increase their professionalism. All teachers entering pre-service
programs now do so with an appropriate undergraduate degree. Teacher education
has become a postgraduate experience. The mean grade point average of preservice
teachers has risen steadily over the decade. The Teaching Profession Act
(1987) and the BCCT (1988) were critical in developing the identity of teachers as
professionals and giving them a particular legitimacy. For the fi rst time in Canada,
teachers were in control of regulating their own profession much in the same way
as the more established professions of law and medicine. Furthermore, the BCTF,
which has always played an active role in professional development of teachers,
has extended this work and embraced the concept of lifelong learning for all school
agents. Professional development has come to include programs on the inclusion
of languages, cultures, and children with special needs as well as antiracist,
antidiscrimination and antiviolence programs. The work of school agents in BC
schools is very different in 2002 to what it was in 1987.
Concurrent with professionalization, there is an emerging discourse of deprofessionalization
among teachers. While professionalization raises the public
awareness of the standards and status of teachers, de-professionalization calls
into question who teaches and their pedagogical approaches. Inevitably the two
structural trends are often in tension and rarely work in unison. Yet there are times
when policies that are intended to undermine teachers as autonomous professionals
actually serve that objective. The Social Credit governments of the past and the
current Liberal government are ideologically opposed to unions. This opposition
takes on a particular force with regard to public sector unions and in the case of the
BCTF an added vehemence given the ties referred to above. In 1987 the Teacher
Profession Act was designed to undermine the power of the BCTF. The BCCT was
meant to, in many ways, replace the BCTF. Instead, BCTF-sponsored candidates
won all of the elections for the seats on the BCCT Board reserved for teachers. At
the same time, the separation of administrators and teachers has clearly undermined
the solidarity of school agents.
We argue that the types and quantities of legislation since May 2001, when
the Liberal government took power, has been designed, in part, to undermine the
BCTF and to deprofessionalize teachers. Under the guise of creating a more fl exible
system and with the slogan of “putting the children fi rst”, the government has made
education an essential service, created a legitimate space for parent volunteers to
work in classrooms, created school planning councils that bring parents into a
professional decision-making role, given more power to the school boards in labour
disputes, increased class size, and redefi ned the powers of BCCT by changing their
mandate and governance structure.
Three other trends characterize the de-professionalization of teachers: the
home school movement, the expansion of independent schools, and the increasing
emphasis on skills. This issue clearly overlaps with the trend toward privatization.
Home schooling and independent schools took on a new signifi cance in 1977 with
the passage of Independent Schools Support Act (1977). Prior to this, BC was the
only secular provincial education system in Canada. A new Independent School
24 Section 1: The West