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These numbers hold up largely across the province: the overwhelming majority of budgets going towards teacher salaries with table scraps left over for students and supplies. This point is driven home when one looks at Ontario’s Sunshine List of public-sector employees making over $100,000 each year. Thousands of elementary and secondary school teachers, admin and staff make the list; with some teachers reaching as high as $133,000 annually.

At some point, the traditional teacher-province understanding — lower wages in exchange for job security and benefits — disappeared; ground to dust by indolent unions and indulgent governments. Simply put, teachers in the province are overpaid; the work is not that onerous nor specialized and the hours not too taxing.

One already hears the howls of indignation from the unions at that claim. “But,” they say, “teachers take their work home with them!” “We need to attract the best and brightest,” they claim. The private sector’s heart no doubt bleeds for the former and the latter proves a curious claim, given the thousands of bright-eyed undergrads currently on teachers’ college waiting lists. Not to mention that if push comes to shove, most teachers have nowhere else to go — let them quit, only to discover that the private sector is not exactly clamouring for those whose expertise is in the pedagogies of visual arts or early childhood education.

Simply put, teachers in the province are overpaid; the work is not that onerous nor specialized and the hours not too taxing.

Where to go from here, then? A hard cap on teacher salaries is the obvious start; perhaps at a still-respectable $65,000 for the top bracket. Targeted buy-outs to entice the retirement of the top-heavy glut of high-earners would both save money and finally allow younger teachers a greater chance to break into the profession full-time, rather than subsist for years on piecemeal substitute work.