Built for Efficiency: The Risk of Shortening Teacher Education Programs

We are facing a crisis in education, and the teacher shortage is only one visible symptom of something much deeper. Classrooms are under-resourced, student needs are escalating, and educators are being asked to hold an impossible amount of responsibility with shrinking support. Teachers are leaving because they are being asked to do more, with less, for longer, and to absorb systemic failure as if it were a personal shortcoming.

Instead of confronting that reality, the system reaches for its most familiar tool when pressure mounts. Efficiency.

A recent announcement from University of British Columbia Okanagan confirms that its post-degree Bachelor of Education program will be shortened from 16 months to 11. Coursework is being compressed into a tighter, more intensive schedule so teachers can be certified faster and placed into classrooms sooner. It’s being framed as a practical response to teacher shortages and the growing complexity of today’s schools. But this move mirrors the very logic that has helped create the crisis in the first place.

This is the same efficiency mindset that equates speed with success and calls it innovation. It reduces preparation to a logistical problem instead of a professional one. Now it’s being applied to teacher education. Move them through, credential them faster, fill the gaps, and keep the system running.

But teaching is not an assembly line job, and teachers are not interchangeable parts.

Education as a system runs on the optimization of time and resources. There is no room to slow down, because slowing down is treated as inefficiency. Yet learning does not happen through speed. It happens through reflective practice, through time to think, question, and make sense of experience. That kind of learning takes time. When we shorten teacher education programs, we remove one of the few opportunities future teachers have to develop that reflective capacity. Instead of building programs that deepen understanding of human rights and inclusive pedagogy, we are reshaping teacher education to mirror the very machine it should be helping educators understand and challenge.

Teachers are burning out because they step into classrooms where supports are thin, demands are endless, and responsibility is repeatedly downloaded onto individuals. Shortening preparation programs does nothing to change those conditions. What it does remove is the space to develop a critical understanding of the systems they are entering before they are expected to survive them.

Teacher education is not about learning how to manage a classroom or deliver curriculum. It is one of the only opportunities educators have to interrogate the structures they will later be expected to operate within without question. It is where they can examine inclusion, disability, assessment, behaviour, power, and policy with enough distance to see patterns rather than just endure moments. When programs are compressed, that space disappears. Reflection becomes inefficient. Critical awareness becomes optional. Survival skills take precedence over professional judgment.

An accelerated pathway may produce teachers faster, but it also produces teachers with less time to integrate theory, less time to practice thoughtfully, and less opportunity to develop the confidence required to push back against harmful norms. Instead of preparing educators to help change the system, we prepare them to adapt to it, normalize overload, and keep the machine moving.

This is not a solution to a teacher shortage. It is the education system doubling down on the very logic that is hollowing it out.

If we want teachers to stay, we have to stop pretending the teacher shortage can be managed through efficiency. This is not a bottleneck problem to be solved by moving people through faster. It is a systems problem that demands critical examination. Once teachers arrive, they are expected to compensate for chronic underinvestment with personal sacrifice. Cutting months from teacher education does not address that reality. It simply accelerates the conditions that drive people out.

We already know where efficiency-driven models lead us. We see it in classrooms every day. Applying the same logic to teacher preparation is not innovation. It’s repetition. And it should concern all of us who care about the future of public education.