In the second column

Require teachers to have degrees in the subjects they teach.

Just painfully naive. As a union guy I love it because it would force the boards to hire many more teachers to meet the needs.

Get rid of salary grid?

Good luck with that. Author simply has no sense of working in a collective bargaining environment. Since absolutely nobody in any jurisdiction on Earth has found a formula to decide who is a good teacher.

Testing advocates are frustrated because no matter how they adjust so called VAM systems they still fluctuate wildly from year to year and produce absurd results. Soon some of these will go to court. The American Association of Statistics has condemned VAM as wildly inaccurate.

Hot house business and trades people into teaching? Won’t work. Parents are overwhelmingly convinced that they want OCT Ontario certified teachers.

Wayne Gretzky was a great player but a terrible coach. Don Cherry was a journeyman player at best but a great coach.

Subject knowledge is very important but it is still less important than teaching skills.

Non certified teachers just don’t,  with very very few exceptions have what it takes to teach.

Teaching is not about lecturing from the front taking questions and assigning homework.

It is about creative lesson construction, differentiation, assignment construction proper and improper evaluation, variation in teaching methods, motivation, public relations,
And many other skills that uncerts just don’t have.

If an engineer is assigned a grade 11 math class this September without training they have a much higher chance of being soon in way over their heads than a certified teacher.

One place I would insist on a subject specific degree in elementary school math. I would treat math like itinerant French. One math teacher would see students on a rotary system even in primary while their language/ home room teacher was on prep time.

“Wayne Gretzky was a great player but a terrible coach. Don Cherry was a journeyman player at best but a great coach.”  But at least BOTH of them knew HOW to play hockey!  It’s a logical start.

There are hundreds of schools on northern and rural Ontario let alone other rural parts of Canada.

Many of these small rural high schools have 7-8 teachers to cover all of the subjects. I remember when the ministry wanted to insist that every OAC teacher have a degree in their subject. The letters poured in from Northern and rural Ontario that this was simply impossible. They would need to double their staff and make all teachers half time to accomplish this. The teachers just did not exist to deliver the ministry dictat. 

People say thing with no sense of the consequences in a province like this.

BTW the happiest group in the province would be the federations, if degrees were demanded for every subject taught. The boards would be forced to hire many more teachers.