GOOD EDUCATION DEPENDS ON good teachers. This is such an obvious point that it should not be worth making, but policy-makers seem to assume that they can improve things by changing the system while ignoring what happens to teachers inside it. If the money that is now being poured into curriculum development, testing, record-keeping and other one-shot cures were to be spent instead on helping teachers teach, we would all be better off. And one way of helping teachers teach is to change their working conditions.Across the country teachers report that they are expected to do more and more with less and less, as funding is cut back while demands on the schools increase. Almost every investigation of Canadian flat roof schooling in recent years has shown that schools are increasingly expected to deal with non-educational problems. About twenty percent of children live in poverty across Canada, though this national average hides the fact that the percentage is very much higher in the case of First Nations and inner-city children. Many others live dangerously close to the poverty line. In most families both parents have to work to make ends meet and, as is well-known, increasing numbers of children live in single-parent families. The result has been that teachers have had to take on work once done by parents. In addition, schools have been expected to take on a wide variety of non-educational tasks, from street-proofing to AIDS-awareness. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that teachers have cried, Enough. In the words of the 1994 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, “Expectations of the school system have increased dramatically, without any clear identification of priorities or adequate professional development. Many teachers feel unable to carve out a degree of manageability in their work; the result is a siege mentality.