The Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, made the announcement last week: at the next school year, parents and students will resume the tradition of three report cards per year, rather than the two communications introduced in pandemic context. This news sounds like a certain return to normality, after two years of an extraordinary context. But it leaves out a whole essential part of the discussion: what success exactly will we measure?
The education network has not yet recovered from the batch of school interruptions that have upset the course of its existence since March 2020. To this day, 6and wave obliges, pupils are regularly withdrawn from classes the time of an infection. The effects of these interrupted apprenticeships are not very well documented and are essentially impressionistic.
The return from summer vacation has always had a negative impact on learning, particularly among the most vulnerable clienteles and from underprivileged backgrounds. In reading, spelling and arithmetic, the delay of a two-month break in school cadence is easy to observe. No need to be an expert to understand that two years of pandemic, with unequal access to distance education and the digital material necessary to indulge in it, could only be damaging. To date, however, nothing has yet appeared in the figures.
Even if we suspect the inevitable consequences, how will we evaluate them? The arrival of three report cards rather than two restores a normal course to the cycle of communications between the school and the parents, but this does not dwell in any way on the content of the evaluations. This thorny issue has always been controversial in education, but a crater as large as a pandemic of more than two years exacerbates the need to dwell on it. Otherwise, there is a risk of allowing a whole section of ill-equipped students to evolve — or abandon — a whole group of students.
The school has completely changed its assessment practices, because the context demanded it: the places and ways of assessing have changed, the content of the program to be taught has been reduced, the weighting and the quantity of report cards have been modified and some ministerial exams have been cancelled. It is now time to consider the future and to ensure that the evaluation is neither a way of penalizing the students too severely nor of guaranteeing success at a discount. This delicate balance, which must rest essentially on the professional judgment of the teachers, cannot be achieved if the question is not debated in broad daylight.