Quebecor media recently unveiled the secondary school rankings with great fanfare. This communication tool is developed by the Fraser Institute and has the political objective of reinforcing the idea that education is a consumer product. Over the years, this list has always been controversial. here is our top four of the arguments against the School Rankings.
Fourth position: load shedding. To keep rising, hot air balloons must throw away ballast. In a school market like ours, the same principle applies: subsidized private schools and selective public schools refer students who risk harming them in the rankings to regular public schools.
In October 2000, the Minister of Education declared: “With a list like this, what we are doing is encouraging schools to get rid of weaker students before secondary 4 and 5 in order to perform well . That doesn’t make any sense. » Who was Minister of Education in 2000? François Legault.
What does he think of it today? And what does his Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, think? Do they even have data on student expulsions from selective schools? And what are the consequences for these students, who are thus expelled so that their old school appears better?
Third position: inflating numbers. The list serves to sell a new argument in favor of subsidized private schools: these schools would now welcome more disabled students or students with adjustment or learning difficulties, EHDAA.
Sensing the sharp decline in social acceptance of their business model based on the social sorting of their clients, subsidized private schools have a trick to appear less exclusive: assigning intervention plans to their students. You should know that, for the ministry, an intervention plan equals an EHDAA. A request for access to information made by École ensemble allowed it to note that when the former Minister of Education simply threatened subsidized private schools in 2012 to condition their public funding on a greater presence of EHDAA , the number of subsidized private intervention plans has more than quintupled in one year!
The growth in the number of intervention plans has been constant since that date without any corresponding decline being observed among the public. And, of course, we are talking here about “codeless” intervention plans, for the least serious cases. Except in the dozen private schools specializing in special education, there are no intervention plans with a code in the subsidized private sector.
And even if subsidized private schools really accepted more EHDAAs, we must remember that their parents must take out the checkbook. Disadvantaged families do not have this “choice”.
Second position: the choice… of schools. We are sold the list by saying that it will help parents make the right “choice” of school. This argument is attractive, but it is false. If you know parents of children aged 6e elementary school year, you know that they and their children are very anxious during the school shopping period. And for good reason: they don’t have the choice. The choice lies with subsidized private schools and selective public schools.
These are the schools that sort children based on their worth. They must be profitable in terms of money (because you have to pay for the latest equipment) and in terms of ratings (because you have to continue to climb the charts…).
First position: the best… to select. You were waiting for it, here is our main argument against the Palmarès: it tells us nothing about the best schools. Rather, it tells us which schools selected the best students.
Quebec created a school market 55 years ago. We decided to put the schools into competition. They are fighting to climb the charts. And to climb there, the recipe is simple: choose the best students. So-called private schools have been doing this for decades. Unfortunately, the public network has also chosen the path of competition by creating selective schools which sort students.
Our schools were to educate the citizens of tomorrow. How far we have come from this goal!
Our education system is inefficient and unfair. We now understand what role the Palmarès plays in this. However, a solution, that of the common network proposed by École ensemble, is within reach. If we want the best for all children, it is time to react.