At the opening of public hearings on Bill 23, Education Minister Bernard Drainville said he intended to “resist resistance to change”. In his mind, change seems to be synonymous with progress and those who oppose it necessarily lack open-mindedness or seek to protect their interests.
When you undertake a reform that promises to be so delicate, the last thing to do is to launch into the lawsuits from the outset. It is true that, under the guise of virtue, the motivations of the various stakeholders can be questionable, but things do not always change for the better.
The Legault government’s recent about-face on the Quebec Experience Program (PEQ) clearly shows that the reform carried out by Simon Jolin-Barrette during the first term, which was supposed to better meet the needs of the Quebec economy, was ill-advised. .
Had it not been for the resistance to the attempt to “reengineer” the state by the Charest government, which also claimed to be resisting the “interest groups that benefit from the status quo”, the safety net put in place at the time of the Quiet Revolution would have been dangerously weakened.
Everyone agrees that the education system is in a disastrous state and Mr. Drainville no doubt has the best intentions, but the last thing to do would be to make things worse by trying to improve them. If there is an area where sorcerer’s apprentices have no place, it is this one.
It is obviously absurd that the ministry does not have reliable data on the state of its workforce, the level of qualification of teachers, the rate of retention, turnover and absenteeism, the average number of students per class, etc. . We will certainly not blame Mr. Drainville for wanting to obtain them.
The population is perfectly capable of distinguishing between those who seek the common good and those who defend corporate interests. Provoking cries of indignation, the desire for centralization attributed to Mr. Drainville would leave the population indifferent if they believed that it would make it possible to solve the shortage of teachers, speech therapists or psychologists. In the same way, if the Barrette reform had ensured better access to a doctor and the recruitment of nurses, it would have been wildly applauded.
Unfortunately, the Minister of Education seems unable to demonstrate how the changes he is proposing will promote academic success and make school more attractive to teachers. The gloomy prospects announced by some and others are more likely to put them off.
Admittedly, negotiations in the public sector are not likely to facilitate dialogue. One can understand Mr. Drainville for being impatient to act, but he could very well have focused on measures to retain and accelerate the qualification of teachers, even if it meant tackling structural reform afterwards.
He is not in the best position to denounce defenders of the status quo. If there is a fundamental change to be made in the education system, it is not to review the governance of school service centres, but rather to eliminate the inequity that results from the “three-speed school “, whose existence the minister stubbornly denies.
On Thursday, in a parliamentary committee, the Montreal Association of School Directors (AMDES) endorsed the devastating observation made in 2016 by the Superior Council of Education, denouncing “a degraded situation where public schools, the third gear, can no longer rely on a social mix that previously helped the most vulnerable to make their way to success”.
Mr. Drainville describes as “ideological bias” those who observe that the selection made by private schools and the proliferation of special projects in public schools create unsustainable pressure on “regular” classes, where the proportion of students struggling with learning problems that could shorten their school career are on the rise.
Rather than seeking to correct this glaring injustice, the minister accuses those who denounce it of looking haughtily at students who choose to exercise a manual trade rather than pursue college or university studies. One would be tempted to return to him the reproach he addressed to me recently by saying that his position is “a tad demagogic”.
“There is a lot of resistance to change. Whenever you want to change something, there are always lobbies who rise up to say: “Not me, you must not change”, “lamented Mr. Drainville. He makes a brilliant demonstration of it.