Have Quebec students fallen behind during the pandemic? We do not know. This is the observation made by the Auditor General of Quebec in her report tabled on Wednesday. She thus puts her finger on a problem identified for years in the network: when it comes to education, it is often difficult to have an accurate picture.
During the pandemic, Quebec deprived itself of a valuable tool for two years in a row: the Ministry exams, which elementary and secondary students take. These tests make it possible to know where the students are in their learning in French, mathematics, but also in English and history, for example.
However, “a memorandum to the Council of Ministers of November 2020 nevertheless recommended holding the ministerial tests 2020-2021”, but to reduce their weighting, notes the report tabled on Wednesday.
However, the exams were cancelled. Why ? The Department of Education was unable to “provide any analysis justifying this decision” to Auditor General Guylaine Leclerc.
No question of leveling down, said then the Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, but it was necessary “to be benevolent”.
Withdrawing these exams has certainly “removed pressure on teachers, but today we see what that has as an implication”, says Isabelle Plante, professor in the didactics department of the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM).
We have no comparative measurements. Without saying that we cannot trust the teachers for the evaluation, we do not have common tests.
Isabelle Plante, professor in the didactics department of UQAM)
In this context, how do you know which students are doing well at school? Which ones are at risk of dropping out?
To compensate for potential academic delays, 88 million dollars have been invested in a tutoring program aimed at countering learning delays. However, the sums were distributed to the school service centers taking into account, in particular, the number of students, and not the difficulties they might have at school.
“Supporting data, we could have injected the funds where we really need them. It’s disappointing for a government: we distribute 88 million, without clear proof, ”says Isabelle Plante.
Information that does not reach the Ministry
In September 2001, when he was Minister of Education in the PQ government, François Legault promised in an interview with The Press a “revolution” to promote student success. He wanted increased transparency, which would have led schools to disclose their success plan and performance statistics.
Faced with protests from schools, the Ministry of Education finally backed down.
Two decades later, the long-awaited transparency is still awaited, sometimes within the Ministry of Education itself. Journalists who have to make numerous access to information requests to try to obtain data on the education system know this well.
They are often referred to the 72 school service centers and school boards, to which the question must be asked.
A dashboard “
“Education is over-administered, but its administrations do not produce relevant information, or do not share it,” says Julien Prud’homme, professor and director of the human sciences department at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. .
An example: when the government undertook to document the teacher shortage in September, the weekly report that it published on the web was most of the time very incomplete, service centers not having even bothered to respond to the questionnaire from the Ministry of Education, to which they report directly.
“The Ministry has not yet shown the leadership to gather this information and provide itself with a basis that could guide its policies”, says Mr. Prud’homme, who refers to the Ministry’s “historical timidity” in holding the centers of school services.
The Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, unveiled last summer the “dashboard” of the health network, which paints, for example, the portrait of emergencies, waiting lists for surgery, delays in obtaining an evaluation at the DPJ. The new Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, says he wants to learn from it.
His ministry stopped releasing the number of students absent from schools a few months ago. As for the report on the teaching posts to be filled, it has not been updated since mid-October.
Without data from the Ministry, writes the Auditor General, effective catch-up measures cannot be implemented to make up for the delays caused by the pandemic.
If this is the case, these shortcomings in the education of students “risk having an impact on their academic progress, leading them to drop out and depriving them of obtaining a diploma”.
Collecting data, analyzing it and using it to put in place effective measures, “it’s essentially a question of political will”, says Professor Julien Prud’homme.
In the meantime, it is the students who risk suffering the consequences.