The Minister of Education presented a bill on Thursday which aims to make the school network “more efficient”. Bernard Drainville is tightening the screws on school service centers by giving himself significant powers, improving access to data and creating an institute of excellence in education to improve teaching. In the school network, several actors doubt that this “remixing” has a concrete impact on the success of the pupils, as the minister wishes. Here is what could change – or not – in our schools.
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A very powerful minister
This bill allows the Minister to appoint the future directors general of school service centres, but also to dismiss them and even to cancel one of their decisions in order to impose his own. “It aims to ensure that we have a clear alignment and that we row everyone in the same direction,” said Mr. Drainville, who wants greater consistency between government orientations and what is happening in the schools.
However, many feel that the minister is going much too far. Even former minister Gaétan Barrette recognizes that he did not grant himself so much power during his controversial reform of the health system. Opposition parties believe that the minister is assuming the powers of a “monarch”, since the directors general will no longer be able to criticize the government without risking being fired.
At the Centrale des unions du Québec, we consider that Quebec is not tackling the real problems. “What will it change for the shortage of staff and the success of the pupils? At first glance, we are still in the brewing of structure, ”deplores its president, Éric Gingras. An opinion shared by Jean Bernatchez, professor at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, who considers that these changes will have “rather little impact” on a daily basis for the students, while establishing an “exaggerated duty of loyalty” towards the Minister.
Data to make better decisions
Much like Christian Dubé did in health, Bernard Drainville wants to have a “dashboard” to better assess the performance of the school network and student success. These new data, which will be available in real time, will make it possible, for example, to identify classes where the results in French are too low compared to the provincial average after the first bulletin, in order to intervene more quickly, explained the Minister.
The initiative is welcomed by many, but it remains to be seen whether the results will be there. “Having more data, concretely, is a good thing, but it does not solve the shortage and the problem of resources,” says the president of the Federation of Parents’ Committees of Quebec, Kévin Roy.
The latter hopes that these data will demonstrate that there are “gaps” when taking into account the needs of students and available resources. “The challenge is to see how all this will be implemented,” he said, while others are worried about the micromanagement that could be done from the minister’s office.
The Central Trade Unions of Quebec also sees possible “drifts”. The minister could be tempted to move resources to classes where students are doing less well, which could create other problems elsewhere in a context of shortage, underlines Éric Gingras.
science in the classroom
The Legault government is also creating a new organization, the National Institute for Excellence in Education, to “improve teaching in the classrooms”. This organization will “bring together in one place the best research on the best teaching practices” in order to “help our teachers to be even more efficient”, said the minister, who is also introducing new provisions concerning compulsory continuing education.
However, this decision is not unanimous, including in academia. Some, like the expert Égide Royer, believe that this new organization “consecrates the entry of science into school” and will really improve student success, by allowing teachers to base themselves on best practices. . Others, like Professor Jean Bernatchez, are rather worried. “Teachers can already learn from the evidence. There is no miracle recipe, I don’t think that a single pedagogical model can suit all students. It’s very reductive,” he said.
For their part, teachers’ unions received this announcement as a “slap in the face”. “It’s not acceptable,” says Mélanie Hubert, president of the Autonomous Federation of Education. “The message we are being sent is that things are going badly in education because the teachers don’t want to train and they don’t apply the right methods,” she laments.
Extended distance education
Bill 23 also provides for the expansion of the use of distance education, which had been significantly tightened after the pandemic. New provisions, which will be specified in an upcoming regulation, will make it possible to teach online in the event of school closure due to a disaster or natural disaster, indicates the minister’s office. In some cases, a child who must be schooled at home or in the hospital may also have access to virtual lessons. However, there is no question of authorizing distance education on days when schools are closed due to storms, said Minister Drainville.