The Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, recently unveiled an education dashboard. He said he wanted to draw up a ranking of schools. Let’s settle the question of this list from the outset. In a school market like that of Quebec, a ranking will tell us nothing about the quality of schools: it will only tell us which schools select the best students.
Indeed, in our three-tier system, selective public and subsidized private schools market among advantaged students. Ordinary public schools must accommodate all children, including a large number of students excluded from the first two levels. This selection generates numerous negative consequences, both academic (levelling down) and social (compromised common culture, hampered active mobility).
A track record from the ministry would solidify the school market, demobilize disadvantaged families and accentuate the excesses of the system. François Legault himself recognized this in 2000: “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! » The idea of a prize list must be shelved.
The minister tried to attenuate his remarks by saying that we were only going to compare schools that were socio-economically similar to each other. The minister does not have the means for this ambition: there is no reliable socio-economic data on Quebec schools.
The minister would no doubt argue that he has a tool called the Socio-Economic Background Index (SESMI). This index assigns each school a deprivation decile rank. However, the IMSE has serious shortcomings and should be disqualified.
First, the IMSE does not include subsidized private schools. If he did, the decile ranks of public schools would look very different.
Second, the index is not calculated with the true characteristics of students, but with those of their postal code. As the ministry itself recognizes: “The index assigned to this student does not always reflect his family situation. »
This imprecision allows, for example, a selective public school opened in a disadvantaged neighborhood to have an IMSE as disadvantaged as that of the ordinary public school in the neighborhood. Many selective public schools thus go under the radar.
As early as 2003, the ministry wrote with prescience that the educational segregation caused by its selective public schools would blunt the relevance of its index: “It will therefore become increasingly imperative to consider an alternative solution, given the continued increase in special education programs in many public schools. These schools, as private schools currently do, will tend to select the best students. »
The French example
In France, the Ministry of Education is able to assert, for example, that “at the start of the 2021 school year, 40.1% of private sector students under contract are from very advantaged social backgrounds compared to 19.5% in the audience. » Such a level of knowledge and transparency is unimaginable in Quebec!
This data is available because the former French Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem wanted to have a realistic portrait of the situation. His ministry designed a particularly fine indicator called IPS, the social position index. The online publication of the data made it possible to very precisely document the French situation, from the scale of the country to that of neighborhoods.
The IPS also makes possible the publication of College Value Added Indices (IVAC) which aim to go further than the simple success rate for the French national diploma by taking into account the significant disparities between schools in terms of educational and socio-economic profiles. To establish added value per school, you must first have socio-economic data per school. Quebec, we see, has a huge gap to catch up on.
We suggest that the minister postpone his ranking project, begin work leading to the creation of a Quebec IPS and, until the publication of such an index, urgently publish data on the level of education and income of parents by school.