During your victory speech last Monday, you reiterated, Mr. Legault, that education would remain, and I quote, “the top priority” of your government. If I am permitted to do so, I would like to add my voice to those of many people who work in the field of education, or whose job is to be a watchdog regarding the health of the Quebec school system. .
I would first like to tell you that in addition to being the mother of two young women who went through school, I taught French in secondary school for 14 years before becoming a pedagogical adviser to the teaching staff of French from 13 secondary schools. Being now a professor of education sciences at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières and working in the practical training of teachers, I very humbly believe that I can contribute to the reflections and actions that will have to be put in motion urgently if we want to truly that Quebec schools regain their health.
I would like to submit to you some thoughts on the word “success” in school, which seems so dear to you. I would first like to ask you what you mean by “success” in school. Is it to pass the ministerial tests? Not dropping out of school? Arrive in the first year of primary school with the “expected” achievements for a child of… six years old? Because, you see, when I consider your speech, that of your Minister of Education as well as your respective actions, I understand that “success” at school in Quebec consists precisely in “reaching standards”. Everyone will say that it is desirable that it be so, and it is true. Success is important.
Success is not learning
Allow me, however, to illustrate, very concretely, the perverse and well-established effects in our schools of the culture of “success”. In our school system, ministerial examinations exist in several disciplines both at primary and secondary level: in French, in history and citizenship education, in science and technology… I am currently working with French teachers in the first cycle of secondary school who bear witness to the time invested in “preparing their students” for the writing test in Secondary II.
Two months. Two months of a ten-month school year. Two months of exercising their students to “pass” a writing test, very different from what the program normally invites them to teach. Two months of trying to explain to the students, who themselves point out the inconsistency (they’re not stupid…), that “yes, you don’t write in life a text like the one you’ll be asked to write during the exam”, but that it must be done to “pass” the test.
Same problem for teachers of science and technology or history and citizenship education, who have no choice but to put an impressive amount of content into their course, even if the students do not “understand” it. not, as long as they “retain” what is needed to “pass” the tests. Thus, it rests on the shoulders of our children and their teachers the responsibility to “succeed” so that we can say that the school system is doing well, at least on the surface.
I know that my examples are big, even crude, and that, of course, it’s neither so simple nor so dark (whatever…). I don’t like to be defeatist either, and it’s not productive to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You are a pragmatic man, I find that to be a quality. Nevertheless, what I am trying to tell you is that by using ministerial tests as we have been doing for too long, we are imposing a performative purpose on school and depriving teachers and our children of a school where you “learn”. Because, you see, “succeeding” and “learning” are two very different things.
What to do then? How to use all this mass of results, to which we do not have access elsewhere and which obsess more than one, to put them at the service of a system which would guarantee real and lasting learning? How can we relieve our children, and their teachers, of this considerable burden that this obligation to perform has become, which leads to all the excesses that one imagines and which deprives children of a school that teaches them?
Promote the profession
Let’s rethink evaluation: what it is, what it evaluates, what it is currently used for and what it should be used for. I propose to distinguish, on the one hand, the evaluation of the “system” and, on the other hand, that of the “students”. A system evaluation requires a representative sample. We could then set up annual tests assessing the “skills” of a certain number of pupils, held at strategic moments in their school career, just as the OECD does with the PISA tests. I am sure that you read the OECD reports with interest and that you attach great value to them. Such evaluations would specifically target the regulation of the system and not the evaluation of the students themselves: they would not appear on their report cards, nor would they constitute a condition of graduation.
Students would be assessed by the person who knows them best: their teachers. Do you happen to want to promote the profession? Well ! Here is a strong way to achieve it! Teachers would at the same time be relieved of the burden of preparing for the tests, which would allow them to “take the time” (my God! Does that still exist at school?) to ensure that their students “ learn” and develop solid skills, understand why they go to school and how what they learn there is useful for them to think, to be capable of critical judgement, to know their culture and their language, to emancipate themselves!
Isn’t that what a healthy school should allow? It would not be a question of the Ministry providing more tests to teachers, but that these tests should be tools among others allowing teachers to pass judgment on the real skills of their pupils, and not that they evaluate training for passing exams.
This idea is not magic. Everything rests on the social contract that the teachers would receive and its implicits. In any case, it is high time to act… our children and their teachers are not an assembly line that needs to be optimized to increase success, Mr. Legault. It doesn’t seem to me that’s how you view them either. I believe you when you say that education is dear to you. But the current means of managing the system, based on “success” to the detriment of learning, are in my eyes simply counterproductive.