The problem with numbers is that there is always a way to make them say what you want. Or to silence what you refuse to see. This is a bit like what the Minister of Education’s office did when it shouted out against the teachers’ strike to explain the disastrous results obtained by the students of the 5th grade.e secondary to the ministerial exams last June in French.
True, some students missed up to 22 days of school. That’s huge. But Minister Bernard Drainville stepped up to help these students catch up with a catch-up plan that was well-endowed with all kinds of resources. In mathematics, the formula achieved its targets. The success rate among public school students (76.6%) even saw a surprising jump of 7.5 percentage points, an improvement of the same order as that of private school students, whose success rate (90.7%) jumped by 7.6 points.
In French, however, the decline is all the more painful because Quebec has been flirting with more than unsatisfactory success rates for years. In the public sector, only 66.9% of students passed the writing test. That’s a drop of 4.2 percentage points compared to last year. In the private sector, students did much better, with a success rate of 83.8%. But, and this is where it gets interesting, they too are experiencing a drop, estimated at 3 percentage points.
The situation is quite different for the English exams. Not only are they stable, but they also display success rates that would make you green with envy: 97.8% in enhanced English and 92.6% in the basic program. Clearly, everything is swimming in the world of Shakespeare and Leonard Cohen.
The same cannot be said of Molière and Michel Tremblay, which has been hit by a loss of love and disaffection that has stretched out over time. Such poor results in French are not just the result of a strike or a pandemic regime that has been going on for too long. Let’s call a spade a spade. These figures reveal a real problem in French language teaching in Quebec, as evidenced by Minister Drainville’s Dashboard, where we can observe a nagging downward movement.
The problem is that this change of discourse, in addition to not being up to current challenges, has a demobilizing effect on an education sector weakened by shortages, aging infrastructure and an increase in everyday violence. It is all the more striking given that Bernard Drainville came to the head of Education by taking a merciless look at the quality of French among students.
In doing so, he broke the pinkish spell that enveloped this ministry whose vision was hampered by a glaring lack of indicators and its inability to put the little it had into perspective. This awareness led him to make improving the quality of French among students his first hobbyhorse. His revision of the French programs in primary and secondary schools will make its debut in the classroom next fall. To say that we are eagerly awaiting it is an understatement.
But what is also annoying about this shortcut is that it ignores the growing gap between the public and private sectors. The CAQ government does not like to hear talk of three-speed schools, but the numbers are stubborn. So are the experts. In a report on the crisis in general education in CEGEP released in June 2024, they observe that the general level of literacy, basic reading skills and the degree of autonomy of students have never been so disparate. A fact accentuated, they say, by the “three-speed school phenomenon.”
However, these gaps in learning French in primary and secondary school have a very concrete effect: one in four students fails their first French course in CEGEP.
It is essential to remember: learning a language is done in accumulations, over a course of years. The unfortunate thing is that we persist in thinking of French as a subject like any other. It should instead be taught and assessed at all times and in all subjects, from kindergarten to university, because, yes, the staggering failure rate of future teachers in the Test de certification en français écrit pour l’enseignement (TECFEE) plays a role in this tragedy.
At such anemic success rates, the word “tragedy” is no exaggeration. We are here before the culmination of a long series of deficiencies, delays and corners cut. Already, in 2008, in the report Better support for the development of writing skillsexperts described the situation of written French in schools as “deplorable”. That year, the average success rate, both private and public, was nevertheless 88.8%.
It is hard to imagine what terms the experts working today on the revision of the programs will use to describe the current rout. One thing is certain: nothing short of an electroshock will be enough to reverse this decay.