(Montreal) The Quebec education system is “inefficient and inequitable” and to reform it, the L’École ensemble movement proposes to end the funding of private schools, that all students in the province attend their neighborhood school and have access to specific programs.
Posted at 10:06 a.m.
Updated at 10:21 a.m.
Five years after its creation by parents, the movement l’École ensemble returns to the charge a few months before the provincial elections by tabling a plan that aims to fundamentally change the education system.
“I want to tell you that we have an unfair school system,” said Claude Lessard, educational sociologist and former president of the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, who is chairman of the board of directors of School together.
The education network as it currently stands “has few winners and many losers,” he continued.
At the heart of the proposal unveiled on Monday is the creation of a single network of schools, where each student would attend the establishment in their neighborhood. This would therefore be the end of subsidized private schools as we know them: private schools would be 100% funded by Quebec and free for all. In a six-year horizon, they should exclusively welcome pupils from their basin.
“Schools no longer choose their students,” summarized in a press briefing Stéphane Vigneault, coordinator of the School together movement. The children go to their school [de quartier] regardless of their parents’ ability to pay,” continued Mr. Vigneault.
As is the case in Ontario, schools could remain private and select their students, but they would no longer receive public funds, “neither directly (subsidies) nor indirectly (school transportation,” reads the movement’s report.
The School together commissioned economist François Delorme, from the University of Sherbrooke, who calculated that the annual savings for Quebec would be $100 million.
The School Together movement also wishes to generalize a model already implemented in certain secondary schools in the province, namely that of offering special programs free of charge to all students, without selection on the basis of academic results.
Last week, the Minister of Education Jean-François Roberge promised to introduce new measures to make special programs, often expensive, more accessible to all.
According to the most recent data on this subject provided to The Pressnearly one in four students (23.6%) who attend public secondary school are enrolled in a particular program in 2020-2021.
The international education program is the most popular, followed by sports, arts and language programs.