The existence of a “three-speed” school system in Quebec is “neither a slogan nor an ideology”, wrote a group of 26 teachers, who criticize the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, for cultivating the denial of a “real problem” which threatens the right to education.
” […] Denying or ignoring this reality of the existence of the school market, of a three-speed, even multi-speed school, and its negative effects on the democratization of education in Quebec seems to hide a certain ideology moving away from the right to education enshrined in the Education Act,” writes Professor Pierre Canisius Kamanzi, professor at the Faculty of Education at the Université de Montréal.
He published on Wednesday an open letter co-signed by 25 other teachers, in response to comments made by the Minister of Education last week. At Duty, Mr. Drainville declared on May 15 that “the thesis on the three-speed school has an ideological bias”. He quickly amended to speak of a “conceptual bias”.
“In the case of the three-speed school, how can I put it? The foundations on which this thesis is based seem questionable to me, ”said the elected official, among other things.
Without naming him, Mr. Drainville attacked the work of Professor Kamanzi. In 2019, he published a study in which he notes that students who have attended regular public secondary school go on to university in a proportion of 15%. For students who have taken part in specialized programs (in mathematics, science and languages), this rate increases to 51%. For those who attended private secondary school, it climbs to 60%.
The minister said he recognized that access to university is an “important indicator” and wished “that the maximum number of students have access to university”. “But to go from there to saying that this access to the university will determine whether the school system is egalitarian or unequal, that seems a bit short to me. It seems to me to be an eminently questionable intellectual shortcut, ”he added.
“No bias”
In interview at Duty, Professor Kamanzi points out that his work is based on data from, among others, Statistics Canada and the Ministry of Education. “On my side, there is no bias. All I did was document with empirical data, reliable data, a reality that everyone has known for years,” he said.
According to his observations, the Quebec three-tier system “takes us away from the right to access the same quality of education for all students”.
However, “this right to access the same quality of education for everyone is not my ideology or my conception”, he specifies. “It was rather the conception of the Parent commission in the 1960s that gave rise to the reform. This is also the conception of the reform of the Pedagogical Renewal [déployée en 2005]. »
Professor Kamanzi adds that the “early separation of students” is one of the “weak aspects” of the Quebec education system, which results in an “uneven quality of training”.
“And this can be explained because the government is very concerned about improving performance, success, excellence to be more competitive with the rest of Canada and other countries, without realizing that one of the main factors in having a society of excellence is to get children to learn together, to pull each other up”, he argues.
“Excellence, prioritizing it, is important for the company to stand out,” he adds. But this excellence must still be reconciled with social and educational justice, which are part of the aims of the school system of the Parent reform, and which are also part of the principles of Quebec society. »