In the whirlwind of debates, it happens that the best ideas fall into battle, victims of polarization. Defenders of the status quo and those of revolution often have a common enemy: creative compromise. The injunction “let’s make a clean slate from the past” induces a powerful dizziness (like the following verse of a world-famous song: “we are nothing, let us be everything!”).
This is the case for private schools. There are those who are for it. Including 96% of parents who use it, and who say they are very satisfied with it. There are those who want to push them to extinction. It is — did you know that? — of the majority of Quebecers. They would immediately put an end to public private financing.
Each student crosses the threshold of private schools with 60% of the effective funding they would have in the public. To this sum is added the check sent by the parent and the contributions of generous donors – former students who have become members of the elite -, which offers the cherub much more than 100% of what is invested in his poor relative from the public .
Having, as a member of parliament, visited the best private and public schools in Montreal, I assure you: you don’t need to be a certified inspector to see how we literally move from one world to another. . The quality of the equipment, the traces of recent renovation, the size of the gymnasiums. Moreover, 82% of parents who chose private care mention their visits during open days as having influenced their decision. Seeing is knowing.
For a people who only indulged late in the virtues of education, the attraction of the private sector is a tangible sign of parents’ desire to invest in the minds of their children. When the private sector attracted 5% of the student population in 1970, it was tolerable, because it was marginal. With 21%, including 39% in secondary school in Quebec and 42% in Montreal, we are in another universe, that of the massive vampirization of the public, of its serious devaluation.
The Parti Québécois adopted an idea this weekend that has been circulating for seven or eight years. It was carried by Camil Bouchard, taken up and expanded by the École ensemble movement, whose coordinator, Stéphane Vigneault, was a speaker before the PQ members.
It is about breaking the three-speed school spiral, not by closing private schools and then having to manage an influx of schoolchildren, but by integrating almost all of them into the public sector. The nice word used is “convention”. These schools would retain a dose of autonomy, their identity, their staff, their history – their aura -, but would become public sector schools, enrolling students from their neighborhood, without carrying out any selection. It is true that with this system, Jean-Eudes’ immediate neighbors in Rosemont, for example, would benefit from a windfall effect.
But why on earth would they want to agree? Let’s be brutal: so as not to die. The State would give them the choice between integrating and obtaining 100% public funding, or remaining private and losing all of this funding in the more or less short term. There will be survivors. I suppose Brébeuf could decide to quadruple his price and brave the storm. Quebec now has enough millionaires to keep this boat afloat. The vast majority of others, no.
École ensemble asked economist François Delorme, from the University of Sherbrooke, to carry out a cost simulation. He assumed that Quebec parents would behave the same way as Ontarians, where private schools are not subsidized. The result is that 6% of all Quebec students would remain in the private sector, and would not receive a penny from the public sector, resulting in savings, in total, of nearly 100 million per year. (That sounds like a lot, but if something goes wrong, getting $100 million wrong would give us a zero-cost operation.)
Since there would be no question of buying private schools and we would keep the same number of students in the approved schools, we do not have to build new public schools. The transition would be gradual, over six years, since there would be a “grandfather clause” for students already enrolled.
We know since a 2015 report from the Superior Council of Education that within Canada, “Quebec is the province where the difference in performance between schools in disadvantaged areas and those in advantaged areas is the greatest, and this , significantly “. It hasn’t improved since. If we are satisfied with this situation, it is normal to advocate the status quo. Otherwise, you need an electric shock.
École ensemble proposes, once these mergers have been made, to redesign the school map in such a way as to maximize both proximity, therefore the neighborhood school, and social diversity, therefore to bring richer kids and poorer kids to cohabit more. What we call in other places the republican school.
This is where I choose to make a confession to you. This proposal was described to us when I was leader of the Parti Québécois (Camil Bouchard was my education advisor). She had seduced me. With the deputies, we had agreed, in the improbable scenario where we formed the government, to submit it for public discussion.
Among the most convincing arguments: the fact that Finland, this gold standard of educational success, adopted a similar reform during the 1970s. Another strong argument: we find for subsidized private schools, in the Parent report of 1966, a proposal for “semi-public” schools which foreshadows what I have just described. If only we had listened to it back then…
Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. He has just published Through the mouth of my pencils published by Somme Tout/Le Devoir. [email protected].