The existence of a “three-tier” school system in Quebec is “neither a slogan nor an ideology,” writes one group 26 teachers who criticize Education Secretary Bernard Drainville for cultivating denial of a ‘real problem’ threatening the right to education.
” […] Denying or ignoring this reality of the existence of the school market, a three or even multi-speed school and its negative impact on the democratization of education in Quebec, seems to hide a certain ideology that moves away from the right to education enshrined in the Education Act,” writes Professor Pierre Canisius Kamanzi, Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Université de Montréal.
He published an open letter he co-signed on Wednesday 25 more teachers, in response to comments from the Minister for Education last week. In Le Devoir on May 15, Mr Drainville stated that “the three-speed school thesis has an ideological bias”. He quickly changed the talk of a “conceptual bias”.
“How should I put it in the case of three-speed school? The fundamentals on which this thesis is based strike me as questionable,” the elected official said, among other things.
Without naming him, Mr. Drainville attacked Professor Kamanzi’s work. In 2019, he published a study in which he found that a 15% proportion of students who attended regular public secondary school go on to university. For students in the public sector who have taken special courses (mathematics, science or languages), this increases to 51%. For those who went to private secondary school, it rises to 60%.
The minister said he recognized access to university as an “important indicator” and wished “as many students as possible to have access to university”. “But to say from there that this entrance to university determines whether the school system is egalitarian or unequal seems a bit short to me. It strikes me as an extremely questionable intellectual shortcut,” he added.
“No bias”
In an interview with Le Devoir, Professor Kamanzi recalls that his work is based on data from Statistics Canada and the Department of Education, among others. “There is no bias on my side. I was just documenting with empirical data, reliable data, a reality that everyone has known for years,” he said.
According to his observations, Quebec’s three-tier system “deprives us of the right to give all students access to the same quality of education.”
However, “this right to access the same quality of education for all is neither my ideology nor my vision,” he says. “It was rather the concept of the parents’ 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 Quebec’s education system, resulting in “uneven quality of education”.
“And that can be explained by the fact that the government is very concerned about improving performance, success and excellence in order to be more competitive with the rest of Canada and other countries, without realizing that one of the main factors for a Society of excellence is having children. “learning together, raising each other up,” he argues.
“Excellence and prioritizing it are important to differentiate the company,” he adds. But this excellence has yet to be balanced with social justice [la justice] Education that is part of the goals of the school system of parenting reform and also part of the tenets of Quebec society. »