By Robert Green
A slightly edited verion of this Op-ed appeared in the November 15 edition of the Montreal Gazette
Although the next provincial election in Quebec may still be well over a year away, education is already emerging as one of its central issues. Francois Legault has been clear about his intentions to bring elements of George Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ to Quebec, including performance-based incentives for teachers and schools.
Meanwhile the Liberals have been flirting with controversial ideas of their own such as making deep cuts to school boards and using performance indicators to determine school funding.
What all parties seem to agree on is that Quebec’s education system is in crisis.
This, however, is nothing new. For at least the last twenty years politicians have been wringing their hands over the Quebec education system’s poor performance and high drop-out rate. Their response has been one ill-fated policy-fix after another. Prior to this latest focus on performance-based incentives, it was curriculum reform that was supposed to serve as our miracle cure.
Despite the ubiquitous concern over education constantly expressed by Quebec’s politicians, there is one issue with enormous implications that never seems to get the attention it deserves. In the ongoing debate over the future of Quebec’s education system this issue is truly the elephant in the room: public subsidies for private schools.
The reason that this is such an important issue has to do with what the available research tells us about successful educations systems. There is a large body of research indicating that putting strong students in the same class with weaker students creates a better learning situation for all students. Weaker students benefit by having strong academic habits modelled by the stronger students and stronger students benefit from the leadership and mentoring roles they inevitably accept.
As such policies are often misunderstood to be directed exclusively at improving struggling students, it bears repeating that the learning of all students, weak and strong, is improved. When full integration is done well, it is a wave that lifts all boats.
The problem with Quebec’s subsidies for private schools is that they create a system based on segregation not integration. By making private schools significantly more affordable they effectively remove much of the upper and middle class from public education.
Since there is a well-documented correlation between socio-economic status and educational achievement, the result is an under-representation of stronger students in our public schools.
Compounding the problem is the fact that many private schools have entrance criteria that prevent students with special needs from enrolling, resulting in an over-representation of such students in our public system.
All the research indicates that creating such a system with an under-representation of strong students and an over-representation of students with special needs is a recipe for poor student achievement. Given this situation, we should not be at all surprised by the poor results achieved overall by Quebec’s education system.
However, it is not simply a problem of the public system losing students from affluent families; it is also a problem of losing their parents. A wide body of research shows that parent participation is one of the key factors to a school’s success. For a number of reasons, the reality is that affluent families have a far greater ability to volunteer at their child’s school. When we remove these families from our public education system, we also remove the invaluable results of their volunteer efforts. Parent participation creates a form of accountability for a school that is far more connected to the real needs of local communities than any ‘performance indicators’ dreamed up by government bureaucrats could possibly be.
Being a high school teacher in Quebec that attended high school in Ontario, these are issues I think about often. At the large public high school I attended in downtown Toronto I had kids from Toronto’s poorest and richest neighbourhoods in any given class. Each morning there were kids that arrived to school by public transport, kids that arrived in Jaguars and everything in between. As commonplace as this is in Ontario and indeed most of Canada, it is a scenario that simply does not occur in Quebec.
Compared to other provinces, Quebec has by far the highest percentage of students enrolled in private schools and the numbers are on the rise. From 2004 to 2010 the number of secondary students enrolled in private schools rose from 17 to 19 percent. On the Island of Montreal it has been estimated to be as high as 30 percent. The only way to reduce these numbers and bring many of those students and their parents back to the public system is to end the subsidies that allow so many to opt out.
Were the Quebec government to do so, the available research suggests we might finally see some real improvement in the chronically poor results Quebec’s education system has been producing for years.
Montreal Teachers 4 Change.org 