Quebec’s bifurcated schools: Tensions between democratic and commercial values

Abstract

In education decentralization policy may be beneficial in terms of overcoming an overly cumbersome bureaucracy in educational systems. However, it can also have adverse effects in terms of competition, yielding new kinds of inequalities. This is true in Quebec, where the division of educational labor and the emergence of technical work were indirectly made necessary by the decentralization of the education system, leading to a destandardization of school programming. Students turned away by schools that set standards for excellence turn to schools defined by their educational and social vocation. How do public-sector teachers view all of these changes? As we will see, for many teachers, an attachment to the Quebec education system’s democratic values is not incompatible with buying into free-market values in education.

I do the best work I can, with the services provided and the students in front of me. (Teacher 5 ¹ )

By creating schools with specific programs, we find ourselves helping only those who are doing well. (Teacher 10)

We have a lot of students coming in from other places, which is a good sign. (Teacher 12)

There is some competition between the institutions, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s like competition in business; it forces everyone to offer the best value. (Teacher 16)

Since the 1980s, in both Europe and North America, the education system in industrialized nations has undergone a major transformation. Economic crises, market globalization, the computerization of society, the increasing shift to a service economy, multi-ethnicity, and cultural pluralism have significantly influenced both the regulation of school systems and the cultural frameworks that make teaching institutions cohere. Schools no longer seem as sure of their mission as they once were. How, at the same time, can they train students with varied needs and expectations, transmit knowledge that is continuously subjected to the imperative of legitimation, socialize young people from different social backgrounds, and prepare them for working life in the context of the transformation of the traditional structures of work? Given the multiplicity of poorly defined roles, how can a school find its institutional legitimacy? How did it manage to gain vitality following the critical sociology that targeted it during the 1970s, as well as the budget cuts that began in the 1980s and continued into the first half of the 1990s? To do so, the states in charge of education turned to decentralization, the participation of grassroots actors, particularly by mobilizing parents who wanted to see a more diverse program and a more flexible report card, to meet their children’s needs. The decentralization experienced in Quebec had a material impact on the makeup of school populations in urban schools, on the nature of educational services, on pedagogy, and on the composition of teaching staff. The school’s institutional “face” was changed in an increasingly diverse and highly competitive education system.

In this article we show that the policy of decentralization leads to a form of competition or liberal model which is not without consequence for the bifurcation of the education system. The system is now structured around, on the one hand, institutions that excel academically and, on the other, institutions whose mission is primarily based on a kind of socialization for students who are at risk academically and socially. Hence, the idea of Quebec’s bifurcated school system. At the same time that it strives to integrate the most at-risk students into an inclusive scholastic and social community, it creates educational spaces reserved for the highest-achieving students, resulting in a two-tier or twin-vocation education system (LeVasseur, 2006). This kind of education system negates the principle of equal opportunity underlying Quebec’s major reform of education in the mid-1960s (Dandurand, 1990; Gouvernement du Québec, 1964; Rocher, 1973; Tondreau and Robert, 2011).

After demonstrating the effects of the decentralization policy on the regulation of the education system and makeup of school clienteles within institutions that can be characterized as social, we will show how public school teachers hold very nuanced, if not ambivalent, positions on the idea of the comprehensive school, equal opportunity, and the new private-sector references.

The comprehensive school in Quebec

In Quebec the idea of the comprehensive school emerged in tandem with the reform and modernization of education in the 1960s. It is primarily the Anglophone communities that used the reference to the comprehensive school, describing high schools as “comprehensives.” Francophone communities primarily spoke of democratizing education and equal opportunity. Traditionally, since the 17th century, the Francophone social elite had been educated in classical colleges run by teaching clergy from a variety of orders, such as the Jesuits. With the publication of the Parent Report in 1964 (Gouvernement du Québec, 1964), Quebec began to democratize education by making it free and mandatory until the age of 16, and developing a province-wide education network that included college and university as well as primary and secondary schools. Education became eminently inclusive for all students, regardless of social origin. High school teaching was entirely representative of the idea of inclusion, or the comprehensive school. Students from all social backgrounds were grouped together in a single school, where they took general courses together. CEGEPs, which started in 1967 as an educational level between high school and university, would have the same aim: all students in the general and vocational streams would take general courses together (literature, philosophy, and physical education). As for primary education, “neighborhood” schools welcomed all students, without discrimination, and taught them in mixed classrooms.

Clearly, the idea of inclusion was and remains predominant in many of the province’s schools; however, it is important to show that democratization cannot be reduced to inclusion. In fact, in some settings, especially at the primary level, inclusion is akin to what Derouet (1992), following Boltanski (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991), has called the communitarian or familial model that is focused on close ties between teachers and students, friendly relationships, the idea that each person must have an empowering place and responsibilities that make them a key person in the class, community, and society. However, in Quebec, the democratization of education included the idea of upward social mobility, which admirably illustrates the slogan of the era: “education is wealth.” The democratization of education was primarily seen as a way of developing human capital and, more broadly, Quebec’s forces of production, in both the industrial and service sectors (Gouvernement du Québec, 1964). Through education, Quebec sought to develop a skilled labor force and make French-speaking Canadians active players in the various cutting-edge sectors of the economy in the 1960s and 1970s (Fournier, 1986). Democratization and education are, therefore, not in the least restricted to a communitarian model even though, as we noted above, the vast majority of elementary school teachers see the school as a place that must be inclusive and communitarian.

The oil crisis of 1973, economic recessions, the challenge to the idea of the nanny state in the 1980s, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and, more specifically in education, the devaluation of diplomas in the 1980s, shook the idea that democratizing education could be a means to upward social mobility to its core. Having focused its principal policies on the democratization of education in the 1960s and 1970s, the centralizing state was unable to prevent the relative failure of equal opportunity. A new regulation of education that incorporated some of the values of New Public Management emerged in Quebec, with some teachers as partisans; they immediately—at least in part—gave up on a certain idea of equal opportunity but, as we will see, did not abandon the support measures for students in the most difficulty, or the fight to prevent the social exclusion of the most socially and culturally disadvantaged students.

Decentralization and the bifurcation of the education system

Generally speaking, in western societies, this is the time of decentralization, of increasingly active parent and community participation in constructing institutional arrangements that are better adapted to the specific needs of local users. Similar measures taken by local governments to revitalize institutions fall, more broadly, into the framework of a new regulation of education which borrows heavily from New Public Management (Lessard, 2002; Normand, 2011). Decentralization can of course be based on participatory values, on the idea of sharing power within a network, on the need to make core actors accountable (Ministère de l’Éducation de Québec (MÉQ), 1996: 95 onwards), but it can also be part of an essentially liberal vision of public institutions and education management. Moreover, the liberal version of decentralization comes with new forms of control: the obligation of results; performance contracts; reporting; the evaluation of educators, schools, and education systems as a whole. The state retains the reference to effectiveness by assessing schools according to national metrics, but it also introduces a reference to creativity, to the vitality of local strengths, by allowing schools to internally identify the needs of their users (students, parents, local partners) and to establish the ad hoc methods for meeting them. As a result, in this movement to decentralize, the use of references that are a priori incompatible often gives rise to unusual arrangements in which, for example, bureaucratic logic meshes with the creativity of actors and local initiatives in revitalizing the educational milieu (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991; Derouet, 1992, 2000a; Derouet and Dutercq, 1997). Some show that the imperatives of competence, mobilization, and accountability of actors in education are symptomatic of a new managerial culture in education, examining them as new forms of domination by neoliberal forces (Derouet and Normand, 2011).

The decentralization of education systems thus arises from both a climate of uncertainty about the institutional function of the school and deep dissatisfaction with its effectiveness. The doubt that currently seems to surround the idea of equal opportunity reveals the connections between the school’s institutional crisis, the cumbersome bureaucracy of education systems, and the desire for interplay between schools and local bodies. In fact, one of the conditions fundamental to the idea of equal opportunity that prevailed in France in the second half of the 20th century, and in Quebec from the 1960s onwards, consists in the standardization of schooling offered by a central government that is the guarantor of the fairness of testing, thus providing everyone with the same conditions for academic success, which some call the obligation of means (Demailly, 2004). But if the critique of the 1960s (Baudelot and Establet, 1971; Bourdieu, 1966; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970) highlighted the socially biased nature of this ideal and if, based on the principle of redistributive justice, the allocation of additional resources to the students with the most difficulties did not always promote truly equal opportunity or prevent students from dropping out, was it not appropriate to return the option to make choices about education to parents (Ballion, 1982) and promote their participation in the management of these institutions (Derouet and Dutercq, 1997)? One of the main postulates behind decentralization consists in the school’s necessary interplay with the local community so as to compensate for the government’s pedagogical and administrative shortfalls. Decentralization seems to be a panacea for the primary ills related to the legitimation and operation of large institutions. However, it is also accompanied by the emergence of varied educational principles and diversification of the program offering, both of which may indirectly compromise the ideal of equality.

That is true of Quebec, where decentralization essentially aims to give more decision-making power to the schools so that the provincial curriculum is tailored to the needs of students and the demands of parents. Local definition of pedagogical projects (MÉQ, 1997, 2003) encourages consumer-type behavior, resulting in a market model that has extremely serious consequences for the concentration of at-risk students in the same schools (Desjardins et al., 2012). In some schools, including public schools, student selection begins in kindergarten. Middle-class parents strive to get around the effects of massification (devaluation of diplomas, real or imagined decreases in cultural content, violence) and the more recent impacts of the policy of integrating children traditionally taught in special classes or even separate schools into the regular classroom (MÉQ, 1999). Such changes in the makeup of public school populations, especially in Montreal, have very large repercussions for managing diversity, the work of teachers (Lessard, 2002) and for the supervision and socialization of students who are “outsiders” in terms of school norms.

If decentralization affects the social makeup of educational institutions, it also consequently affects the organizational aspect of schools, that is, the type of service offered to students and the composition of the educational agents working in these institutions. Here, we can refer to the French case widely studied by educational sociologists, who showed the effects of the new regulation of the education system by means of demand. To get around the effects of massification (Dubet, 1992) subsequent to middle- and lower-class access to secondary education, the middle-class parents who benefited the most from the democratization of the education system (Derouet, 2000b) now try to avoid poorly ranked institutions and register their children at schools that meet their requirements for instruction and socialization (Broccolichi, 1997; Broccolichi and Van Zanten, 1997). Such avoidance practices result in a differentiation of schools according to the makeup of the student body and pedagogical practices, concentrating “gifted” students in schools with academic and social selection practices (Dumay et al., 2011; Felouzis et al., 2013; Maroy, 2006; Van Zanten, 1996), while students with difficulties or who exhibit behaviors unsuited to school are sent to relegation schools, cynically labelled “trash schools” (Van Haecht, 1998: 191). More broadly speaking, these changes, which we can assume are part of New Public Management’s extension into education, including the education systems of North American societies, have a very substantial deprofessionalization impact on teachers (Lessard, 2002, 2004; Normand, 2011; Tardif and LeVasseur, 2010). The fact that, in some settings, teachers stress socialization to the detriment of instruction may prove to be a professional decision, preference, or educational value. However, having to put instruction second to socialization can prove to be a real constraint with respect to the concentration of student social problems in the same schools or classrooms.

In Quebec decentralization and competition among schools have led to a heavy concentration of student social problems in the same schools, resulting in mass hiring of technical and paratechnical support staff to help teachers manage and socialize students who are the most at risk (LeVasseur and Tardif, 2005). Technical agents provide the possibility of one-off intervention with students who, for various reasons, require immediate assistance. Special education technicians (SET) “hold the floor” for hundreds of students, handling emergencies, and dealing with students who have been thrown out of class, allowing them to calm down and regain self-control. In particular, they are responsible for the academic and social integration of students who are most vulnerable economically, socially, culturally, and personally (LeVasseur and Tardif, 2005). The SET workforce has grown 260%, the second-highest growth among all school resources: their numbers went from 8,387 in 1990 to 30,195 in 2004 (Tardif and LeVasseur, 2010). Through their work, the school’s socialization functions are magnified and extended; their work literally becomes a unique form of the fight against exclusion (LeVasseur and Tardif, 2005).

Consequently, in France and Quebec, decentralization and competition among schools have a clear impact on the makeup of classrooms and schools. In Quebec we are seeing real bifurcation, a kind of bicephalous education system. The system tends to include the most vulnerable students, who are often in jeopardy of failure and exclusion as a result of decentralization, the differentiation of school programming, and competition among schools. The remainder of this article focuses less on asking teachers to comment on technical work in social institutions and more on having them state their positions on the emergence of liberal values in the regulation of Quebec’s education system. A note on methodology is in order before we present and analyze the data.

Methodology

We participated in a broad, pan-Canadian research project involving approximately 30 researchers between 2002 and 2007. The study focused on the impact on teachers’ work of the primary changes in education. For this article, we draw our data from approximately 50 interviews from 2005 with Montreal-area teachers. We asked them to describe where they worked and, in particular, to tell us about the impact on their work of the pedagogical and curriculum reform that had just been implemented, parents’ new role in education, the inclusion of students with learning problems in the regular classroom, publication of school rankings, pressure to improve students’ results, the decentralization policy, and competition among schools. With some historical distance, a recent rereading of the conversations allowed us to see many teachers’ ambivalence about upholding democratic values in the context of a new regulation of education that was more focused on market values.

Teacher ambivalence about democratic and liberal values in the education system

Teachers are not of one mind about the contradictions inherent in the education policies that structure Quebec’s education system. While some wholeheartedly defend the idea of an inclusive, heterogeneous public school, others defend it so long as it competes by creating, in its own way, closed or elite classes. Others have thrown in the towel, deploring the fact that they have to engage in the competition that has bled public schools of their best elements. “Every man for himself,” they seem to say, which is why they unwillingly subscribe to the logic of commerce. There are some teachers who unreservedly embrace free-market values. Among them some seem plagued by a kind of social blindness: in their opinion, giving parents free choice apparently has no particular consequences, either socially, or for the overall education system.

Lucid observations and denunciations of free-market drift

Teachers make lucid observations about the bifurcation of the education system. The very idea of a public school involves accepting, without discrimination, all students in the neighborhood and giving them the educational services they need. What angers many teachers is the fact that private schools, which in Quebec get more than 60% of their financing from the public purse, do not shoulder their responsibility for educating students with difficulties. Here is a statement that attests to the cultural, social, and educational vocation of the public school.

When they’re at private school, they have to take exams (entrance or selection exams), and that’s not really fair, I think. Here in public schools, we face certain challenges, we accept everyone, we don’t differentiate between who’s stronger, who’s weaker, we accept them all. With private schools, there are exams to take and it’s their choice. (Teacher 14)

Using entrance exams to select students means that “good students” are syphoned away from public schools, while students with difficulties are concentrated in public schools. To compete with private schools, in keeping with the decentralization policy that gives schools administrative and pedagogical autonomy, a growing number of public schools are creating special programs (Portelance, 2006), and offering the International Baccalaureate program; headquartered in Switzerland, this program is increasingly popular in Quebec. Programs such as these make it possible to raise content requirements, which justifies student selection. The result is public schools in which some sections and classes emulate private schools. The very structures of a public school lead to student segregation. This segregation effect is magnified by the policy of integrating students traditionally taught in special classes into regular classes. Classes therefore divide into those that contain students with more and more serious difficulties, and classes that teach high achievers, which naturally makes teachers’ work more complex.

So, that’s one thing that I really find has changed the way that I teach because now I have to take into consideration that these children have a modified program. So, if I’m looking for specifics in the class for something specific in their paper, I may have to adjust that according to the levels that I know that the other children are at. So, maybe they’re not doing a graph but they’re doing a drawing instead or something different so that they are—they can try and keep up with the rest of them. (Teacher 13)

The same teacher condemns the fact that, due to budget cuts, additional staff cannot be hired, staff that would allow her to differentiate her teaching to meet the specific needs of each student. What is more, we may wonder if the act of tailoring the pedagogy does not have a discriminatory effect that could be characterized as cognitive (Anyon, 1980; Rochex and Crinon, 2011). A research program could focus on the alleged virtues of differentiated pedagogy, although given the educational context, effects of segregation, student integration policy, and budget cuts, for teachers it remains the only viable teaching formula. As one teacher pointed out, she was not trained to teach in such classrooms, which have grown in tandem with the various education policies we have just described.

As a regular teacher, I’m not equipped, I don’t have the training to deal with these children. I don’t have it at all. I know how to teach my literature and my language arts and my—but I don’t know … I mean, a doctor could be a very good successful doctor, but a psychiatrist is dealing with something totally different, you know what I mean? I’m not a psychologist, I do the best I can but oftentimes, you have neither the time nor the training to deal with very difficult children. (Teacher 15)

These challenges have nothing in common with the challenges involved in teaching homogeneous classes of strong students. Teachers who work in very disadvantaged areas must diversify their role and act like chameleons (LeVasseur, 2011; Tardif and Lessard, 1999). The role of socialization tends to expand at the expense of tasks focused on instruction and student learning. The question remains open as to whether the fact that teachers are becoming chameleons has a professionalizing or deprofessionalizing effect.

A double disadvantage for public schools?

The fact that budget cuts add to the educational and pedagogical challenges facing these teachers has its share of consequences for the bifurcation of the education system. And what if, instead of bifurcation, we were faced with a tertiarization of Quebec’s public school system? Many teachers have strongly condemned the fact that the allocation of resources within a school depends on the neighborhood’s deprivation index, not the school’s. In their view, the criteria must be revised based on attendance at schools by students who, in many cases, are not from the neighborhood. Student mobility does not only stem from the “good students.” As we have seen, decentralization and school autonomy foster competition. In a moderately disadvantaged neighborhood, children whose families are better off financially send their children to private schools in other parts of the city. To retain its student population and, in turn, its operating budget, a school could be obliged to admit students with learning or behavioral difficulties. Moreover, in the context of budget cuts, a school ranked as deprived could have its ranking changed to moderately deprived, and thereby lose the resources it needs to hire student support staff.

There’s a phenomenon that is increasingly evident, the fact that we deny the deprivation in some neighborhoods. For example, this is a deprived community that isn’t getting any richer, we have a lot of indicators to prove it, but we are losing our funding to districts that are getting even poorer. We are still just as poor, but some schools are getting poorer and the overall subsidy is not increasing. (Teacher 7)

The practice of evaluating a neighborhood’s deprivation index, rather than a school’s, has some unintended consequences. A school that has its deprivation index lowered—i.e. it would no longer be considered as very deprived but only somewhat deprived, which happens when one part of the neighborhood starts to become gentrified—may lose funding for student services. Parents may then opt to send children with learning or behavioral problems to schools that are more deprived, but have bigger budgets: “Given that some schools have more financing, we lose students to them. The fact that parents can decide to go anywhere they want, I find that harms neighborhood schools” (Teacher 5).

It would be inappropriate to talk about competition being ranked with a deprivation level that provides for the most government funding so as to secure support services for students. Yet a school in a neighborhood that is getting poorer can gain financially—a real paradox! The services offered to students go beyond support for learning and managing student behavior. They can include breakfast, cultural or sports outings, and extracurricular activities that are essential in some urban areas. Several school agents told us that school, for many children, is a place of learning, but also a sociocultural center where they can play and have fun—at home, they have no balls to play with, or space to play in. For many of these students, school holidays are a nightmare. Despite these difficulties, or because of them, many teachers still believe in the school’s vocation, and even, in some instances, in the school’s cultural vocation. Such is the case for the following teacher, who mentions: “We have a lot of at-risk children, so we watch them, we do everything we can to help them” (Teacher 4). She focuses her teaching on reading and transmitting culture. She seems to get a lot of pride out of saying that all of the children are taken care of, that none of them are kicked out, unlike the private sector, where as soon as it stops working, they say “goodbye!”. Another teacher, despite the challenges, also holds onto the idea of education for everyone.

For me, what matters is the beginning of a child’s education. No matter what ethnic community they come from, that child has the right to a good education, whether or not they speak French, whether or not they just arrived. They all have their strengths and qualities. What counts is making children love school. (Teacher 8)

The two previous quotes should not give the impression that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods pursue the same educational ends as schools that, by means of elite programs, teach the highest achievers, including, as we mentioned, some public schools. At schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, there is a strong tension between what Thin (1994) calls social work and pedagogical work. Not only does the division of educational labor contain this tension but many teachers have a tendency to legitimate their work through a social or socio-affective logic which tends to devalue specifically academic knowledge and reasoning (LeVasseur, 2011, 2012). In particular, we should not get the impression that all teachers have the same “moral” commitment to the public school system. Many make ambivalent statements about the future of education in Quebec, a future that is apparently to be shaped by having schools compete, protecting private schools, and parents’ sacred right to choose a school for their children.

Ambivalence and the twin logics of democracy and commerce

Teachers’ openness to competition between schools, which just a few decades ago had been unthinkable, is not without nuance. In fact, there are several cases that we will present as being on a kind of continuum, ranging from moderate competition to fierce competition. Remember, however, that this section deals with the teachers’ conflicted positions. These teachers adhere to arrangements in which the democratic and market orientations have different weights. The first excerpt presents a form of democratization enlivened by a moderate form of competition, in which everyone has access to a specific program, but without selective admission.

For my child, I chose a school with a specific program, because I thought it offered something valuable—in the public system, because I really believe in that—and I think it was very enriching for him. For children like that, who are quicker, it’s wonderful. That’s very positive. But the school loses very good students, which takes away from the dynamics a little. (Teacher 9)

The future of public schools would therefore consist in modelling themselves after the private school’s elitist model. Parents must therefore have the option of sending their children to private schools, as the public system has unfortunately demonstrated its inability to teach students properly. Teachers may then criticize the fact that the private system syphons off the best parts of the public system, while insisting on the idea that parents’ choice in education must take precedence over every other principle, even if it undermines the cause of the public school. However, while some teachers are optimistic about public schools engaging in competition, others seem resentful in their acceptance of competition, as if making a concession to trendy market philosophies, ideas that are predominant in many western societies and upheld by education stakeholders.

I find it abominable. We are currently fighting for recognition of the fair value of public schools, given the means we have, and that’s when it really becomes clear that there are two tiers, two types of schools. To stand out and keep its clientele, a public school has to offer special programs or the International Baccalaureate program. I’m not against it, I’m just saying that we have to take care of the children who attend public school and who have growing needs. At least make sure children are fed properly. (Teacher 8)

Finally, there are teachers who believe in the virtues of a somewhat utopian system in which public schools, offering every possible service for students with learning or behavioral problems, would coexist with private schools that have been divested of some of their funding. This funding would then be recouped by the public schools yielding a system in which parents could send their children to the school of their choice. Despite all the formulae for the coexistence of public and private schools, some teachers favor strong competition and subscribe almost wholeheartedly to an education system regulated by strong, open competition.

Democratization and liberalization: difficult to reconcile

Many teachers maintain stances that intimate that public schools are subject to unfair competition from the private sector, which is largely financed by the state and does not educate students with learning disabilities or behavioral problems. However, numerous teachers favor a public school system, provided it acts like a private school, with closed programs. As we will demonstrate, many teachers seem essentially unaware of the social effects that competition has on schools in particular and the education system in general. For some, whose statements we saw earlier, the very principle of an inclusive, heterogeneous school and, in particular, a diverse classroom, has been compromised. For others, whose stances we will analyze below, that principle should be broadly dismissed. Some teachers who are also parents, or who want an education system that lessens the chance of a child remaining captive in a social or academic environment, are in favor of free choice for parents.

Parents who have even the slightest concern about their children’s education would never leave them in a school that doesn’t work. In this school, parents want the best for their child. I have a five-year-old daughter and I would never send her to the neighborhood school, because that school is ridiculous. She goes to a good school, not private, but a public school I selected based on its reputation. (Teacher 2)

The next teacher states, rather candidly, that choosing a school for children allows one to avoid contact with some school populations.

If I had children and I lived there, would I send them to the neighborhood school? I don’t think so. If I lived in a neighborhood where I felt my neighbor was bringing their children up the way I want to raise mine, I would definitely send them to the neighborhood school. (Teacher 6)

It is important to highlight this phenomenon, which Van Zanten (2009) labelled the “public effect,” as it shows that even in an education system in which the state does not explicitly promote or recognize competition, some parents know how to take advantage of the differentiation in the program offering, impacting the makeup of school populations within schools (Dumay et al., 2011). Furthermore, for other teachers, the opportunity to offer the most deserving students from disadvantaged neighborhoods access to elite classes within the public school is a way of providing equal opportunity, which must be maintained.

In my class, I have children whose parents are really poor. And you tell yourself that those kids, later, they might be the ones leading their families; that child might be the only one we can save. There is an extremely bright little girl who plays music, we showed her another world, rather than leaving her where she is, where she would never have had that door opened. (Teacher 3)

Is this not an apologia for a school that is just, because it allows exceptional students to join a kind of educational elite, a return to the idea that equal opportunity is only for gifted students, a democratic justification of the school that Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964; Bourdieu, 1966) deconstructed 50 years ago? Does not this form of public school lead to the sanctioning of social divides? In contrast, the philosophy of the Parent Report that ushered in the democratization of teaching in the 1960s in Quebec was not about giving opportunities to the most deserving, but rather about minimizing the most blatant social divides through education. The teacher in question is far from alone in defending such a meritocratic vocation for public schools. Many other teachers and principals, whose statements are not examined in this article, argued for an equally liberal view of equal opportunity in the course of this study.

Among the teachers who mentioned the benefits of competition, some, because of social or cultural blindness, seem not to recognize that regulation by market forces is liable to create inequalities. These teachers have a strictly pedagogical image of education and seem unable to glimpse the academic and even pedagogical mechanisms that lead to new forms of inequality. In some cases, certain teachers’ stances even contain some condescension toward school agents at more “social” establishments.

There’s a school next door, they’re completely ghetto! Not us. I never see more than one or two teachers outside monitoring, while we have five or six, and they have the same number of students as us. We always make the students line up to come in. And their language … Maybe they’re poorer than us, in terms of clientele. (Teacher 11)

The teacher above does not see the impact of competition or selective admission. Her school only accepted hand-picked students while the school “next door” is a neighborhood school with no special component or program to justify student selection. She judges the school, which seems more chaotic than hers. Her asocial vision of education, that is, a vision that is indifferent to the factors behind educational inequalities, is shared by a colleague, who says:

I think that we should have the choice to put our child in the school we want. What’s nice is that our school has lots of kids from other areas—their parents drive them. That’s a decision they made because they probably heard it’s a good school. I think that’s a plus. (Teacher 12)

The idea of a single, standardized, heterogeneous school no longer corresponds to teachers’ view of the education system. Here, the teachers’ discourse about the new approach, allowing competition to regulate public schools, is indicative of a new concept of teachers’ cultural and social roles compared with what it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was characterized by the democratization of teaching in the wake of the Parent Report’s release.

Conclusion

The modernization of Quebec society with the “quiet revolution”, starting in the early 1960s, saw the state play a dominant role in the economy and social issues. The social frameworks modernized in that their management was rationalized, and access to social, cultural, and educational institutions became democratic. In the realm of education, teachers were the bearers of the new values, and schools were radically democratized. What remains now of the teachers’ effort to democratize Quebec’s schools? We can hypothesize that a twin evolution or transformation of the education system has occurred. Some teachers are in favor of the liberalization of the education system, while those who remain attached to the school’s democratic vocation have a different understanding of the school’s social function than they did in the 1960s. In the 1960s the school’s social function was strongly aligned with the idea of upward social mobility for an entirely new generation of students who, under the old education system administered by the Church, would not have gone past grade 4 or 5 (Dandurand, 1990; Tondreau and Robert, 2011). Now, the school’s social function is no longer to get students into positions of responsibility in society; it is rather to keep the most underprivileged students from tumbling down the social ladder, whence the importance of technical work in Quebec schools. To put the question radically: do we still believe in equal opportunity in education? Do we subscribe to the idea of academic success for everyone by common means? Do teachers still adhere to a mission of social equality for all students? Let us not come to premature conclusions prior to more in-depth research that focuses specifically on these issues. However, in light of this data, we can assert that many teachers see competition and the diversification of the educational program as a panacea for the various weaknesses in Quebec’s education system. Moreover, they do not seem to realize that the new regulation of the education system could generate new types of inequality in education.