“We need to strengthen our teaching in mathematics in college and high school, to put them back in the common core and at the baccalaureate, all specialties combined”, declared President Emmanuel Macron during his first campaign trip to Poissy (Yvelines) on March 8th. This had provoked strong reactions in the union ranks. “Basically, he wants to unravel the catastrophic reform – especially with regard to maths – of his minister Jean-Michel Blanquer”, confided an official of a teaching organization. At the same time, a committee comprising nine experts and mandated by the Minister of National Education to conduct a series of hearings with all interested parties, was working on adjustment proposals. His report is due Monday, March 21. According to newspaper information The world published on March 17, he should propose that scientific education – a mixed discipline which combines SVT, physics and mathematics – be increased to 3:30 in first, against only 2 hours today. “The additional hourly volume would be entirely devoted to math and the discipline renamed “scientific education and mathematics”, indicates the daily. Clarification: at the start of the school year in September 2022, this reinforcement of the common core would a priori only concern first class pupils. who have not chosen mathematics as a speciality. Then, at the start of the 2023 school year, it will concern all first year students.
Proposals for change “at the margins” judge a large number of associations of professors and trade unions. But no one expected a real revolution. The onslaught of criticism of the “failures” of mathematics education, and the fact that the debate was invited in the presidential campaign last February, pushed the minister to act quickly. According to most specialists, the account is not there: since the reform and the disappearance of mathematics from the common core, only 59% of final year students study this discipline, whereas they were 90% before. Girls are also more lacking since only 45.8% of them now follow mathematics education (specialty or option). They were 85% before the reform.
It was therefore necessary to rectify the situation as the presidential election approached. The hearings carried out with a bang in recent weeks by the famous committee have drawn criticism from interested parties behind the scenes. According to the associations, learned societies and union representatives interviewed, the “game was distorted” from the start, the committee being largely made up of designers or those responsible for implementing the reform of the general and technological high school, including Pierre Mathiot and Jean-Charles Ringard (co-pilots of the monitoring committee), Edouard Geffray (general director of school education) or Charles Torossian (co-author with Cédric Villani of the report “21 measures for the teaching of mathematics). “Complicated to list dysfunctions to people who, de facto, will find it difficult to recognize them since they have been touting their qualities for years”, underlines Jean-Rémi Girard, president of the National Union of high schools, colleges, schools and higher education.
“A Form of Patch”
Another major constraint which left little hope for the implementation of size adjustments from the start of the 2022 school year: the overall hourly allocations have already been established for next year and the numbers of positions for competitions have already been recorded. “It is not by tinkering with last-minute teaching in overtime that we will solve anything, gets annoyed Jean-Rémi Girard. On the other hand, we will disrupt the high schools which are already preparing for the next start of the school year school.” For Sophie Vénétitay, secretary general of Snes-FSU, this proposal is similar to “a form of patch”. “In some places, if we can’t add ‘overtime’ hours, there may be big holes in the racket,” she warns. Before continuing: “The report notes that there is a problem but does not take the measure of the necessary structural changes, that is to say the overhaul of the reform”. For many, the articulation of mathematics with other disciplines, in particular the sciences (physical and chemical sciences, computer science, life and earth sciences, economic and social sciences, human sciences, etc.) deserves to be redesigned.
“Off”, the committee officials would have themselves admitted to being dependent on a very constrained political calendar. “They explained to us that launching a major reform was complicated from the moment when the next Minister of National Education was likely to put an end to the work as soon as he arrived”, confides one of the actors interviewed. “And, in the event that the current majority is renewed, the priority of those responsible for maneuvering during the next five-year term should no longer be high school but college”, believes the latter.
Many regret that the question of the shortage of mathematics teachers, an essential element, was not sufficiently discussed during the hearings. “The latest figures from the Depp (Department of Evaluation, Foresight and Performance, Editor’s note) show that the new high school has 33,000 fewer hours of mathematics”, advances Sébastien Planchenault, president of the Association of teachers mathematics in public education. During his hearing, he was told that one extra hour of maths in the common core, in first and last year, corresponded to 1,500 additional teachers. “We know that adding hours would clearly be a problem given the lack of staff that the ministry is facing,” lamented Sébastien Planchenault last week. Like him, many actors believe that we are taking the problem upside down by adapting to the shortage of teachers but not providing the necessary means to deal with it.
Finally, how to encourage female students to turn more towards scientific teaching, including math? Still according to information from Le Monde, the objective could be given to principals to convince more high school girls to follow the “expert math” course at the start of the final year. In order to obtain a more balanced pool of “real” scientists. The learned societies and specialized associations were not expecting major upheavals in such a short time either. For Véronique Slovacek-Chauveau, honorary president of the Women and Mathematics association, the fact of being able to keep three specialties instead of two in the final year would have been a step forward. Because, in 2021, half of the girls who had chosen the maths specialty in first class abandoned it in the final year. “But, during our hearing, the committee made us understand that it would not accept this proposal”, regretted Véronique Slovacek-Chauveau a few days ago. The latter considered that “we cannot do without a fundamental reform”. A priori, it will not be for right away.