On September 1, more than 12 million students are going back to school. A worrying figure awaits them: 4000! This is the number of unfilled teaching positions for the start of the 2022 school year, with massive shortages in certain disciplines (literature, physics, maths). By announcing the catastrophic recruitment of contract workers, the massive tenure of thousands of them and the admission of those who had missed the competition to the famous complementary list to alleviate the emergency, we are continuing the policy of dust under the carpet .
Crying over the inevitable regression of our education system is certainly a national sport that spares neither the right – judged by the powerful unions to be unfit to understand the problem – nor the conservative left of which it is deemed to be the preserve. But it is true that no one can understand that the most important budgetary item of the Republic gives such disappointing results, even if it would be incorrect to hide also the remarkable initiatives and individual successes obtained here and there.
Let’s not be afraid to say it, our schools are deserted by teachers. How to blame them? Formerly respected and admired, they are today, according to public opinion, the scapegoat for all evils. Admittedly, the conservatism of their representatives does them a disservice and they have, through certain behaviors, a real share of responsibility. But, with a salary that is too low, a lack of recognition and legitimacy, ever more degraded working conditions, everything is in place to kill vocations. In ten years, we have watched helplessly as the number of competitive exam candidates plummeted. And this abandonment is not a transitory phase. Our country faces a deeper evil. Because it is illusory to pretend to settle everything at the same time, I think that fixing as an anchor point for the reconstruction of the education system the fact of profoundly transforming the teaching profession would be a major asset.
The necessary transformation of the teaching profession
Three simple ideas. First, make the headteacher the initiator of this transformation. By giving him the power to recruit his teaching teams and to build with them a specific educational project, we would finally recognize that the population of an establishment has neither the same expectations nor the same needs depending on whether it is in a difficult neighborhood , in the city center or in a rural area. I saw it in Meaux: each time a director/principal/headmaster launched projects (while respecting the national framework), he worked miracles and left his mark on entire generations of pupils. Of course, the counterpart must be a systematic evaluation by the academy inspection. By the way, the example of Finland, the first country in the Pisa ranking and follower of this system, should wake us up!
Second simple idea: make the personalized management of teachers’ careers an obsession. Evaluation, remuneration, progression, protection must be the four key words. All the teachers with whom I have spoken for years do not understand why no one ever addresses them individually to simply support their careers, promote their results, encourage training and optimize the experience acquired. Finally, the feeling of loneliness and impunity in the face of the inadmissible attitude – I am thinking of the dramatic Islamist excesses of course, but also of the verbal and physical attacks of all kinds – of a parent or a pupil too often invites them to discouragement. It would however be so simple to put these principles in place rather than to promise them allusively without ever making them the essential axis of a transformation of the system. In my view, this approach should precede any curriculum reform, the meaning of which – as we have seen for history and then maths – is so difficult to understand and justify.
This is also the logic of my third idea: to reform the programs only according to a single criterion, the discovery and understanding of “professions” in the broadest and most open sense possible. Here again, it is an extremely rewarding challenge for teachers in that it gives a tremendous extra soul to the relationship with their students. Emmanuel Macron seemed to be aware of this at the Sorbonne on August 24. May he transform the essay.