The proposals for candidate Macron’s school are already causing cringe in the teachers’ rooms. “Liberal”, “insulting”, “disconnected” are terms used in the various comments read here and there. In fact, there are many reasons for dissatisfaction. Conditioning salary increases on an increase in tasks and working time, liberalizing local recruitment by giving greater autonomy to schools and greater power to school heads, publicizing evaluations with families, are all casus belli for a suffering profession that feels devalued or even, rightly or wrongly, regularly despised.
The president’s choices seem clear. The Pisa surveys regularly remind us of the poor performance of the French school system, which continues to decline in international rankings, while confronting us with a reality that not only contradicts the current mantra of “equal opportunities” but also the promise of the republican school, namely the possibility of emancipation and social ascent offered to every child in France. It is in fact the children of the working classes who are today the first victims of a school system in distress, because the various studies show that the best pupils, very largely from the upper social classes, are maintained, when the school results of the poor children literally dive. This situation is aggravated by ghettoization and the lack of social diversity. Clearing up the horizons of this youth is imperative if the Republic wants to maintain credibility with these young people and their families. We are here faced with a fundamental question of trust, social justice and national cohesion.
On the other hand, the president-candidate seems to be making a strategic choice. Rather than spare the teaching world, whose concerns he knows not only about possible structural changes but also that he is not necessarily favorable to him, he turns to the families and public opinion for whom the poor results, educational as well as social aspects of school today place any political leader before the need to act and reform. But the reform must take place in the most peaceful climate possible.
Different statuses within the profession
This is where the challenge lies when the salary of teachers at the start of their career has dropped in forty years, going from 2.3 times the Smic in 1980 to 1.2 times in 2020. The “substantial” salary increase “announced by the president will be conditional on the signing of a contract increasing the working time, creating de facto, at equal level of competition, different statuses within the profession, between those who will refuse, those who will sign and the new entrants for whom the new tasks integrated into the contract will then be statutory. Among these, the systematic replacement of absent teachers which clashes with the trade union discourse calling for revaluation and job creation, as well as personalized follow-up of pupils, homework help or closer links with extracurricular activities which are so many missions that do not fall, statutorily, today, teachers.
What is comparable to a real rupture, corroborated among other things by the possibility of recruitment on profile posts given to the heads of establishments, can only provoke the ire of the teaching organizations very attached to the status but also to the principles of equality. processing and recruitment.
Then the balancing act will not be easy to hold because it is necessary to take into account the unease teacher just as it is absolutely necessary to offer prospects of social and geographical evolution to the youth. If we spend large sums for the best students who populate the preparatory classes for the Grandes Ecoles, we must also worry about children from working-class backgrounds and it is illusory to believe that the question of the only means would be the miracle recipe. Systemic changes seem to be inevitable today but they will not happen without the support of teachers, at the risk of rendering them ineffective because only a teacher who is happy and recognized in his profession is a good teacher.