Announcements for education: Minister Attal chooses inequalities!

The Minister made these announcements today following the work of the “Knowledge Requirements” mission and the publication of the results of the PISA survey. While SUD education has taken measures with other union organizations to improve the public education service, promote student success and fight against inequalities, the Minister has on the contrary chosen not to listen to staff and to promote a vision outdated and above ground of the school.

The PISA survey shows that in mathematics and reading comprehension the number of low-performing students has increased and the number of high-performing students has, on the contrary, decreased. Likewise, the weight of social inequalities in student results remains high. Faced with these findings, it would have been necessary to take steps to democratize school and guarantee better study conditions for all students and especially for the most disadvantaged students, starting by reducing the number of students per class because France has the busiest classes among OECD countries.

On the contrary, Minister Attal chose profoundly unequal measures which studies show deeply penalize the working classes: repeating a year and implementing level groups in middle school in French and maths.

While the results of the advanced and support groups in sixth form are negative both at the educational level and in their effects on the organization of the colleges, the Minister persists in wrong answers: the level groups lower the average level and only benefit students who are already performing well. It thus opens the way to a questioning of the single college.

Attal thus continues the work of Jean-Michel Blanquer with Fundamental Knowledge by designing a two-speed school: that of reading-writing-counting and simple cognitive actions for students from working classes, those of complex activities, in-depth study for students from wealthy classes. The deployment of Artificial Intelligence tools in second grade is a measure that takes into account neither inequalities in digital access nor the necessary ecological reflection on new technologies.

In the first level, if we can hope that the renovation of the programs will make it possible to integrate learning objectives concerning in particular education in emotional and sexual life, the announced return to annual prescriptions goes against respect the pace of the students. The same desire for standardization of teaching is found in the announcement of labeling of school textbooks and centralized ordering of CP and CE1 textbooks for reading and mathematics. SUD education reiterates its attachment to educational freedom: it is the teachers who are best able to choose the method and tools adapted to their students.

Finally, Minister Attal chose to give in to pressure from the far right and reactionaries by returning to the calculation of continuous monitoring for the patent via grades and not via skills. For SUD education, this measure is only intended for communication.

SUD education denounces these measures which aim to recycle the methods of the past to respond to the problems of today’s schools. SUD education calls on staff to discuss now the construction of a massive mobilization for an egalitarian public education service.