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The Commission scolaire de Montréal, Quebec’s largest school commission with more than 100,000 pupils and 8,000 teachers, is launching a wide-ranging, five-year campaign to improve the scholarly performance of its students, using means reaching beyond the classroom.
Improving French
The CSDM’s “Plan Réussir,” which CSDM personnel spent considerable time researching and finalizing before announcing it to the media recently, sets out goals the school board wants to achieve in order to improve the academic results of its students, while also striving to curb an escalating school dropout rate. For the next five years, the CSDM will be placing special emphasis on improving the teaching of the French language, and devoting more academic attention to students with learning difficulties.
“Our plan is an exercise in converging everybody’s efforts and our goals are meant to be achieved without compromise,” CSDM chairwoman Diane de Courcy said during a press conference held at the board’s Sherbrooke Street East headquarters. The plan calls for all the CSDM’s schools to map out smaller versions of their own of the “Plan Réussir.” Each school’s results will be made public at the end of each academic year, starting with 2010-2011. Analysts with the school board noted a correlation between inadequate French language reading and writing skills and poor academic performance. Students who don’t read or write French are less likely to have good marks in other subjects.
Action needed
To counter this trend, which the board maintains may be at the root of the dropout problem, the CSDM is requesting that all its schools make the teaching of French their number one priority at the primary, high school and adult learning levels. “We must take action so that all students can read at six years, read and write well at 12, and read and write perfectly at 16,” the board says in a statement. The board also plans to launch a program to inform students of the value of the written word, while improving its libraries and using various pedagogical methods to spot reading and writing problems early in young pupils. However, the CSDM notes that the latter measures will only be implemented when funding for them “is accorded by the government of Quebec.”
In real terms, the CSDM is aiming to achieve an overall student average at the grade school level of 80 per cent in reading and writing French in the next five years. The current rate is 74 per cent for reading and 75 per cent for writing. At the secondary level, the board’s five-year goal has been set at 70 per cent. The current average in high school for reading is 59.9 per cent and 60.5 per cent for writing. The board is aiming for an 80 per cent end-of-year success rate in writing at the Secondary 5 level (it is currently 74.7 per cent), and an 85 per cent success rate in reading (currently 83.9 per cent). In the adult learning sector, the CSDM also wants to accord more importance to the teaching of French.
A goal of 70 per cent
The board wants to raise the graduation rate of students with seven years instruction from the current 55.9 per cent to 70 per cent. In the same five-year time period, they also want to reduce the number of dropouts by 20 per cent. The CSDM plans to spend $6.6 million on the plan. “If we wish to increase the rate at which diplomas are granted, we must know and follow very closely each student who has specific needs,” de Courcy said. “That is why we judge that individual followup of each student at risk is a solution that is more than appropriate.” De Courcy said the CSDM will also be following the linguistic progress of allophone students more closely, especially those in classes for recently arrived immigrants.