School market and the democratization of education: one step forward, two steps back. The case of the Canadian Province of Quebec

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to show that since the 1980s, educational inequalities in Quebec have gradually been reconfigured through the school market. The results obtained from a sample (N = 24,085) of a cohort of students who entered their first year of secondary school in 2002–2003 and who were observed for up to ten years (2012–2013) show that the influence of social origin on educational inequalities operates in large part via mediation of the type of institution attended. The results indicate that enrollment in selective schools, whether public or private, is closely associated to the social characteristics of the students: socioeconomic and ethnocultural origin, gender and mother tongue. In addition, there is a strong association between attendance at these same institutions, access to higher education and graduation. We conclude that the persistence of the reproduction of social inequalities in education is the result of the interactive and combined effects of social power relations related to class and ethnicity, and the current organization of public policies in education. This reveals a paradox as school markets have been promoted by public policies in the name of strengthening democratization and improving the quality of education.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational inequalities
• school market
• educational policies
• social inequalities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The Quiet Revolution was a period of intense socio-political and socio-cultural change in Quebec in 1960s, characterized by the effective secularization of government and the creation of a government-run welfare state. The main change was the decision of the provincial government to take more direct control over the fields of health care and education, which had previously been under the control of the Roman Catholic Church.

2 For Anglophones, McGill and Bishop's universities, and Sir George Williams University and Loyola College, which fused in 1974 to become Concordia University; for Francophones, Laval University, University of Montreal and University of Sherbrooke.

3 The link between private versus public school attendance and competition must be qualified. However, there are also distinctions that must be highlighted in the unique linguistic context of Quebec concerning students from non-Canadian English-speaking backgrounds who did not study in English in Canada. Following the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1984 amending Bill 101 with respect to accessibility to English-language elementary and secondary schools, the Charter of the French language does not grant access to English-language education in the youth sector to students whose parents did not complete their primary and secondary education in English in Canada (Woehrling, 2008). By law, the only students who are eligible to attend an English public language school are: (1) Children whose father or mother is a Canadian citizen and received primary education in English in Canada, provided that this education constituted the major part of their primary education received in Canada; and (2) Children whose father or mother is a Canadian citizen and who have received or are receiving primary or secondary education in English in Canada, as well as their brothers and sisters, provided that this education has constituted the major part of their primary or secondary education in Canada (Vieux-Fort, 2018, p. 17). Faced with this barrier enforced by Bill 101, English-speaking parents of non-Canadian origin who have the means opt to enroll their children in private schools not subsidized by the Quebec government.

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Pierre Canisius Kamanzi

Pierre Canisius Kamanzi is Associate Professor at the University of Montreal (Province of Quebec, Canada), Faculty of Education. His research concerns economics and sociology of education. His main research topics are education policies analysis, educational trajectories and social inequalities.