How French immersion has created a two-tier education system
Ontario’s self-selecting program clusters high-achieving students in their own classrooms
WATERLOO REGION — What if Ontario school boards had a program that let parents steer top students to elite classrooms, relegating others to classrooms that struggle?
They do. It’s called French immersion and it’s a popular program with many problems.
If parents think immersion will make their child bilingual, that is not its stated goal.
“We don’t set out any kind of bilingual standard,” said Bill Lemon, a superintendent with the Waterloo Region District School Board.
By teaching more than 8,000 children in French for half the school day, the program strives more vaguely for students to “communicate effectively” when ordering food or navigating a French website.
Fluency is not objectively assessed until high school when most students have quit immersion.
What the program does do, is segregate children within shared schools and even on playgrounds, clustering higher-achieving students away from their needier, lower-performing schoolmates.
“They have to learn a different language. It puts them in a different category. It’s just an elite group, I guess,” said Kerri Gettliffe, whose children attend immersion in Grades 1 and 3.
“It’s not that they’re elite or superior to their English peers. Eventually, they could be more successful in business or a career that they chose, because
they do have the two languages.”
Yet Gettliffe is uncertain if her children will become bilingual. She studied in French immersion and although she can read French “I cannot have a French conversation. If you started talking French to me I’d panic.”
She worries about segregating her children but feels they are still embedded in their school. “It is easy to say that they’re going to be higher performers but they might not be,” she said.
One way to measure student performance between the programs is to compare classroom achievement. Ontario has standardized tests for this in Grade 3, but withholds French immersion results.
The province says this is because school boards administer the program differently. Some immersion students are tested in reading, writing and math. Some are tested only in math. Some write the math test in English, some in French.
Results “can therefore mean something different, depending on the board, which is why we do not release the results publicly,” a spokesperson for the Education Quality and Accountability Office said by email.
The Record filed a Freedom-of-Information request to obtain Grade 3 French immersion results. To compare results, we looked only at schools that had both streams and where students take all three tests.
Ontario does not distinguish French immersion results for Grade 6 testing or beyond, but disparities leap from the Grade 3 test results.
Results for the two most recent years were aggregated. This produced results for 248 schools at 33 Ontario boards for up to 18,674 immersion students and 14,763 non-immersion schoolmates.
In this region, immersion and non-immersion students are most often drawn from the same neighbourhoods, but their classrooms are far apart in learning.
More than three-quarters of local immersion students (78 per cent) meet provincial standards across reading, writing and math in Grade 3. That’s well above the Ontario rate of 70 per cent.
In non-immersion classrooms in the same schools barely half their schoolmates (52 per cent) meet provincial standards, well below the Ontario rate.
This is an achievement gap of 26 percentage points between immersion and non-immersion classrooms inside 34 elementary schools at the local public board.
Across Ontario it’s the same. Inside shared schools in cities such as Ottawa, Hamilton, Mississauga and Sudbury, French immersion students outperform their non-immersion schoolmates by 19 points on average across reading, writing and math in Grade 3.
There’s no local school where non-immersion students outperform their immersion schoolmates.
At local schools that don’t offer immersion, students achieve provincial standards 59 per cent of the time. That’s seven points higher than non-immersion peers inside immersion schools.
This points to a program that’s less about French and more about segregating children by academic ability.
“There’s definitely winners and losers,” said Sachin Maharaj, a PhD candidate in educational policy at the University of Toronto.
Students in immersion classrooms are winners. The losers: Schoolmates who stay out of immersion and are relegated to the board’s worst-performing classrooms.
According to data from the public school board, 21 per cent of non-immersion students need individual attention for their education needs compared to eight per cent of immersion students.
“It’s kind of like simulating an elite, private school type of experience within the public system,” Maharaj said.
“In French immersion classrooms, if you’re surrounded with a lot of high-achieving, motivated students, those things help all the students in the class collectively.
“In the non-immersion classrooms, you basically have the opposite effect. You have more problems with motivation, behaviour. You’ll have special needs students, people with behavioural problems, learning disabilities, and that has kind of a negative effect on the learning of everybody in the classroom.
“If everyone was distributed more evenly, there would probably be better learning outcomes on the whole,” Maharaj said.
Lemon argues French immersion is not elite because that’s not what the school board intends. The board promotes immersion as open to all based on parent demand.
“In terms of what the data revealed, I won’t argue with you. It’s compelling data,” said Lemon, the public board superintendent.
“But we need to unpack it. And then we need to respond to it. We’re not putting our head in the sand and saying that we’re going to ignore this information ... but we’re not going to advertise it as an elite program because we don’t believe that it is,” he said.
“We can’t simply say that we, through any kind of intentional act, moved our high-achieving students into one place and our students who are not achieving as well into another place,” said Lemon, who helped lead a board task force into French immersion that concluded in April.
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Demand for French immersion is rising, burdening Ontario boards with staffing and planning challenges. More than one in four students is now enrolled at the Grade 1 entry level at the local public board.
“I, too, am worried about elitism in the French immersion program,” public school board trustee Ted Martin said. He served on the immersion task force after his children attended French immersion.
If the board sought to end the popular program “I definitely believe that would be explosive,” he said.
“But at the same time I’m very concerned about what we may be creating here. It’s almost like a two-stream system, especially in those schools where it really is a two-stream system. We have two little schools within a single school, often.”
“As an individual it does concern me that French immersion might be a self-selecting, advanced program,” said trustee Scott McMillan, chair of the
public school board.
It’s a polarizing issue. Parents strongly opposed a proposal to kill French immersion at the Halton Catholic District School Board last fall. Outcry persuaded trustees to save it despite a study that deemed it unsustainable.
“What do we do with French immersion that we can keep offering it to people that want French immersion, but that we don’t do it in a way that negatively impacts others?” Martin said.
To mitigate impacts, educators have pondered ending French immersion, expanding immersion to all students, allowing multiple entry years into immersion, and setting up magnet schools for immersion students only.
They have pondered greater supports for nonimmersion classrooms.
A 2015 Ministry of Education report pondered how to better balance classrooms by bringing more children with special education needs into immersion.
Maharaj, studying educational policy, recommends teaching more French to all students in early years, but delaying entry into immersion until parents have had more time to assess the program and their child.
The Ministry of Education would not comment on the achievement gap within schools, saying it’s up to boards and parents to decide on French immersion,
an optional program.
Parent volunteer Laurie Tremble, whose children are not in French immersion, is surprised by test scores that support a longheld parent belief.
“Some parents have a belief that if they get their children into a French immersion program they’re getting a better education, partly because there’s not that distraction of a kid who has special needs in the class, or maybe because the teacher can focus more on providing a higher level of content,” said Tremble, who joined
the immersion task force.
It bothers parent Brent Hutzal, a volunteer on the task force without a child in French immersion, that some parents see the program as an enrichment program.
He’s puzzled by vague immersion goals that aren’t measured.
“Without having a clear set of goals or objectives of the program, we don’t really know if the program is being successful,” said Hutzal.