At each start of the school year, it is a must for many teachers: submitting their students to national assessments. A device launched in 2018 to gauge the level in French and mathematics and which now concerns the classes of CP, Ce1, 6th and second. This year, an experiment is also launched to assess 15,000 CM1 and 25,000 4th graders, before this is generalized in 2023-2024.
But it is clear that teachers are still not convinced by this device. First on the merits, because they don’t find it useful. “We still do not know what these assessments are for. Are they an object of political communication or a working tool for teachers? “Asks Alexis Torchet, national secretary of Sgen-CFDT. According to Pap Ndiaye, they make it possible “to respond immediately to the difficulties encountered and to put in place an appropriate pedagogy”, he recalled during his back-to-school press conference. Without convincing everyone…
“They come way too early in the year”
The pedagogical interest of the device also raises questions for Eric Nicollet, general secretary of the SUI-FSU (Unitary union of the Pedagogical Inspection): “It does not bring anything because the teachers evaluate their pupils on a daily basis without them realize it. They know how to position them very well in the class”. Some teachers even find that they are “doubting their qualification and their educational freedom”, underlines the Snes in its Primer for the start of the 2022 school year.
On the form too, these evaluations irritate. “They arrive much too early and come to hit the first apprenticeships of September. However, it takes time for our students to adapt. For example, some CP students are not mentally in it, when they could very well pass these assessments during the year, ”underlines Guislaine David, secretary general and spokesperson for SNUipp-FSU. Although the content of the tests has been reviewed many times, their relevance is sometimes still called into question: “Some exercises are meaningless and reflect a mechanistic vision of learning. In French, for example, they overestimate deciphering skills but not text comprehension. And in maths, there aren’t a lot of problem-solving skills,” points out Guislaine David.
“It sometimes causes stress”
These tests are also considered to be particularly time-consuming: “In the first degree, it’s a huge job to pass them and enter the results by computer”, emphasizes Alexis Torchet. “This reduces the time devoted to learning, without meeting the needs of the students,” insists the Snes-FSU. Some children also seem to experience these evaluations badly, according to Eric Nicollet: “This sometimes generates stress. However, missing these evaluations is nothing serious. The children do not evolve at the same speed and certain unmastered skills can be caught up over the course of the year”.
If theoretically, the results must be communicated to the families, this is very often not the case. “Teachers want to preserve parents and not make these assessments a central event,” continues Guislaine David. Discretion approved by Eric Nicollet: “It is not relevant to communicate them to the families, because the interpretation of the results is the competence of the teachers, not that of the parents. »
A competition between establishments?
Last but not least, it is also the political use of these tests which is disturbing: “They are used by the ministry to communicate on the supposed effects of the reforms it is undertaking and on the possible progress of the pupils”, affirms Eric Nicollet. For her part, if Guislaine David recognizes the usefulness of certain evaluations in order to carry out specific surveys, as does the Department of Evaluation, Forecasting and Performance (Depp), she disputes the systematic nature of these tests. national: “Evaluations in the form of a panel [sur un échantillon d’élèves] are sufficient to help reflection on educational policies. There is no need for standardized national assessments that give the impression that students are being assessed all the time. »
According to some unions, their development since 2018 demonstrates the government’s desire to bring institutions into a culture of evaluation. This worries teachers. “They legitimately fear that the results will be scrutinized and that we will move towards a competition between establishments,” says Eric Nicollet. Guislaine David is already observing certain excesses. “The first manuals aimed at training students for assessments have been released. We enter a system of cramming. It’s a safe bet that we will soon see the holiday notebooks preparing for these tests flourish.