Développer la qualité de l’école, mais prudemment : le difficile exercice d’équilibrisme des cadres d'une administration scolaire

Abstract

Quality development is an ambitious but necessary project for who runs an education system. While institutional texts claim to consider parents as partners, what place does the institution give them in such a process? An ethnographic study carried out within the school administration of the canton of Fribourg (Switzerland) shows the many pitfalls encountered by managers in implementing a quality policy: confronted on all sides, and first and foremost internally, with the diversity of views on what schools are and should be, managers proceed cautiously, seeking to allay the fears of professionals in the field, to convince rather than impose, in order to avoid resistance and conflicts that would call the process into question. Since the relationship between school and families is a major source of tension within the teaching profession, the involvement of parents in the quality development process was seen as one threat too many, and parents were kept out of the process. Beyond the issue of school-family partnership, it is the possibility for managers to lead a policy that is implemented by all schools that is questioned.