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The French immersion debate has been a long, winding road, so it can be easy to forget what started the journey in the first place.

The noise and fury of the months-long controversy will subside in the next few days. When that happens, we'll be left with the exact same starting point: how do we fix an education system that's broken?

Education Minister Kelly Lamrock believes the new system announced on Tuesday will help. His new plan moves early immersion from Grade 1 to Grade 3, while Grade 6 will remain the starting point for late immersion. There will also be "enhanced" French courses for those students not in immersion, a test in Grade 10 leading into the high school curriculum, and the ultimate goal of a student population that is 70 per cent bilingual.

Lamrock created this new plan after court-ordered public consultations forced the government to reconsider its original proposal. It's unfortunate that the justice system had to get involved at all, but now that a compromise has been reached the focus should be on measuring the successes and failures of the new system as often as possible.

The government's review came about because of serious concerns about New Brunswick's educational system, and nothing over the past eight months changes that. We need a better system with better literacy rates. We need options within the system to be equally accessible to everybody, including special needs students and people who live in rural areas. We need to avoid creating an elite stream of education for students from a certain economic class.

(Tangentially, the government must also deal head-on with the cultural divide that this debate revealed. Most of the pushback was along cultural lines, not academic ones.)

The entire program will undergo a review in 2015-2016, but that's not enough. Lamrock must be crystal clear about how the government intends to evaluate the system from the very beginning. What will be measured? What will the timetables be? If numbers aren't improving, what will be done?

For instance, moving early immersion from Grade 1 to Grade 3 is meant to improve the foundational literacy skills of New Brunswick's youngest students. The status of the very first group of students should be measured three years from now.

New Brunswickers shouldn't have to wait until 2016 to see if their children are getting the education they deserve. Schooling is a process that must be improved continually, not simply given course corrections every decade or so.

These discussions have been difficult. Reforms touched a nerve. But now that the changes are underway, we must all work hard for the same goal - a school system where New Brunswick's two distinct cultures are respected, and where students graduate well-prepared for a productive life in their home province.