France is justly proud of some aspects of its education system. At prestigious public sector high schools such as Henri IV, an ancient establishment in the centre of Paris, pupils emerge with rigorous, well-trained minds, thanks to a broad-based final exam, the baccalaureat. The country boasts five of the top 15 European business schools. Yet, although it caters well to the top end of the ability range, French education is miserably failing the bottom.
Each year 122,000 pupils — 17 percent of the total — leave school without high-school diplomas. Last year, the French army evaluated national levels of reading and comprehension during a compulsory day of military and civic service for 17-year-olds. It found one in ten attendees couldn’t understand basic French. Such difficulties are concentrated in the outer-city banlieues, where family support is minimal and schools tend to get the least experienced teachers. But even the average is dropping. According to PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), an international comparison of education standards run by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, French 15-year-olds’ standards of written comprehension and mathematics have fallen since 2000.
Early preschool and primary school work well in France. The weak link seems to be the first four years of secondary, known as college. This chunk of schooling, run with no selection for ability, “does not today guarantee the acquisition of basic knowledge”, in the words of the education ministry. This is why Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the Socialist government’s education minister, recently unveiled a plan to overhaul college, which she hopes will come into effect in September 2016.
The first proposal is to close specialist bilingual French-German classes and give much less emphasis to Latin and Greek. Vallaud-Belkacem says middle-class parents use the German-French classes, which cater to just 16 percent of pupils, as a proxy for selection to secure for their children an elite education. Critics, however, see a sacrifice of excellence on the altar of egalitarianism. Jack Lang, a Socialist former education minister, said he was “shocked” by the relegation of classics.
The real difficulty is that ideological differences are getting in the way of a proper debate on how to improve school results and ensure all pupils, including those in the peripheral banlieues, leave school with basic skills. Too many questions aren’t even on the table, such as poor levels of pay in the teaching profession, head teachers’ lack of freedom to recruit their own staff, and the difficulty they face getting rid of poor teachers. Greater autonomy ought to be part of the solution. But so far, it seems to be judged a problem.
(Excerpted and adapted from )