Less than two months before the presidential election, we hear little about school from the candidates. Right, left: Everyone recites their classics without much imagination, and no proposal breaks the sound barrier. However, education, the first state budget, the foundation of the nation, is a social issue at the forefront of the French. Because, they know, the school creates, from infancy, the future of their children, correcting or perpetuating the inequalities of fate.
10,000 French think the school is in decline
And they worry about the deterioration of the education system. In our survey of 10,000 French people conducted last summer with Harris Interactive*, nearly half of them believe that France is “in decline”, the main cause being “the lowering of students’ educational attainment”. For 62% of respondents, “investing more in education and training” is a priority, well above “increasing purchasing power” (54% of respondents) and “better controlling immigration” (53%).
A care that fits the challenge. Education plays a more central role than ever in educating the workers of tomorrow. “We have entered the knowledge economy and the education level of the largest number, not just the elites, is crucial if France is to maintain its position in global competition,” the president of Medef Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux analyzed at the summer university. of the employers’ movement, at the end of August.
Also read: Education: the great displeasure of math teachers
The school also has a mission, more sensitive than ever, to instruct enlightened citizens. “Research shows that the abstinence rate of French people aged 18 to 25 during elections is related to their French and math skills,” said Nathalie Mons, a sociologist specializing in education policy, in Télérama in 2017.
Broken education system
But France no longer knows – or badly – how to educate its children. Proof of this is the latest delivery, in 2018, of the Pisa tests conducted every four years by the OECD in 79 countries among 15-year-old students since 2003: Jules Ferry’s home country, in constant decline, only achieves the average, at least past 20th grade. Behind Japan, Korea, Canada, Finland, Poland, United Kingdom, Germany.
Mediocre for the country of the Enlightenment, seventh world power. Worse still, the only ranking where France makes the Top 10… is that of educational inequalities, one of the countries where social origin most determines the performance of its schoolchildren, such as Bulgaria or Peru. Unworthy of a republic that has its motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” written on the pediment of its schools.
This poor performance at age 15 actually stems from shortcomings accumulated long ago. The international Pirls study shows that the reading skills of 10-year-old French children have steadily declined over 15 years (from 2000 to 2016), while those of their peers from other developed countries have improved. And in mathematics it is disastrous: in the Timms survey (2019), our level has dropped so much in 12 years that we have become the suckers of Europe. A humiliation for the homeland of Molière and Poincaré. The decline is spectacular.
Strong social segregation
In 2017, only 1% of CM2 math students reached the threshold that allowed them to be in the top 10% 30 years earlier. In 2019, only one in five schoolchildren at the end of primary school will be able to reuse the notions of mathematics from the classroom in everyday situations. Not better in French: Nearly half of sixth-grade students struggle to read fluently.
The causes of this collapse are multiple, cumulative, and the school cannot be blamed alone. For example, the OECD points out that France is one of the countries with the strongest social segregation, with its ghetto suburbs where poor immigrant populations are concentrated. Casualization of employment, proliferation of single parents: difficult family situations, also heavily mortgaged educational pathways. And some, like neuroscientist Michel Desmurget, accuse the spread of screens, which monopolize ever younger children, “produce digital idiots.”
“No fatality”
However, these factors do not explain why France is so lagging behind countries similar to us, such as the United Kingdom, and why it fails to recover when others, faced with a similar “Pisa shock”, raise the bar. have been able to lay, such as Germany, Poland, Portugal. “There is no fatality,” emphasizes Stanislas Dehaene, neuropsychologist at the head of the Scientific Council for National Education, responsible for advising the ministry. And foreign experiences such as scientific research show us the way: we need a mobilization that is targeted on young children and underprivileged families. This is where efforts are most productive.”
In fact, neuroscientific studies reveal that while we can naturally learn throughout our lives, it’s in early childhood, when the brain is configured, that we learn fastest and best. Inequality thus crystallizes out at a very young age. At the age of four, a child from a disadvantaged background has heard 30 million fewer words than a child from a disadvantaged background. For those who are on the wrong side of the fence, having arrived at university, it is already too late. We know that 80% of early school leavers, who drop out of school without a diploma (100,000 in 2019), already ran into problems in CP.
Also read: Selecting teachers: why Macron is right
Fewer students per class
Education experts are therefore unanimous: we must put the package with the small classes. Kindergarten to consolidate language, the key to all other learning. Primarily to master the basics: reading, writing, counting. The exact opposite of what France has done, which, while investing massively in its education (5.3% of its GDP, or 122 billion euros, at the top of the OECD average), has also long neglected the primary cycle and preferred the secondary, high school betting. During François Hollande’s five-year term, priorities were reversed.
And Emmanuel Macron, who campaigned in 2017 on the theme of the fight against inequality of opportunity, convinced that it “must be tackled at the root”, accelerated the move. The Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, has made primary school “the mother of all struggles”. The flagship measure is the doubling of CP, CE1, and large kindergartens in schools in priority education zones.
Maximum 24 students per class
Since 2019, the government has also committed to limit the number of staff to 24 in all classes for these three “critical” levels. The effort is real: between 2013 and 2021, the spending gap per pupil in pre-primary and primary schools has narrowed from -15% to -9% compared to the OECD average. “It was time! Greetings Eric Charbonnier, education analyst at the international institution. But that only slightly makes up for the enormous delay.”
Encouragingly, however, the results of the duplication are a bit disappointing. It will take time to reap the effects, also delayed by the lockdowns caused by Covid, even if the minister insisted on keeping schools open as much as possible. “To realize its full potential, duplication has not been sufficiently accompanied by educational innovations, Eric Charbonnier laments. To succeed, teachers must follow suit, it is necessary to modernize and upgrade their profession.” Even if the ministry has stepped up training a bit and dropped a few bonuses, the profession, which is very poorly paid and relegated, no longer attracts the best talent.
Early childhood, the blind spot
As a result, the Court of Auditors continued to make a serious diagnosis of the school last December, pointing out that despite the increase in resources, the assessments of pupils’ performance have not shown significant progress. Perhaps because the effort also has to be made higher on the age scale? Because if there is one area where France has not caught up, it is the care of toddlers, from 0 to 3 years.
However, according to the US Nobel Prize in economics James Heckman, “intensive investment in preschool programs before the age of 3 and support for young parents is the most profitable”. In the foreground twenty years ago, France has since been largely left behind. In particular, and this is no coincidence, because of these Asian countries (Japan, Korea) or Scandinavian countries (Finland, Sweden) that shine in the Pisa tests.
Lack of nurseries
There is a serious shortage of places in crèches and they are not open to low-income families whose children would nevertheless benefit most from community care. Emmanuel Macron, sensitized on the subject by Boris Cyrulnik, placed the media neuropsychiatrist at the head of the Commission for the First 1000 Days of Child Development, which submitted its report in September 2020.
But not much has happened since then, as the head of state acknowledged in a January 6 speech, indicating that early childhood policies remained an “ambition to be built”… For a second term Notice to presidential candidates seeking for ideas: investing in the success of children aged 0 to 12 is the most effective lever to improve the future of France in thirty years.
*Harris Interactive for Challenges survey of 10,000 people in July 2021.