The Stranglehold on French Schools

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/opinion/the-stranglehold-on-french-schools.html

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PARIS — Every country has its back-to-school rituals. In France for the past few years, la rentrée — the return to classrooms after the two-month summer break — has been accompanied by teacher strikes.

Last year, one in four teachers didn’t show up for work on some September days to protest against changes in the school timetable. The year before, some struck because of losing a day’s vacation. This year, the largest teachers’ union has called for a daylong strike next Thursday and a mass rally in October to voice discontent with the government’s plans to alter the middle school curriculum. Among other things, there will be fewer possibilities to teach Latin and German, and a new emphasis on interdisciplinary studies.

It is easy to accuse the teachers, as some do, of blocking any attempts to improve the system. It’s also easy to understand why teachers are fed up. They are poorly paid by European standards. They operate within a stifling, highly centralized hierarchy that micromanages their every move. And for more than a decade, they have borne the brunt of constant but minor reform attempts that have singularly failed to address the two critical issues facing the French public school system: the rapid decline in the academic performance of pupils, and the growing social inequality in the education system.

Today, one in four pupils in France fails to complete his or her secondary education, according to the national statistics office Insee. In the international PISA studies that measure the performance of 15-year-olds around the world in mathematics, science and reading comprehension, the average French score is at best mediocre, and the number who perform poorly has risen sharply since the first test in 2000. Even the top performers are less numerous as a percentage of the student body than in other European countries including Germany, Poland and Belgium. For a nation that long believed in the intellectual excellence of its school system, that’s painful.

There’s worse to come. School is supposed to be a critical enabler of social mobility. The word “égalité” is inscribed on almost every school in France and you won’t find the strata of super-expensive private institutions for the affluent that exist in the United States or Britain; most of the best French schools are public and free.

Yet according to PISA, France now has one of the most inegalitarian school systems in the world, on a par with Bulgaria, Chile and Peru. The gap in performance between children of well-off parents and poor ones is today greater in France than anywhere else in Western Europe or the United States, where the inequalities of the education system have preoccupied policy makers for four decades.

What has gone so wrong? That question is part of an increasingly polemical political debate — which itself is part of the problem. There is no consensus on the causes of the schools’ crisis, or on the possible solutions. On taking office, successive governments upend the education policies of their predecessors. In 2008, under President Nicolas Sarkozy, the government changed the school hours; in 2013, under President François Hollande, they were changed back. In 2009, teacher-training colleges were shut down; four years later, they were reopened. The job of education minister has become a political ejector seat: Average tenure is less than two years.

I believe one of the main problems is the sheer enormity and heavy-handedness of the system. With more than one million personnel, it overtook the Russian armed forces in size in 2010 to become the second-largest organization in Europe. (Only Britain’s National Health Service is bigger.)

But school works best as a local affair. Teachers and principals on the front lines know better what serves the needs of their pupils than ministry officials in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. Yet under the French system, schools are tightly controlled and given no leeway. They are not viewed as stand-alone entities allowed to make their own choices. Principals have no authority over the teachers, and don’t form a team. They can’t offer Latin or German classes as they want. They can’t even select new teachers: All personnel decisions are decided by the central authorities, based on seniority. Teachers’ unions and ministry officials are both adamant about keeping it that way.

This stranglehold is untenable. The situation has now deteriorated to such an extent that the system is starting to fragment. I spent a year traveling around France visiting schools that are trying to do things differently. Demand from parents for “alternative” schools is growing; according to one poll, 55 percent of parents would take their children out of the state system if they could.

This mixture of parental demand and teacher frustration are giving rise to all sorts of interesting experiments. About 50 new private schools per year are currently opening. Montessori ones are very much in fashion, especially bilingual ones. Homeschooling is starting to gain traction; it’s still tiny — with just over 5,000 families doing it — but growing fast, up by 70 percent in five years. An embryonic charter school movement with conservative Catholic roots recently opened two schools in run-down areas outside Paris and Marseille that are attracting a large number of Muslim families. School uniforms are compulsory and grace is said before lunch.

The most surprising experiments are taking place within the decaying public system, especially in the worst schools in the toughest areas. Groups of highly motivated teachers, seeing that the prescribed curriculum and methods simply don’t work, are taking matters into their own hands, and convincing local education officials to grant them exemptions from the rules.

A small network of so-called “micro-lycées” that help school dropouts get back on track and take their baccalaureate has sprung up. The results are spectacular: kids written off as complete failures suddenly end up with commendations and are going on to university. I also spent time in a suburb of Lille in a primary school that was threatened with closure 15 years ago because it was failing so badly. Today, its results are above the national average.

These breakaway movements are still few and far between. But the system could and should learn from them. The key to solving France’s education crisis is to empower teachers and give schools far more autonomy. Let them teach Latin if they want. When teachers are motivated and work together for the good of their pupils, it makes all the difference. Who knows, one day it might even put an end to those back-to-school strikes.

Peter Gumbel is a Paris-based author and journalist. His latest book, “Ces écoles pas comme les autres,” appears in English as “French School Without Tears.”