What are the specificities of social inequalities in educational success in France? A dual evolution to be clarified

Abstract

In France, during the last decades, the educational levels of pupils have continued to rise despite the difficulties and increased learning inequalities observed during compulsory education. This hiatus between changes in learning and student pathways is to be linked to new management methods of school organization. On the one hand, student flows have been more systematically channeled through structural transformations and instructions to school heads. On the other hand, student learning has given rise to an inflation of ambitious prescriptions addressed to teachers, without a consequent increase in the resources devoted to their training; and this contradiction intensified after 2005, in particular under the effect of an inclusive education policy which did not provide for its ambitions. This series of changes produced pedagogical dysfunctions and an intensification of segregation processes which further penalized students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. It is then a question of questioning the logic underlying the political options which have thus produced record-breaking educational inequalities in France in recent decades.