Contenu du sommaire : Ecole ségrégative, école reproductive

Social diversity at school is often invoked as an imperative in public debates, without however being translated into a public policy. In the French context, the almost total absence of institutional mechanisms meant to foster diversity sheds light on the dark side of the educational system: the gradual withdrawal of the state from the regulation of the migration of students between schools, which is the cause of an increased segregation. In recent years, social diversity has been used as the main argument in order to justify the suppression of the zoning system and the free choice of the school, thus exacerbating the dynamics of competition between schools and families. Similarly to what happens in urban policy, the rhetoric of social diversity seems to express generosity while it actually contributes to diffusing a discourse of commiseration about suburban schools and to imposing a neoliberal vision of the educational field.

The choices that parents make regarding schools are closely associated with educational segregation. On the basis of studies conducted in Rueil-Malmaison, Nanterre, Vincennes and Montreuil, this article analyzes the mental and practical operations that lead parents to construe some social groups as “different” from them. By relating this conception with argumentations, views and values regarding the schooling of their children, these operations are the main cause for the efforts to avoid specific schools. At the same time, the article explores similar operations that lead to construing other groups as “close” or “akin”, and to seeing them as social resources that, by providing judgments, information and practical means, facilitate the devising of strategies.

Besides the dispensations stipulated in the zoning provisions, parents sometimes write to local authorities in order to be granted the permission to send their children to a school located outside their zone. This qualitative research survey focusing on primary school is based on the combination of archives and interviews. It distinguishes between several kinds of letters that reflect among other things different perceptions of administration and politics. By analyzing how these requests are met, the article sheds light on their differential chances of obtaining satisfaction and on the uneven efficiency of these strategies targeting authorities.

This study assesses the impact of local public and private educational opportunities on real estate prices, in the context of public school zoning in Paris during the period 1997-2000. On the basis of real estate and educational data, it seeks to isolate the causal impact of public junior high school attractivity on the price of housing by comparing real estate transactions in the immediate vicinity of the borders between different schooling zones. Results indicate that the characteristics of public schools have a significant impact on real estate prices: depending on the indicators used, the increase in the standard variation of local school attractivity triggers an increase of prices per square meter ranging from 1.4 % to 2.4 %. Subsequently, it appears that the real estate premium going toward the most attractive public schools tends to disappear in the areas with many opportunities for private schooling. These results suggest that the readiness of parents to pay for an attractive public school diminishes as they have the opportunity to send their children to local private schools regulated by the state. More generally, they confir, the interdependence between residential and educational choices by showing that Parisian households take into account local educational opportunities, whether private or public, when they chose to buy an apartment.

The role of intermediary bureaucracies in generating educational segregation is a blind spot in the sociology of education. On the basis of an ethnographic study led in two educational districts, this article looks at the perceptive, cognitive and practical frames mobilized by educational administrators faced with educational segregation and thus delineates four typical positions: the technocratic state, the withdrawal of the state, the powerless state, and the commiserating state.

The analysis of social inequalities affecting access to knowledge and educational certifications can benefit from the addition of a spatial dimension: this is done by exploring the institutional conditions behind the current focus on differences between schools and observing the biases associated with this focus. A survey of socio-spatial inequalities in terms of educational attainment that combines statistical comparisons spanning all French junior high schools and field research in five districts (départements) shows significant variations in the differential attainments of different social groups. The increased inequalities and the knowledge acquisition deficits that one can observe in segregated urban environments are mostly seen as the collateral damage of an exacerbated hierarchization of the educational field: on the one hand, one witnesses a patent degradation of the schooling conditions in the stigmatized schools and classes where the most deprived students are confined. At the other end of the educational hierarchy, one sees more stringent requirements that destabilize those who are less prepared for this kind of testing. The variations in the differentials of educational attainment between different social groups can thus be matched with the interactions between contexts and mobilized resources.

The successive reforms of the French educational system and the ensuing massification of education have led to the emergence of a “democratized junior high school” in which trajectories vary essentially with the institutions. This process takes a concrete form with the social and ethnic specialization of junior high schools. This segregation transforms the entire range of mechanisms ensuring social reproduction at school. Its magnitude generates a segmentation of the educational offer that contributes to social reproduction, which takes two forms. First, the conditions for the reproduction of educational capital depend partly on the school itself, which tends to play the role previously played by the specialized curricula (filières). Social reproduction also takes place through social habituses, the preservation and reproduction of which has come to depend directly on schools. In this context, the reproduction of habituses partly escapes the control of the families and is ensured by the schools, which play a central role in the constitution of groups of peers, encounters and relationships between teenagers that are the very principle of the formation and reproduction of social habituses. In the end, this article suggests that school-mediated social reproduction is taking increasingly complex forms and shows the importance of peer groups in the process of teenage socialization. What is today at stake is the capacity of families to control this process, and one of the means by which this control, which is always relative, takes place is the choice of the schooling institution.

Several “grandes écoles” develop programs targeting inner city high schools in order to diversify their recruitment and, more generally, incentivize some students to reevaluate positively their educational ambitions. The impact of these programs cannot be reduced to their mere efficiency in terms of affirmative action. Indeed, the active presence of a grande école in stigmatized urban and educational environments transforms the way parents and students relate to schools by redefining their perception of meritocracy, inequalities and discriminations. By analyzing Sciences Po programs in four high schools of the Seine-Saint-Denis, this article intends to shed some light on the way an unprecedented educational offer is perceived, and on the tensions generated by the emergence of educational and social aspirations associated with an acute perception of inequalities.