In Paris – academy certainly very particular -, it is all the fragile balance of the public school which is threatened. The latest developments can and should worry us all.
In 1959, on the pretext of accelerating school democratization, the State made a departure from the principle of secularism and decided to finance private schools under contract. Sixty years later, things have changed a lot. We no longer choose the private sector out of conviction but to flee a public school deemed increasingly failing. And the State now encourages this deleterious dynamic.
A third of the capital’s middle school students are educated in private colleges which capture good students everywhere and contribute to the disintegration of surrounding public colleges. This “segregation” is more or less obscured by increasingly meaningless indicators of success (assessment by skills and patent records).
In 2017, in order to fight for “living together“and against”self-reliance“(in the words of former minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem), the state imposed, in Paris, “experiments“of social diversity… only applying to public colleges! It was enough to cause discouraged families to flee to the private sector for the first time, especially since private school students were now allowed to participate in allocation to public high schools on an equal basis with public college students.
In 2021, the assignment procedure in public high schools was brutally reformed to give disadvantaged public secondary school students access to major Parisian public high schools… but at the same time opening up this privileged access to private secondary school students who had fled their sector college but thus outplaying public college students from other sectors.
To fight against “hyper competition and hyper selection“causing a” caricatural hierarchy” of the Parisian high schools (Jean-Michel Blanquer), the reform has, once again, concerned only the public Parisian high schools. The private high schools – more than a third of the high school students! – have not, in fact, been concerned, although they occupy the very top of the table in the annual rankings of high schools.
A curiously selective fight against elitism, therefore, unless it is a pretext to downgrade, with everyone’s consent, the public education service, including what is better, and thus promote one and only one elitism: that of the private sector.
Artificial indicators of success
And, in fact, when in 2022, the last two major public high schools capable of competing with the private sector in Paris – Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand – were ordered to join Affelnet and no longer choose their students, some were delighted of this blow to Republican elitism, without understanding that it thus favors a single elitism: that of the Fénelon-Sainte-Marie, the Francs-Bourgeois and the Stanislas, where Jean-Michel Blanquer was a pupil.
There weren’t that many: there will soon be no more good public high schools in Paris.
The artificial indicators of success (continuous assessment, record success in the baccalaureate) will not deceive the most informed public who know that the reality of academic success is preserved in the private sector, which will ensure their offspring access to the best training in the superior in the general selection of Parcoursup.
But the reform has another effect, perhaps even more serious.
Faced with increasingly meaningless algorithms, effort, hard work and perseverance are becoming useless academic virtues in public schools, much to the despair of teachers.
In short, instead of making the public school the place of possible academic success for all, it is in the name of a hypocritical fight against school elitism that we ensure in today’s school today a social reproduction more burdensome than ever.
These unspoken political choices aim to bring families – starting with those who still believed in public school – to this conclusion of infinite sadness: in Paris as elsewhere, the choice of public school will soon be the worst choice possible.
*Loys Bonod, classics teacher at Lycée Chaptal, Paris