Schooling in France: From Organizational to Informal Inequality

This article presents a broad historical perspective on inequality in French primary and secondary public schooling (from age 6 to 18), with emphasis on policy debates and institutional consequences of public policy. During the Third and Fourth Republics (1870–1959), schooling was provided in three gender-segregated tracks for different social classes. Under the Fifth Republic (since 1960), educational tracks after age 16 have been coeducational and ostensibly indifferent to social class origin, focusing instead on previous academic achievement and students’ prospects for higher education or for jobs. Recent changes have seen a massive expansion in schooling, and have sought but failed to produce greater social class equality. I argue that recent attempts to mitigate inequality have failed because success in school depends on the cultural and educational background of students’ parents and also because upper- middle-class parents use various means—economic means and ability to capitalize on social connections—to enable their children to go to the best schools.