Originally designed to level out class differences, France's education system instead perpetuates them
Interesting article from Peter Gumbel, author of On Achève Bien Les Ecoliers, in this weeks Time.
Some highlights:
- while they have been good at producing a relatively small number of extremely bright students who go on to run the country — a vestige of the system's elitism that dates back to Napoleon — French schools are increasingly failing to cater to the much larger number of students who have less stellar abilities
- one-fifth of 11-year-olds finishing primary school still have serious difficulty with reading and writing. By the age of 16, almost as many — about 18% — leave school with no formal qualifications whatsoever
- In international comparative tests of 15-year-olds, France's overall scores are at best mediocre and have been dropping abruptly in the past decade. Even at the top end, the proportion of brightest kids is lower than it is in many other countries, especially Finland
- Increasingly it is a place where children from poor backgrounds do far worse than kids from better-off backgrounds. An analysis by McKinsey & Co. shows that the performance of French schoolkids can vary widely depending on their socioeconomic background: especially in math, race and class affect scores even more markedly than they do in the U.S., where the gulf between white, black and Hispanic students has been widely documented.
For the complete Time article see : France Scores an F in Education
Watch for our upcoming interview with Peter Gumbel on On Achève Bien les Ecoliers.
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