Agnès van Zanten

Choosing the Local School: Middle Class Parents' Values and Social and Ethnic Mix in London and Paris.

This paper analyses a specific kind of choice, choice of the local school, by a specific middle class group, characterized by its high cultural capital, its ‘caring’ perspective and liberal political orientation, in two cosmopolitan, ‘mixed’ settings, London and Paris, with a focus on values and how ethical dilemmas raised by confrontation with the social and ethnic mix in schools are solved. It draws upon a small‐scale comparative study of urban middle class parents conducted in 2004–2005 at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris in collaboration with the London Institute of Education. Using the same open‐ended schedule, 28 interviews were carried out in one London locality and 38 in a similar locality in the Parisian periphery (plus 12 others in a nearby private school). Its main purpose was to use a cross‐Channel comparison to test and enrich a comprehensive model of school choice that tries to take into account the complex interaction between policies, strategies, contexts, resources and values.

New Modes of Reproducing Social Inequality in Education: The Changing Role of Parents, Teachers, Schools and Educational Policies.

This article is based on the Keynote Address to the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), Crete, Greece, 21–25 September 2004. One of the most consistent results in sociology of education research has been the existence of inequalities in school results and educational trajectories related to social factors. Despite an important increase in number of years of schooling for all children in most European countries in the post-war period, research still shows important differences between social and ethnic groups and even a widening of the gap between the most advantaged and most disadvantaged in some countries. Factors shown by previous studies to account for these differences are still at work, but many of them are influential in new ways. In addition to this, new factors have to be taken into account. Using available sociological literature on European countries, while focusing specifically on France as an exemplary case, this article presents some of the new constraints on and opportunities for action by parents, teachers and schools that result from both economic, cultural and educational changes and recent policy orientations.

Educational change and new cleavages between head teachers, teachers and parents: global and local perspectives on the French case

This article combines a global, national and local perspective to study the effects if educational changes over the last 20 years on the relationship between head teachers, teachers and parents in France. Five kinds of transformations - decentralization, marketization, accountability, managerialism and professionalization - are examined in terms of their impact on definitions of the social and professional identities of educational agents and on the redistribution of power among them. The first section of the paper examines main shifts in policy and practice that these transformations were designed to produce from the perspective of policy-makers. The second section analyses the interaction between these global discourses and transformations of French educational models and realities at the level of the nation state. The third section shows how reform projects interact in very different ways with school realities in two contrasting local settings.

Bourdieu as education policy analyst and expert: a rich but ambiguous legacy

This article focuses on Bourdieu’s contribution to the analysis and transformation of the field of education. It shows that, when closely examined, Bourdieu’s writings on education reveal not only one but at least three competitive or complementary policy theories. There is a common principle to all of them, that is the invisibility of policy, which is embedded in the cognitive classifications and everyday activity of institutions. Nevertheless, while the first theory is strongly deterministic, the other two leave some room for political and pedagogical action. This article also shows that Bourdieu has exerted an important influence, both directly and indirectly, on collective representations and collective dynamics of educational politics and policy in France. This influence has lasted despite the extremely varied positions he took throughout his life and work on the relation between science and politics from strong reluctance to commit himself at the beginning of his career to academic radicalism at the end.

School choice: a European perspective

It has long been the case for the North American middle classes that where you live is largely determined by whether you can afford to choose where to school your children. Only the most affluent will live in downtown Manhattan or Chicago’s Gold Coast because they know that implies educating children at an elite private school. Thus the natural habitat for the American middle class family is the suburbs where, crudely speaking, how much tax you are prepared to pay determines the quality of the public (state) schools. Unsurprisingly, many middle class parents then move once their children are through the education system to somewhere where the taxes are lower (because they don’t have to support a high quality educational infrastructure) and to escape the ‘soccer mom’ syndrome. Largely where you live tends to determine the kind of education you get, but where you live also determines how much you pay for that education. The trade off has been quite clear. In Europe, to varying degrees, it has also been the case that where you live will determine the quality of your children’s educational experience. However, for the most part local taxes are determined by the quality and size of your individual dwelling rather than the variable quality of the local education service, which is mostly funded out of general (direct) taxation. Even private schooling in many countries (such as France, Spain and Denmark) is largely funded from the public purse, further blunting the divide so sharp in North America and the UK. What determines a ‘good school’ in Europe is also rather more complex, for several other reasons: the existence in many countries of a national curriculum and a more homogeneous teaching force, as well as less social and ethnic segregation between schools. Nevertheless, both because of the increasing importance of educational qualifications and of the urban social and ethnic mix, parents’ decisions are increasingly based on the link they establish between school results and the number and proportion of pupils from advantaged social backgrounds in the school. To a greater or lesser extent this has encouraged ‘game playing’ by parents ambitious for their children but either unable or unwilling

School competition and pupil flight in the urban periphery

In France, the existence of competition among schools and pupil flight from local public schools is not easily acknowledged because it calls into question established ideals concerning equality of opportunity and social integration through schooling. However, research on schools on the urban periphery shows that these phenomena are now quite common and reveal important changes in the functioning of schools and in perspectives and actual choices of parents. Faced with pupil flight to more prestigious public or private schools, local collèges create ‘good classes’, reinforce security and discipline and try to strengthen links with feeder schools to improve their image among parents. Parents, however, who are in search of guarantees of the existance of a good leaning environnement, have major doubts about the relevant criteria to judge school quality. Moreover, they differ strongly not only in the will to choose but in the ability to do so. The end result of these transformations in attitudes and behaviors is an increase in school segregation that can only be limited if important measures are taken to homogenize public school provision.

Elite education and the State in France: durable ties and new challenges

Employing a Weberian understanding of the centrality of a strong bureaucracy in the modern nation-state, this article examines the relationship between the state and elite education in France. Through a historical analysis and an examination of two current issues facing education – widening participation and pressures to internationalise – we illustrate how the legitimacy of the administrative and political establishments, as well as the status granted to elite education tracks, has been largely preserved. Furthermore, dominant social classes have actively played a role in this alliance, thereby limiting the circle of eligible individuals who can aspire to future elite positions.

School Differentiation and Segregation in the Parisian Periphery: An Analysis of Urban Schools' Logics of Action and their Effects

This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive view of the functioning of urban schools in the Parisian urban periphery with two main purposes. The first is to argue on a theoretical and empirical basis that, in order to understand urban schools and urban educational systems, it is necessary to take into account both external and internal factors and, especially, schools’ interactions with their social and institutional environment. The second is to analyze the two-way relationship between the logic of action of each school, that is, its leading orientation as it can be reconstructed from the analysis of discourses and practices, and academic, social and ethnic segregation of pupils. In order to do that, I use empirical material collected in a large study of the Parisian periphery, covering three different research projects; on the interaction between urban and school segregation, on competition between schools and on parental choice of schools. This study was conducted in four different urban areas (two predominantly white and middle class and two socially and ethnically mixed) and 25 secondary middle schools (22 state and 3 private). The first section of the chapter presents a general model for analyzing urban schools, which examines the interplay between policies, local dynamics, and the perspectives of educational professionals in schools. The second section discusses in some detail six ideal types of logics of action representing different responses to different constraints and opportunities resulting from policies, environmental factors, or internal dynamics. The final section of the paper is concerned with the interactive relationship between schools’ logics of action and segregation.

'Plus ca change...'? Changes and continuities in education policy in France

How do educational systems change? If one conceives of educational policy as a process of vernacular globalization, it is important to analyse not just the formal statement of aims and procedures by state agents but also the complex interaction between local, national and transnational levels of policy-making and reinterpretation (Ball 1990, Ball and van Zanten 1999). The study of the transnational level is particularly important at the present moment because the globalization of economic systems, the political pressures towards homogenization from transnational agencies such as the EEC or the OECD, and the development of communication networks has considerably reduced the capacity of individual nation states to develop independent policies while increasing policy borrowing, both overt and covert, between countries (Ball 1998). Although this question is not examined at length in this issue, the reader familiar with educational changes in England and other countries will easily perceive a f̀amily resemblance’ between them and many recent trends in French education such as decentralization, school autonomy or the penetration of a market ideology. This view is nevertheless partially misleading. In its radical version it denies any kind of autonomy to educational systems, ignoring the influence of national cultural models. On the contrary, we believe that educational systems with a long historical tradition, such as the French system, have a strong capacity to resist external pressures (van Zanten 1997). Even if the French model of the educator state that Claude LelieÁ vre presents in this issue is undergoing profound transformations as the result of hybridization with other models and internal criticism, its value system and organizational structure still play a central role in educational debates and concrete educational choices.

Cultura da rua ou cultura da escola

Este artigo objetiva estudar a construcao de atitudes e praticas desviantes de adolescentes de origem francesa ou imigrantes. Os dados da pesquisa foram obtidos em uma pesquisa de campo que incluiu observacoes e entrevistas realizadas ao longo de dois anos numa escola da periferia parisiense, A hipotese central e a de que os adolescentes dos bairros perifericos, ao ingressarem no ensino medio, ja estao predispostos a cultura da escola ou a cultura da rua, cujas predisposicoes foram estruturadas na familia, na comunidade ou nas escolas primarias. Assim, e nos colegios, em interacao com processos especificamente escolares, que se desenvolvem condutas desviantes em alguns deles. Este texto evoca, primeiramente e de maneira geral, como os jovens percebem as interpelacoes e diferencas entre o colegio e o bairro, para em seguida voltar a atencao para tres dimensoes da sociabilidade adolescente que expressam as tensoes entre a rua e a escola: as amizades juvenis, a sociabilidade em sala de aula e as relacoes interetnicas. A conclusao ressalta o peso que os processos de segregacao tem para a perda da capacidade integrativa da escola, quer se tratem dos processos que ocorrrem nos estabelecimentos com um todo, quer sejam os que tomam lugar nas salas de aula.