Social mix, school mix: difficult to avoid the subject when discussing school. On the political scene, however, we manage to keep him at a distance: two months before the presidential deadline of April 10 and 24, the declared candidates have little grasp of the issue. Or in covert words, acting that he is ” simpler “ and electorally “more buoyant”as industry pundits say, to campaign on reading-writing-counting or restoring authority rather than tackling inequality.
Sensitive subject, therefore, and which has a liability. Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy committed himself for the right in the race for the Elysée, by doing the suppression of school card, at the entrance to college, one of its key measures. Facing him, Ségolène Royal also seized it, advocating her “relaxation” and creating a stir within the Socialist Party.
For the two candidates, it was then a question of giving more choice (in the absence of a free choice) to families. To those, in any case, in the middle and upper classes, for whom the school map, a Gaullist heritage of the 1960s, is an argument for voting. We know what followed under the Sarkozy five-year term (2007-2012): the change initiated – through a system of derogations – did not upset the school landscape. And successive surveys, beginning with those of the General Inspectorate in 2008 and the Court of Auditors in 2009, have highlighted a risk of ghettoization of the colleges already in the greatest difficulty.
“Not in my child’s college”
Three five years later, while living together and social cohesion are elevated to the rank of priorities for the nation, and the school is put on notice to contribute to it, the site of diversity still passes for the one of the thorniest. “Mingling audiences” according to the expression of the professors, to reparameterize an assignment algorithm, to redesign the recruitment pool of an establishment, to touch the composition of the classes, the sections or the options, it is inevitably to expose oneself to a flood of criticism.
Evidenced by the current bronca aroused by the change in the registration procedure at Louis-Le-Grand and Henri-IV, two Parisian high schools (out of a hundred in the capital) which derogated, until now, from the rules of assignment in the public, to select their students on file. As in private.
“The real question is to know who, in the country, today wants diversity, observes the sociologist Marie Duru-Bellat, co-author with François Dubet, among other works, of Can schools save democracy? (Threshold, 2020). The families to whom the mix serves the most, for their children, are also those who are the least heard, who are the furthest from the school system… and who travel the least to the polls. »
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