3-2 – How will the decrees be applied by the social actors concerned ? 3-2-1 – In the education system
4 –THE LACK OF MEMORY IN THE SYSTEM AND OF CONTINUITY IN POLICIES
France, a Latin country, has inherited the Roman tradition of written legislation, which it tends to overuse. As we saw with respect to secular matters, the law may clarify a confusing situation and impose rules that reduce conflict, like the law regarding the Islamic head-scarf, for example (ToR 4, 1). However, the law cannot be a substitute for adaptation and regulations concerning everyday practices. Law-makers could draw lessons from these. Information feedback to the ministry, which continues to centralise decisions, is poorly managed. Not enough time is given to assessing the effects of the reforms introduced before new ones are created. Due to lack of evaluation and information feedback to the deciders, there tends to be an accumulation of specific measures and a lack of resources to support those which could provide the most effective solutions. The shortcomings in the national education system combine with overlapping problems in other areas.
Thus, as we saw, the ANRU (Agence nationale pour la rénovation urbaine : National agency for social renovation) assessment committee produced a report denouncing the inadequacy of the financial resources for the urban renovation plan, which the nonetheless considerable contributions from the local authorities cannot make up (Bronner, 2008-1). Already, social players and researchers alike are highly concerned by an increasingly likely social explosion. Yazid Sabeg, President of the ANRU, called the government’s policy in difficult neighbourhoods a “succession of avatars.” The State’s disengagement affects the whole social fabric, not only in the housing sector but “access to transport, educative, and the redistribution of wealth between local authorities (…). The resulting social meltdown constitutes a real public order problem. In this respect, we have failed to draw lessons from the riots of 2005. Local relegation, the spatial separation of communities, difficulties in
gaining access to fundamental rights such as education or employment, and the transmission of inequality to several generations has reached intolerable proportions. With the invisibility of minorities in the area of representation, there will be a revolt on the French scene. We cannot say to young people in a neighbourhood ‘we have a plan’ and then go back on our promise.” (Bronner, 2008-2).
Our analysis of the current reforms seems to point to a particularly acute phase of relapse in the age-old French defect of lack of memory and discontinuity of policies.
5 – ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS
The pessimistic conclusions that we have just drawn may lead us to question the solutions needed by an education system that appears to be poorly managed. Nonetheless, alternatives solutions have always existed, based on initiatives introduced by social players, which correspond to those put forward by present research with respect to each topic. When policies are in place to support them, they develop and spread throughout the system, for those who wish to innovate have more resources to do so and are helped by the school and social climate. In periods of recession, they live on in a few more small pockets than before.
One factor which has changed over the last twenty years is that the effects of decentralisation have introduced opposition forces that challenge the central decisions. We cannot go into these issues in depth as they do not directly concern our report, but we should keep this factor in mind when we analyse the French situation. Even if the State changes its policy and its emanations as represented by the local education authorities in the regions, even if the regional and local communities complain about having far less power than their colleagues abroad and the transfer of State credits is far less than the money needed to manage all the work it is expected to do, they can nonetheless develop their own, more continuous policies in the regions, the departments and the urban areas (cf. Zay, 2002).
According to Claudy Lebreton, President of the Assemblée des départements de France, “the local communities provide almost 75% of the nation’s public investments” (Lebreton, 2008). Since the municipal and cantonal elections of March 9 and 16 in 2008, which supplemented the regional elections of 2004, the socialist party has managed almost all the metropolitan area (with only two exceptions), almost two thirds of the departments, and 14 of the 20 largest towns. (Andréani, 2008). Following the urban community and municipal elections, the left governed 2/3 of all urban areas in France, in other words 12 urban communities (conurbations with over 50, 000
inhabitants built around one or several town-centres of 15,000 inhabitants) out of a total of 14 (Ternisien, 2008).
Even if the State credits to the regions fail to match the outgoings sent to the local representatives, there is still some room for manoeuvre which allows all scenarios to be envisaged.
The four case studies introduced in ToR 11 show these in a single regional education authority, the Nord Pas-de-Calais, one of the largest in France, which organised all the national experiments.
The research carried out by Maryan Lemoine, PhD student in Education and coordinator for the “Démission impossible” scheme, Michèle Guigue, Professor, and Bernadette Tillard, Senior Lecturer, all members of the PROFEOR-CIREL research team at Lille 3 University, on an initiative designed to prevent pupils from dropping out of the education system, illustrates the strategies taken at regional and local level in the Pas-de-Calais “département”, which referred to by Regional and Local Education Authority, and even national level (in reports by the National Education Chief Inspectors of Schools) and which complement a national policy in secondary schools (collèges).
The research by Cécile Carra, Senior Lecturer at the IUFM in the Nord Pas-de-Calais, CESDIP-CNRS national research team, Head of the Research Centre RECIFES, University of Artois, focuses on violence between pupils in all primary schools in the Nord “department”, whatever their orientations with respect to national and local strategies. This enabled comparisons to be made between the choice made by institutions with respect to them.
The doctoral thesis by Graciela Padoani David, PhD in Educational Sciences, PROFEOR-CIREL and ESCIP International Business School, analyses the effects of the last ministerial policy regarding socio-economically deprived areas to foster access to these élite higher education institutions via agreements between the higher education institutions and secondary schools (lycées) in ZEPs, through a case study on collaboration. The ministry ratified the initiatives taken by two“Grandes Ecoles”. The research conducted by Yves Reuter, Professor, Head of the THEODILE-CIREL research team, presents a detailed assessment of five years work on the effects of the policies introduced by a team of teachers in a primary school which applied the Freinet teaching methods, notwithstanding the powers in place.
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