Top French Schools Are Pushed to Open Meritocracy – Ny Times

01/07

Top French Schools Are Pushed to Open Meritocracy – Ny Times

Article publié dans l’édition du 30 juin du New York Times

PARIS — France is embarking on a grand experiment — how to diversify the overwhelmingly white “grandes écoles,” the elite universities that have produced French leaders in every walk of life — and Rizane el-Yazidi is one of the pioneers.

The daughter of protective North African parents in the tough northeastern suburb of Bondy, Ms. Yazidi is enrolled in a trial program aimed at helping smart children of the poor overcome the huge cultural disadvantages that have often spelled failure in the crucial school entrance exams.

“For now we’re still a small group, but when there will be more of us, it’ll become real progress,” said Ms. Yazidi, 20. But she is nervous, too. “We’re lucky, but it’s a great risk for us,” she said. “We might never make it” to a top school.

Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

“In France, families celebrate acceptance at a grande école more than graduation itself,” said Richard Descoings, who runs the most liberal of them, the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, known as Sciences Po. “Once you pass the exam at 18 or 19, for the rest of your life, you belong.”

The result, critics say, is a self-perpetuating elite of the wealthy and white, who provide their own children the social skills, financial support and cultural knowledge to pass the entrance exams, known as the concours, which are normally taken after an extra two years of intensive study in expensive preparatory schools after high school.

The problem is not simply the narrow base of the elite, but its self-satisfaction. “France has so many problems with innovation,” Mr. Descoings said. Those who pass the tests “are extremely smart and clever, but the question is: Are you creative? Are you willing to put yourself at risk? Lead a battle?” These are qualities rarely tested in exams.

But the schools fear that the government will undermine excellence in the name of social engineering and say the process has to begin further down the educational ladder. The state, they say, should seek out poor students with potential and help them to enter preparatory schools. Of the 2.3 million students in French higher education, about 15 percent attend grandes écoles or preparatory schools. But half of those in preparatory schools will fall short and go to standard universities.

In 2001, Mr. Descoings, 52, who cheerfully admits that he failed the concours twice before passing, began his own outreach program to better prepare less-advantaged students for Sciences Po. Last year, the school accepted 126 scholarship students out of a class of 1,300, and two-thirds of them have at least one non-French parent, he said. But that is a far cry from 30 percent.

One of them, Houria Khemiss, 22, is about to graduate from Sciences Po in law. The daughter of Algerian parents growing up in impoverished St.-Denis in the Paris suburbs, she was pushed by a high school teacher to the special preparatory program. She wants to become a judge, “because then you have a direct impact on people’s lives.” Many at Sciences Po will become the leaders of France, she said, “and because we are there it gives them another point of view.”

Oualid Fakkir, 23, who is graduating with a master’s in finance, said, “It’s very dangerous for France to close its eyes and say, ‘Equality. We have the best values in the world.’ It’s not enough. There has to also be equality of chances.”

par Steven Erlanger, NY Times

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Sciences Po

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Alexandre 1 juillet 2010 - 13 h 38 min

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En fait Sciences Po est à l’honneur dans tous les journaux anglo-saxons (Guardian la semaine dernière, NYT cette semaine)… il y a juste dans leurs rankings académiques qu’elle brille par son absence. C’est gênant.

Boris 1 juillet 2010 - 20 h 53 min

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C’est plus facile de bluffer un journaliste isolé, ignorant du contexte français, que de tromper une équipe expérimentée en comparaison internationale travaillant sur des données quantitatives.

François 2 juillet 2010 - 0 h 57 min

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Plan after plan fails to make Oxbridge access fair. There is another way

Top universities remain dominated by privileged types like me. But one solution is ignored. Why? Because it would work

George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 24 May 2010

None of them work. The elaborate schemes supposed to widen access to the UK’s top universities – the summer schools, the mentoring programmes, the taster days, the bursaries and scholarships – have failed. The proportion of poor students these universities accept has fallen over the past 15 years.

A new report by the Office for Fair Access (Offa) shows that intelligent children from the richest 20% of homes in England are seven times more likely to attend a high-ranking university than intelligent children from the poorest 40%. In the mid-1990s they were six times more likely. The better the college, the worse the figures become. The Higher Education Statistics Agency publishes the figures for individual universities. I’ve just been through the spreadsheets. In 2002-3, when the data begins, 5.4% of students at Cambridge and 5.8% at Oxford came from « low participation neighbourhoods ». By 2008-9, the proportion had fallen to 3.7% and 2.7%. This has happened despite 13 years of a Labour government that listed its priorities as « education, education, education », and tens of millions spent – particularly by Oxford and Cambridge – on outreach and encouragement.

People of my social background (upper middle class, public school) dominate every economic sector except those – such as sport and hard science – in which only raw ability counts. Through networking, confidence, unpaid internships – most importantly through our attendance at the top universities – we run the media, politics, the civil service, the arts, the City, law, medicine, big business, the armed forces, even, in many cases, the protest movements challenging these powers. The Milburn report, published last year, showed that 45% of top civil servants, 53% of top journalists, 32% of MPs, 70% of finance directors and 75% of judges come from the 7% of the population who went to private schools. Even the beneficiaries should be able to see that this system is grotesque, invidious and socially destructive.

Children from privileged homes begin to creep ahead of their peers long before school begins: the link between background and attainment, Offa says, is evident at 22 months. But schooling widens the gap. By the time they sit GCSEs, the children of higher professionals are nearly three times as likely to get five good grades as the children of people in routine work. Fewer working-class children take A-levels, and those who do get lower scores. Pupils at private schools account for some 15% of entries but take around 30% of A grades.

But this isn’t just about grades. Even when children from poorer homes do well, they are less likely to apply to the top universities. Going by grades alone, there’s a shortfall of some 4,500 state sector pupils who should, all else being equal, enrol on the UK’s top courses. These students aren’t applying partly because their schools don’t encourage them to do so; partly because they feel that the top universities aren’t for the likes of them.

Private schools, by comparison, groom their pupils for Oxford and Cambridge. They pass from the quadrangles of Eton to the quadrangles of Oxford with a sense of entitlement. (Many of them spend the rest of their lives nannied in quadrangles, at the bar and the Palace of Westminster. They then instruct everyone else to stand on their own two feet).

So what is to be done? The Offa report is coherent and persuasive – until it starts making recommendations. It documents the utter failure of existing measures to redress the problem. It makes the startling observation that « there is no clear correlation » between the efforts a university makes to widen admission and the results of those efforts. It then proposes a radical and dynamic programme of, er, more of the same. More summer schools, more outreach, better bursaries and scholarships, more « promoting good practice », even though we know this good practice doesn’t work. These complex and expensive measures are necessary, it says, because « the solution was never going to be short or simple ». It is wrong.

There is a short and simple solution, first proposed 11 years ago by the journalist Peter Wilby. Oxford and Cambridge, he suggested, should offer places to the top one or two pupils from every school, regardless of grades. The next-best universities would offer places to the pupils who come third and fourth, and so on downwards. There would be some adjustment for the size of the school, but the brutal logic holds.

Sit back for a moment and let the implications sink in. The system wouldn’t be perfectly fair, because of the advantages privileged children enjoy from the beginning, though it would be a heck of a lot fairer than the current arrangement. Instead of scrambling to insert their children into the best state schools, pushy parents would seek to enrol them in the worst. As Nick Davies’s investigation of the schools crisis in the Guardian showed, the overwhelming reason why some schools fail is that « the bright middle-class children are being siphoned off into private schools and a minority of state schools … The system fails because it is segregated. » Under Wilby’s programme, no longer.

Private schools would collapse overnight: the last place you’d want to put your child is where other ambitious parents have sent theirs. The top universities would no longer be enclaves of the privileged; working-class children would feel that they have just as much right to be there as the scions of the posh. The middle-class flight to good catchment areas would screech into reverse as wealthy families extracted themselves from their comfortable ghettos. Social mixing begins both in and out of school.

It is not quite the end of the matter. There would still be a need for outreach programmes, taster days and bursaries; but this time they would work, as bright students of all backgrounds would know that they stood an equal chance. There would still be a need for Sure Start and other means of tackling disadvantage from birth. Rich parents would still seek to help their children get to the top by buying them extra tuition. There are two answers to this. The expensive one is to offer extra tuition, free of charge, to everyone. The cheap one is to dock the positions of those who receive it.

Wilby’s revolutionary idea was greeted by government and educational reformers with a momentous thunderclap of … silence. Governments can do what they like to help the disadvantaged, as long as they don’t threaten the privileges of the ruling classes. This programme has not been adopted for one obvious reason: it would work. The far safer course is the one promoted in the Offa report: wring your hands, spend some money, but for God’s sake don’t solve the problem, unless you want the most powerful classes in open revolt.

When this idea was first published, the government could at least claim that it was trying something else. The something else didn’t work. Let’s make the real solution impossible to ignore.

François 2 juillet 2010 - 1 h 00 min

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This simplistic solution to Oxbridge elitism won’t work

Top universities can’t offer places unless they know the students will flourish in a demanding environment

Lee Elliot Major

The Guardian, Friday 28 May 2010

It is absolutely right for George Monbiot to describe the continued dominance of the social elite among the upper echelons of professional and public life as « grotesque, invidious and socially destructive » (Plan after plan fails to make Oxbridge access fair. There is another way, 25 May).

It is also true that these trends are fuelled largely by the exclusive intakes of Oxbridge and other elite universities, which in turn reflect the educational inequalities that emerge so early in children’s lives, and widen thereafter.

But the key finding highlighted by the Office for Fair Access’s recent report is not that « the proportion of poor students these universities accept has fallen over the past 15 years », as Monbiot claims, but something arguably much more disturbing. The starkest gap is between children from the richest (actually most highly educated) 20% of homes in England, who continue to dominate elite admissions, and the rest. Elite university access is not just a problem for the underprivileged, but for the 80% of children not lucky enough to benefit from the small cadre of independent and state schools that supply the lion’s share of Oxbridge candidates.

Monbiot’s scathing verdict on outreach schemes is: « None of them work. The elaborate schemes supposed to widen access to the UK’s top universities – the summer schools, the mentoring programmes, the taster days, the bursaries and scholarships – have failed. » But who knows how much worse these statistics would be were it not for the schemes undertaken by universities during the last decade? Thousands of state pupils have benefited from Sutton Trust summer schools – many of whom are now Oxbridge graduates.

Under Monbiot’s « short and simple solution » – originally proposed, as he says, by the journalist Peter Wilby – Oxford and Cambridge would « offer places to the top one or two pupils from every school, regardless of grades. The next-best universities would offer places to the pupils who come third and fourth, and so on downwards. » The attraction of this radical scheme is that it would create a powerful incentive for middle-class parents to send their children to lower-performing schools, and broaden the social mix of all schools.

Unfortunately, this solution is, in its purest form, unworkable. Universities live or die by the academic standards they uphold. No elite university would allow students on to its degree courses unless they had shown that they could survive and flourish in an academically demanding environment – irrespective of how highly ranked they may have been at their school. To do so could be disastrous for the student and the university.

Our trust reviewed the use of percent schemes, which adopt a similar approach to those in the United States, when developing our pilot scheme, now operating at Exeter and Leeds universities. Students are identified early in local schools serving disadvantaged areas, but given support by the universities over a number of years so they make the grade when they are 18. The impact of the scheme is currently being measured by a randomised trial. This is not the simple fix for low social mobility that we all wish for. But, unlike most education reforms, we will know whether it works or not.

François 2 juillet 2010 - 9 h 32 min

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FIN DE L’ARTICLE DU NEW YORK TIMES (pas toujours accessible)

(Page 2 of 2)

But other elite grandes écoles are more specialized than Sciences Po, concentrating on engineering, business management, public administration and science, and they are more concerned about the government’s program.

Pierre Tapie, 52, is the head of the business school ESSEC and chairman of the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, which represents 222 schools.

While he shares the government’s objective of diversity, he said, there is a long educational track before the concours. “We cannot be the scapegoat of any demagogic decision because we are the finest and most famous part of the whole system,” he said. Gen. Xavier Michel, 56, runs École Polytechnique, one of the world’s finest engineering schools and still overseen by the Ministry of Defense. Known as X, the school is extraordinarily competitive, and its students do basic training and parade wearing the bicorne, a cocked hat dating from Napoleon, who put the school under the military in 1804.

“The fundamental principle for us is that students have the capability to do the work here, which is very difficult,” with a lot of math, physics and science, very little of it based on cultural knowledge, General Michel said. Even now, he said, the school takes only 500 students a year, barely 10 percent of its specially educated applicants. “We don’t want to bring students into school who risk failing,” he said. “You can get lost very quickly.”

Despite the misgivings, in February the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, under considerable pressure, signed on to a “Charter of Equal Opportunity” with the government committing the schools to try to reach the 30 percent goal before 2012 or risk losing some financing.

But how to get there remains a point of contention. There is a serious question about how to measure diversity in a country where every citizen is presumed equal and there are no official statistics based on race, religion or ethnicity. A goal cannot be called a “quota,” which has an odor of the United States and affirmative action. Instead, there is the presumption here that poorer citizens will be more diverse, containing a much larger percentage of Muslims, blacks and second-generation immigrants.

The minister of higher education, Valérie Pécresse, argued that French who grow up in a poor neighborhood have the same difficulties regardless of ethnicity.

But the government is examining whether the current test depends too much on familiarity with French history and culture. “We’re thinking about the socially discriminatory character, or not, of these tests,” Ms. Pécresse said. “I want the same concours for everyone, but I don’t exclude that the tests of the concours evolve, with the objective of a great social opening and a better measure of young people’s intelligence.”

The government, with Mr. Tapie’s group, has moved to unify and expand scattered outreach programs from different schools. Copied to some degree from Sciences Po, the program Ms. Yazidi attends tries to reach out to smart children, give them higher goals and help them get into preparatory schools. About 7,000 high school students are currently enrolled, but it is too early to tell whether it will produce a large number of successful applicants.

At one recent session, 10 students, all children of immigrants, were working to pass a special concours for a top business school instead of going right into the job market. Their teacher, Philippe Destelle, pushed them to “look more self-confident” in oral exams and “don’t be afraid to have an opinion.” He told one, “You have the answers, but you don’t trust yourself.”

Salloumou Keita, 22, is vocal and social, but worryingly behind on his math. “We have to prove something,” he said. “There is a look we always get, a questioning — ‘Can he adapt?’ ”

Awa Dramé, is 22, French-born of African parents, confident and talkative. “I don’t mind being a guinea pig, so long as the experiment works,” she said. “Reaching this level was unthinkable before, and I can see myself going higher,” she said. “I’m full of dreams.”

Malvy 2 juillet 2010 - 21 h 28 min

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Le « comble de la com », ou comment essayer d’apparaître comme le vainqueur d’une bataille qu’on a perdue.
En février dernier, RD mène une offensive contre les grandes écoles espérant obtenir du ministère que celui-ci rende obligatoire des quotas de boursiers. Ce qui détruirait les concours. Il piétine toute considération éthique pour y arriver : « les grandes écoles ne veulent pas des pauvres » dit-il, mobilisant les pires relents du populisme. Finalement il est désavoué par la ministre qui signe un accord avec la Conférence des Grandes Ecoles dont la logique est à l’opposé des attentes de RD. Pas de quotas sur critères sociaux, mais une politique d’aide à l’accès aux grandes écoles respectant le principe du mérite scolaire. RD a perdu.
Mais notre grand communicateur cherche à gagner dans l’apparence, la seule chose qui compte à ses yeux, la bataille perdue sur le fond. L’adversaire déterminé des grandes écoles tente, auprès d’un journaliste américain peu informé, de passer pour leur leader en faisant croire que celles-ci mettent en oeuvre des mesures « copiées sur SciencesPo ». Alors qu’elles font exactement le contraire : aider les candidats à atteindre le niveau plutôt qu’abaisser le niveau par démagogie.
La com comme absolu. Pathétique.