improving the school system is “easier to do” with “staff who feel considered”, according to economist Esther Duflo

Friday January 12, Franco-American economist Esther Duflo will inaugurate a series of conferences dedicated to education at the Collège de France. An initiative born in 2022, from the desire of teachers to act in the face of the crisis situation facing the French education system.

The Franco-American economist Esther Duflo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, and is a professor at MIT (United States) and the Collège de France. Education is the subject of a cycle of conferences which will be held at the Collège de France (free entry), while the brand new Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has just left this ministry.

franceinfo: Gabriel Attal was in this position for less than six months. A quick passage after “a whirlwind of media announcements”, said earlier the general secretary of the first union of middle and high schools, the SNES-FSU, on franceinfo. What signal does this appointment send to teachers and students, in your opinion?

Esther Duflo: I think the way it was received was that the Department of Education served as more of a springboard than a place to build a project. All educational projects necessarily take a long time to realize. There they were barely launched.

A number of projects have actually been launched. This cycle of conferences, which is called “Acting for education”, is you who are organizing it this year. On the Collège de France website, it is indicated that the initiative was born, in 2022, from the desire of teachers to act in the face of the crisis situation facing the French education system. This system does not keep its promises today?

The French education system is in difficulty. This was recently revealed by the international PISA survey, which showed a decline in performance at the end of middle school, since these are 15-year-old children. We must nevertheless put this decline into perspective, which is observed in all the countries in the PISA survey and which is probably linked, at least in part, to the disruption that took place during the Covid-19 epidemic.

France is falling, 22nd today in maths out of the 32 OECD countries, 24th in reading comprehension, with educational inequalities which are very strong.

She goes backwards and she starts from a low level. The PISA survey has existed since 2000 and since 2000, France has had a relatively low average score and, what is even more worrying, scores which are very heterogeneous. We have excellent students, who do very well in PISA, and we have many students with great difficulty. What is even more worrying is that these difficulties are extraordinarily correlated with social origin. France is the OECD country where social origin is the most predictive of success or difficulties in education.

To remedy this, we have seen among the projects launched by Gabriel Attal, the establishment of level groups in math and French, for sixth and fifth grade classes, from the next school year. Is this a good idea?

The truth is that we don’t know, because it has very little been evaluated, and it has never been evaluated in the specific circumstances of the French system. For the research that has been cataloged by the “Idée” laboratory at the Paris School of Economics, the experiences that have taken place in other countries are not conclusive for the permanent level groups. What we know to be very effective is the attention paid to each student in much more fluid level groups. But fixed level groups, no.

So they are not fixed, we can move from one group to another.

What is not fixed is the description that was given! Sometimes it’s called “needs groups” with the idea that it’s not fixed, but in the announcements, it was more like “level groups”. And since Gabriel Attal is no longer there to oversee how this will be implemented, we don’t know exactly. This is why this series of conferences is about experimentation. Launching an idea by first doing a real experiment would have been a reasonable approach.

So what you recommend is rather to address the questions of educational inequalities empirically, through experiments, and then to see if they work or not.

That’s it, we have to start there. Furthermore, another subject on which we do not even need experiments is that another characteristic of France is to be one of the OECD countries where teacher remuneration is the lowest. compared to other people of the same level of education. OECD countries where children do the best, such as South Korea, are the countries where teachers are best paid. So this does not mean that there is an immediate cause and effect relationship between teacher salaries and performance. But there is still a reality in France, which is that college has been for a long time, perhaps always, the poor relation of the education system. There is more effort, imagination and resources concentrated on primary and secondary schools. So this attention to college in Gabriel Attal’s announcements was probably very welcome. It was good to finally tackle middle school. But the absolute priority is to recruit. However, today we cannot recruit the minimum needs, recruitment competitions are not filled. Because the teaching profession is not attractive today in France.

So we need to increase salaries. This was also implemented with the famous pact.

It was implemented, but in a partial, conflicting manner. To bring France to the average OECD level, we must start by having an unconditional increase in remuneration. From there, we could have put ourselves in a more serene position, to begin to question the problems in college, why these inequalities are perpetuated? What can we do ? Let’s experiment this way or that… It’s much easier to do it, in an environment where there are the personnel to do it. With staff who feel considered and not treated as the fifth wheel at every possible turn.

Watch this interview on video: