It's well known: the French resist everything, including international assessments, as the 2019 TIMSS results showed. Since then, French students' scores have come under scrutiny: they ranked second to last among OECD countries, ahead only of Chile. It is worth stressing, if it needs stressing, that TIMSS, like PISA, is intended to compare the education policies of different countries, not to measure schoolchildren's intellectual abilities. The people who shape education policy must therefore be the ones to question the direction of school systems.
The CNESCO (Centre national d’étude des systèmes scolaires), whose studies we regularly cover in *Tangente Éducation*, has just published the first in a series of four briefing notes aimed at understanding French schoolchildren's disastrous results in mathematics. Comparing the performance of test-takers from different social backgrounds reveals that "disadvantaged" students score significantly lower than "advantaged" students (whose results are hardly stellar themselves). Yet in most OECD countries, this gap is not significant—and sometimes even favors "disadvantaged" students. Could the French system therefore be more unequal?
