Ask the Expert: Andrew Coulson on France and Education

Brian Isaacs, a freshman attending Northwestern University in Chicago asks:

"As a proponent for the privatization of education, I am always stumped by examples in favor of socialized schooling - especially the French education system. I would like to know how/why the French model for education is successful - if at all. The argument tends to contrast the lack of social promotion abroad (i.e., they don't graduate high school students who read at 8th grade levels), while also maintaining a rigid general curriculum - the culmination of which is the baccalaureate exam at the end of high school. Do they owe their relative success to increased national oversight or in spite of it? Is theirs truly a model worthy of emulation?"

Andrew Coulson, Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at Cato, answers:

French performance on international tests of student achievement is not especially good, and it offers no justification for holding up the French education system as a model for emulation. France is seldom if ever among the top tier of performers on the tests in which it participates, and it chooses not to participate in at least one very high profile test: the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

Consider, for example, French performance on the most recent (2006) Program on International Student Achievement (PISA) test. In the PISA science test, French students placed 25th among participating countries, only four places ahead of the United States. In reading and mathematics it placed 23rd.

On the PIRLS 2006 literacy study (the most recent in that series), France placed 27th -- scoring below the United States by a statistically significant margin.

These test results are readily available on the Internet.

As a final observation, the whole idea of holding up any nation's education system as a model for emulation purely on the grounds of its students' achievement is invalid. Many factors outside the classroom affect student achievement, so it is difficult to determine, from a single nation's results, whether its success is due to its schools or to other factors (e.g., culture, demographics, technology, economics). To reliably determine which systems are worthy of emulation and which are not, it is necessary to compare different kinds of schools and school systems operating within countries. Within-country studies minimize the outside factors that cloud results. To get the most reliable results, many within-country studies can be combined in a search for overarching patterns. This is what I did in my 2008 Cato Institute study "Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence." A revised and expanded version of that study is forthcoming in the Journal of School Choice.