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Counterforces
Educational Inequality andRelative Resistance
When your name is Modoud or somethinglike that, it brands you and makes it hardto find an internship. It’s true. It’s difficult, but not impossible.
—Vocational school teacher
When we got to high school, we had to dothree times the work . . . my grades reallychanged from junior high to high school; itwas a total change! So I failed the first year.
—Naïma
The French educational system, as I have argued, reproduces socialinequality and culturally assimilates outer-city youths of immigra-tion and color in particularly detrimental ways. This chapter exam-ines how schooling operates as a counterforce to assimilation whenyouths are failing in that system or resist the content of schooling.Indeed, the same school that levels differences also creates it, despitetwenty years of affirmative action measures in secondary educationand, more recently, in higher education. And while these measureshave provided youths in the most disadvantaged schools with someindispensable resources, they have had little impact on those mech-anisms that select and sort them toward downward mobility. A criti-cal factor is racialized discrimination, couched in terms of differencesand deficits belonging to these youths. As the state does not producedata pertaining to French students’ “ethnicity” or national origins,such discrimination is not easily documented. There is, all the same,resistance to the forces of social exclusion. Battling to earn at least
4
 
minimal certifications is one way to resist, though such battles donot necessarily lead to greater emancipation. In fact, they can havethe opposite effect. The same can be said of certain Muslim girls’ re-sistance to the assimilative forces of French schooling, which I ex-plore in relation to two tension-ridden courses: natural sciences andphysical education. Although the content of these courses can chal-lenge both fundamental beliefs and modesty, these girls are notwithout their own resources.
Situated Inequality and thePolitics of French Schooling
In chapter 1, I introduced Fatou, one of several representativecases of patterned downward mobility in French national education.Young people like Fatou are conventionally viewed as having cul-tural deficits that are both inferred from academic failure and used toexplain academic failure. In his numerous writings, sociologist PedroNoguera examines how such presumed deficit arguments becomeindependent explanations of low academic achievement. His in-sights into the U.S. context accurately apply to France as well:
explanations for the achievement gap focus on deficiencies among parentsand students. Dysfunctional families, lazy and unmotivated students, andthe “culture of poverty” in inner-city neighborhoods are all frequentlycited as causes of the gap. Left overlooked and unaddressed are the condi-tions under which children are educated and the quality of schools theyattend. (Noguera and Akom 2000, 29)
Extreme disparities continue to plague schooling in France, particu-larly at the middle school level. These disparities make apparent theexternal function of schooling: maintaining class divisions throughprocesses of socialization and selection (Broccolichi 1995; Trancart2000; INSEE 2000; Van Zanten 2001). Two processes working intandem sustain this function: students are tracked by real and ex-pected ability, which fixes their educational trajectories for the fu-ture, and parents and students try to avoid lesser tracks and un-satisfactory schools, particularly in disadvantaged areas such asSeine-Saint-Denis (Broccolichi and Van Zanten 1997). Moreover,teachers in disadvantaged areas find themselves trapped within aproverbial double bind, as sociologist Franck Poupeau describes it inhis study of the teacher strikes in Seine-Saint-Denis. That is, theysee themselves confronted by a “new public”—youth of non-Euro-pean origins—and caught
128
Muslim Girls and the Other France
 
 between their belief in a system of which they are a product and the livedreality of its failure, between their faith in the values of equality and justiceand the repeated observation that they can do nothing to change the sys-tem, between their hope for freedom through the school and their feelingthat they are ultimately doing nothing more than “policing” or pacifyingthis “new public.” (2001, 83–95)
Affirmative Action
à la française 
In the early 1980s, the state initiated a number of affirmative ac-tion policies (
la discrimination positive
), directed at the most disadvan-taged districts in the country and its overseas territories. Initially,these policies affected 15 percent of elementary and middle schoolsin France. Operating under the motto of “giving more to those whohave less,” the
zones d’éducation prioritaires
(ZEP, priority educationzones) were created to target the critical early years of schooling dur-ing a period when striking numbers of primary and middle schoolstudents were failing in the system. For example, only 26 percent ofhigh school students passed their
bac 
at that time.
1
Although therewere heated debates about these concerns, the ZEP initiative did notinitially encounter the kind of opposition that affirmative actionpolicies did in the U.S., because the sociohistorical context of Frenchaffirmative action was drastically different. That is,
la discrimination positive
did not emerge from a civil rights movement, a revolutionagainst the legacies of slavery and the realities of legalized segrega-tion of indigenous peoples and people of African descent. French af-firmative action was framed in terms of poverty rather than “race,”and thus was not interpreted as “reverse discrimination” because the
 français-français
working class benefited from it as well. The ZEP ini-tiative sought to redress “social inequalities by selectively reinforcingeducational initiatives in areas (
zones
) where failure rates are themost pronounced . . . and where the social and cultural conditionsare an obstacle to the academic advancement of children.”
2
By 1999,nearly 18 percent of French schools were ZEP, and more than 30percent of the middle schools in Pantin’s school district were ZEP,compared to 18 to 24 percent of those in the school district that in-cluded Paris.While poverty became a criterion for ZEP classification, a combi-nation of extreme poverty and school violence was held to warrantadditional state assistance beyond what was provided through ZEP.A parallel intervention was created, the
réseaux prioritaires
(REP), topromote academic excellence, while schools identified as havingcritical levels of poverty and violence were classified as
écoles sensibles
Counterforces
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MuslimVoices

This article was made available as part of the Voices and Visions Project of Indiana University. www.muslimvoices.org.

reply10 / 29 / 2009
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