School Choice, Race and Social Anxiety

Exploring French Middle-Class Parental Risks

Anthony E. Healy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032116143
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000505474
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on a carefully contextualized and critical study, this book tells how France's dominant social and political ideology and prevailing cultural conventions abate the effects of race and anxiety within school choice, here focused on public-school middle-class parents living among immigrants in the diverse Paris suburbs.

The study employs innovative techniques to tackle the presence of race, a difficult topic in France, and to address the impact of global risk from which social anxiety springs. Interviews for this book took place when a wave of deadly terrorism, mass migration of refugees, and the divisiveness of a presidential election made topics around the study poignant. It demonstrates how race operates in French education policy and practices by directing attention to how experienced and more qualified teachers move over their careers to less diverse schools, seen by teachers as having better students.

The book explores how social anxiety created through global risk is culturally resisted within the French context by viewing this resistance theoretically through parental dispositions. It presents the racist perception in French school choice by revealing the education policies and parental choices that often segregate immigrants into schools with inexperienced and unqualified teachers. This book will be of interest to academics at upper-level undergraduate as well as graduate courses, policymakers, educators who are interested in inequality, sociology of education, transnational and critical perspectives on race, schooling, and school choice.

Chapter 1
The terrain of choice

DOI: 10.4324/9781003220725-2

I am greeted by a jumble of old and new urban buildings when I emerge from Petiteville’s one underground metro transit station to interview parents here. This compact suburban town immediately borders Paris. A wide, heavily trafficked main boulevard through the town is lined with both midrise offices and residential buildings. Walking along the sidewalk through a bustling mélange of pedestrians, I pass the storefronts of an array of cafés, tobacconists, and small grocers, some selling ethnic goods, intermingled with large, modern complexes housing major retailers, chain restaurants, and even a few American fast-food outlets.

Petiteville may have urban bustle and jumble, but it is also a town divided spatially between the newly arrived middle-class, and its working-class and immigrant populations. The middle-class arrivals live in midrise apartments on the side nearest Paris and working-class and immigrant residents live on the other side of town, some of them in public housing. That division is indicated in the town’s population, economic, and educational statistics (the data for it and the other towns are in Table 1.1). About a quarter of its households in 2014 had a member in upper management or in a profession, a gain since 2008 (INSEE 2016b), even as the proportion of working-class households fell slightly in that same period (INSEE 2016b, 2016c). About two-fifths of residents hold a postsecondary or college degree. That, too, has increased, even as the proportion without a high school diploma has fallen (INSEE 2016b).

Petiteville is one of the three towns where I interviewed middle-class parents at a local public middle school. The forces that have changed this town are the same as those forces that create impetus for French school choice. The story of French school choice is one that begins with a confluence of geographic, migratory, and economic changes that have led the middle class and immigrants to share the same towns in the Paris suburbs. In this chapter, I explore the components of those changes that include suburban out-migration, the situation of the French middle class, and the growing population of French immigrants. Beyond their ramifications on school choice, those changes also potentially generate social anxiety and drive concerns about race. I use a contextualized approach, following the work of Duneier (2007) and Lamont and Swidler (2014), Contextualization in qualitative research means digging deep to properly interpret interviews and observations. I start by portraying Petiteville, and then Riviereville and Centreville, the two other towns where I interviewed. This chapter, and the next, are important to understanding the context in which parents live lives, and children are schooled.

Table 1.1 Social, Economic, and School Data for the Three Interview Towns

Town	Riviereville	Petiteville	Centreville
Profile	Village-like, quiet streets, many single-family homes	Bustling, built-up main avenue, many apartments	Large edge city with highways, many apartments
Households
Pct. couples with children	27%	25%	30%
Pct. single parents	9%	11%	14%
Pct. professional	26%	24%	14%
Pct. intermediate	16%	18%	18%
Pct. working class	7%	10%	12%
Pct. poverty rate	8%	16%	20%
Top decile median income	$64,400*	$45,400*	$40,500*
Persons
Population	75,300	25,700	91,000
Pct. college degrees	47%	43%	34%
Pct. immigrant	13%	21%	23%
Pct. French citizen	91%	87%	86%
Pct. unemployed	7%	11%	11%
Residences
Pct. owner occupied	62%	25%	35%
Pct. public housing	6%	34%	40%
Schools
Public middle schools†	5	2	8
Private middle schools†	3	1	3

Source: 2014 data from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. Population numbers are rounded to thousands. College educated is any degree past secondary school. Household occupation is for primary person in household.

* Based on exchange rates in June 2017 of 1 euro to 1.13 dollars.

† Ministry of education data.

The changing suburbs around Paris

The turning of Paris into a global postindustrial city has unleashed economic forces that affect the middle class geographically. These geographic changes are not unusual but different by country. In the middle of the 20th century, many U.S. cities had evolved largely minority and impoverished urban cores, while the urban cores of French cities, as Paris, stayed pleasant quarters housing the bourgeois (Andreotti, Le Gales and Moreno Fuentes 2013; Wacquant 2007). The French working class lived in the suburbs, working in industry near and beyond the city limits, in contrast to the United States where the middle class usually lived in the suburbs (Viguier 2011; Wacquant 2008). Some Paris suburbs were known as the banlieue rouge, the red suburbs, because their voters there backed France’s once politically potent Communist Party (Stovall 2001). These Communist-dominated towns built public housing projects to accommodate workers because much existing housing was substandard or becoming scarce (Blanc 2010; Verdugo 2011; Wacquant 2008).

Global deindustrialization in the 1970s then led to a major loss in French industry. Around Paris, the industrial working class over time dissipated or left the inner suburbs for the outer suburbs (Le Goix 2016). As public housing in the old industrial suburbs fell vacant, the national government opened them to newly arrived immigrant families (Viguier 2011; Wacquant 2008). The arrival of immigrants transformed many of these towns. They ceased to be industrial working-class strongholds and became immigrant enclaves, or as one author describes it, they switched in the popular mind from the Red Belt to the Black Belt (Stovall 2001). Today, suburban towns possess an unfortunate reputation for being dreadful places, with violence, unemployment, and drug dealing, a popular and media perception that is not always empirically justified (Le Moigne, Smithsimon and Schafran 2016; Viguier 2011; Wacquant 2008).

Economic change next brought the middle classes to the suburbs. Notwithstanding its touristy image as the City of Light, Paris is facing many of the population and economic problems of global cities, including sharply rising housing costs (Bacqué, Charmes and Vermeersch 2014; Préteceille 1995; Sassen 2001). Paris continues to attract relatively affluent professionals between the ages of 20 and 29 years (Baccaïni 2007) who may live in small two-room apartments, deux pièces, a main room with a kitchen, a separate bedroom, and a bathroom. But as they form families and have children, they need more space. Unless they are willing to pay inordinate rents, they find it hard to remain in the city’s pricey and cramped housing (Augustine and Virot 2012; Bacqué, Charmes and Vermeersch 2014; Préteceille 2007).

Despite their bad reputations, many middle-class families head to the inner suburbs like Petiteville where housing is less cramped and more affordable (Augustine and Virot 2012; Cusin, Lefebvre and Sigaud 2016; Préteceille 2007). That movement has increased in urban-to-suburban migration within the Paris region (Augustine and Virot 2012; Baccaïni 2007). As they move, these families sort themselves out by a higher-paying private sector or by a lower-paying public sector, and coincidently by their political leanings. Petiteville attracts more persons employed in the public sector, for example, and also is left learning. It had a Communist mayor after World War II, though...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The terrain of choice
• 2 Policies and practices of choice
• 3 Choice as a choice
• 4 Schooling as it ought to be
• 5 Race as imagined
• 6 Social anxiety and school choice
• Conclusion
• Appendix How this study was done
• Index