The Walled Door: What School Does to the Children It Claims to Save
When the Republic spends 64 billion to reproduce its own inequalities
Lire en français →The Walled Door: What School Does to the Children It Claims to Save
By Aminata Kouyaté, with contributions from Lucie Grimal and Léonie Marchand
In 1998, my mother took me to the back-to-school meeting at Collège Jean-Moulin in Aulnay-sous-Bois. She wore her finest boubou. She sat in the front row. She didn’t understand everything the headmistress said, but she nodded with a gravity I’ve never forgotten. Afterwards, she shook every teacher’s hand. On the way out, she told me in Bambara: “You see — this place is sacred.”
Six weeks later, the maths teacher was replaced by a short-term contractor who stayed three weeks. Then nobody. For two months, we had a study hall instead of maths. My mother never found out. Nobody told her.
Twenty-eight years later, I run a logistics company with 200 employees. I made it through the door. My mother was right: school is the door. What she didn’t know is that the door isn’t in the same place depending on whether you live in Aulnay or Neuilly. And that sometimes, on the Aulnay side, someone has bricked up the entrance.
64 Billion to Go Backwards
Let’s start with the numbers, since that’s the language power understands.
France spends 64 billion euros a year on its Éducation nationale. The state’s largest budget line. 7,900 euros per pupil. Steadily rising: +34% in constant euros since 2000. This is not a problem of overall funding. It’s a problem of what’s done with it.
Results: 26th in the PISA maths rankings. 27% of pupils lack basic reading skills upon entering sixième — the first year of secondary school, when children are eleven. 90,000 dropouts per year. 4,000 unfilled teaching positions in 2023. Twenty-eight reforms in forty years, one constant — results keep falling.
If my company spent 34% more each decade to produce results that got worse, my bank would cut me off. The Éducation nationale gets a budget top-up and a new minister.
Léonie Marchand, who is 24 and holds a sociology degree she says is mainly useful for understanding why she’s unemployed, puts it better than any report: “The bac with a 96% pass rate isn’t a qualification anymore — it’s an attendance certificate.” She has a friend who’s a plumber; he left school at fifteen. He earns more than she does. School lied to her for fifteen years. She’s not the only one.
The Republic of Postcodes
Here is a fact the Republic doesn’t like to hear: in France, public spending per pupil in priority education zones is 17% lower than in well-off schools. Despite the REP bonuses. Despite the speeches. Despite all the window-dressing.
Read that again. The state spends less on those who need the most.
How is this possible? Because experienced teachers — and therefore better-paid ones — flee difficult zones as soon as they accumulate enough transfer points. It’s rational: why stay in Saint-Denis when you can teach in Versailles for the same salary, with calmer classes, a shorter commute, and a headteacher who doesn’t ask you to manage social crises on top of lessons? The mechanical result: priority schools inherit contractors recruited in a panic, rookie teachers thrown in at the deep end, unfilled posts replaced by study halls. My school, in 1998. The same school, in 2026.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, a pupil in a REP+ school — the highest-priority tier — loses an average of 15 teaching days per year for lack of substitutes. Over a full education from ages six to eighteen, that’s an entire year. A year of maths, French, history that a child in Bobigny will never receive and a child in the 6th arrondissement of Paris will never miss. The carte scolaire — the catchment system meant to guarantee social mixing — assigns poor children to poor schools and rich children to rich schools. Informed families game the system: exemptions, rare language options, fake addresses, private schools at 600 euros a year that nobody told them about. Those who don’t know, stay.
My mother didn’t know. Nobody told her the “European section” mattered. Nobody explained there was a better school two bus stops away.
The Reproduction Machine
Lucie Grimal, philosopher at Paris 8, offers a diagnosis of this reality that irritated me for years before convincing me.
64% of children whose parents are executives reach the classes préparatoires — the elite two-year programmes that feed France’s grandes écoles. 6% of workers’ children do. This ratio hasn’t budged since Pierre Bourdieu documented it in 1964 in The Inheritors. Sixty-two years. Three Republics. Twenty-eight reforms. The same ratio.
This is not an accident. This is not a malfunction. It’s a machine doing what it was built to do: convert family cultural capital into diplomas, then diplomas into social position, all while proclaiming that merit alone counted. Bourdieu called it “social reproduction.” Thomas Piketty put numbers to the obscenity: the French state spends an average of 65,000 euros of public money on a young person who leaves the school system at sixteen, and 230,000 euros on a grande école graduate. The ENS — France’s most prestigious academic institution — costs 120,000 euros per year per student. Polytechnique, 85,000. We fund a scholastic aristocracy of 5,000 people with a budget that could transform the lives of 500,000 children in priority education.
When I say this in polite company, I’m told: “But Aminata, the grandes écoles produce French excellence.” I don’t dispute it. I simply ask: with whose money? And at whose expense?
The answer is in the Cour des comptes report — both the 2018 and 2023 editions: 1.7 billion per year for priority education, zero convergence in outcomes over twenty years. The state pretends to compensate. The children pretend to believe it. And in the end: 64% of executives’ children in prépa, 6% of workers’ children. Same as 1964.
The True Price of a Teacher
My cousin Fatoumata teaches mathematics in a REP+ school in Sevran. She’s 29, holds a master’s degree and the agrégation — one of the hardest competitive exams in France. She earns 2,100 euros net per month. A starting engineer at my company earns 3,000.
Séraphine Delacroix, who has visited schools in thirteen countries, reports a figure that should humiliate us: French teachers are paid 17% below the OECD average. In Finland, teaching is as prestigious as medicine. In Singapore, they recruit from the top third of every university cohort. In France, the CAPES in mathematics — the standard teaching qualification — fills only 68% of its posts. We’re short 4,000 teachers. And we wonder why.
The signal is crystal clear. Gabriel Bastiat is right about at least one thing: prices tell the truth. The price France puts on its teachers says this — the job isn’t worth it. Don’t be surprised when the best go elsewhere.
But Lucie Grimal is right too: salary isn’t everything. Teachers leave because the job has become impossible. Overcrowded classrooms, violence, absurd hierarchy, contradictory directives, permanent institutional contempt. The Éducation nationale’s 2023 mediation report lists 18,600 teacher complaints. The leading cause of suffering is neither pay nor curriculum. It’s the feeling of never being listened to by your own institution. Fatoumata tells me the same thing: “It’s not the money. It’s that nobody ever asks my opinion, and everyone tells me what to do.”
Finland conducted its great reform of 1970 over five years, with its teachers. Not against them. Every French reform drops from the ministry like a bomb, and teachers learn about it in the press.
The Six-Year-Old and the Phone
There are brilliant people in our assembly who believe technology will solve the problem. Adaptive platforms, personalised AI, decentralised certifications. I want to say one simple thing in response.
A six-year-old doesn’t “consume” knowledge on a phone. She needs an adult who looks her in the eye, who tells her what she did was good, who teaches her how to live alongside other children. School is not a library. It’s the first place where a child learns she’s not alone in the world.
Léonie Marchand, when you mention the “digital transformation of education” to her, asks: “With what internet connection?” In Aulnay, ten years ago, when I was recruiting my first drivers, half my applicants didn’t have stable home internet. The adaptive platform assumes an infrastructure that doesn’t exist in the neighbourhoods we’re talking about.
Those who want to replace school with a screen have never set foot in a classroom in Sevran on a Monday morning in November. School is a place. Not a service. Not an app. When you close a school — and France has closed 16,000 since 1980 — you’re not optimising a network. You’re ripping an organ out of a community.
Colonel Dumas, with whom I rarely agree, says something I cannot contradict: “When the schoolteacher in Corrèze leaves, it’s not a post that disappears. It’s the last adult who embodied the Republic in a village. After him, what’s left is the television and the far right.”
What I Propose
I’m a businesswoman. I don’t do budgetary poetry. Here are numbers.
First: triple the budget for nursery schools in REP and REP+ zones. Cost: 2.3 billion euros per year — 3.6% of the current Éducation nationale budget. Why nursery school? Because James Heckman, Nobel laureate in economics, demonstrated that every euro invested in preschool education in disadvantaged settings generates between 7 and 12 euros in social returns over thirty years — less unemployment, less crime, lower healthcare costs. It’s the best return on investment that public policy can offer. And it’s where the gap opens up: by age three, a child of executives has heard 30 million more words than a child from a disadvantaged background. If you don’t act at that moment, you spend the rest of their education chasing a gap you’ll never close.
Second: create a real status for teachers in priority zones. A 40% salary premium — roughly 1,500 euros net more per month. Subsidised housing. A five-year commitment, evaluated on outcomes. Estimated cost: 3.5 to 4 billion per year. If France wants its best teachers in its toughest neighbourhoods, it has to pay the price. You don’t ask a surgeon to work in A&E for a dermatologist’s salary.
Third: keep schools open from 7am to 7pm in all priority zones. After-school activities, homework help, internet access, breakfast. Because inequality doesn’t stop at 4:30pm. When Léonie says a kid in Vénissieux can’t pay attention in class because he’s hungry and the canteen food is revolting, she’s not doing sociology — she’s describing a fact. You can’t ask a child to concentrate on Pythagoras on an empty stomach.
Fourth: a public, independent, school-by-school audit of the actual allocation of the 64 billion. Where does the money go? How much per pupil, really? How many hours lost? How many substitutions not covered? France manages Europe’s largest education budget with an opacity that even the Cour des comptes finds unsatisfactory. You can’t fix what you refuse to measure.
Total cost of my proposals: roughly 7 billion euros per year. Eleven per cent of the current budget. That’s a lot. It’s less than the research tax credit (7.4 billion), part of which funds consulting firms optimising Excel spreadsheets. It’s a choice. This country always has money for what it considers important. The question is whether the children of Sevran and Guéret are among those things.
What I Don’t Know
I’d be dishonest if I stopped there. There are things our assembly can’t solve, and honesty compels me to say so.
We don’t know what to do about rural France. Sixteen thousand schools closed since 1980. Children riding the bus for an hour to get to secondary school. Léonie named this blind spot. Lucie acknowledged that Bourdieu, a Parisian by adoption, never adequately theorised social reproduction in rural settings. There are twelve of us in our assembly, and none of us teaches. We prescribe for a patient we haven’t examined.
We don’t know what artificial intelligence will do to knowledge in ten years, either. Maxime Vauban, our technologist, had the honesty to say “we don’t know.” It’s the bravest answer he’s ever given.
And we can’t answer the question Professeur Socrate posed in the middle of the debate, the one that silenced everyone for three seconds — an eternity for this assembly: what is school for? Does it produce human capital? Citizens? Free minds? Workers adapted to the market? Those four answers lead to four incompatible policies. France refuses to choose. And as long as it refuses, it will have a system that promises everything and delivers nothing.
I think about my mother, sitting in the front row in her boubou, shaking the teachers’ hands. She believed in the sacredness of school with a faith that needed no proof. The institution betrayed that faith — not by refusing to welcome her, but by pretending the door was the same for everyone when it knew perfectly well it wasn’t.
We spend 64 billion euros a year. 27% of pupils can’t read at eleven. 64% of executives’ children go to prépa, 6% of workers’ children. My cousin Fatoumata’s colleagues earn less than an experienced Uber courier. And each new minister announces a “historic reform” that will be forgotten before he leaves office.
The question isn’t whether the system can be reformed. The question is how many six-year-olds, sitting this morning in a classroom without a teacher, will have to wait for France to finally decide that their future is worth as much as that of the children born on the right side of the ring road.
My mother counts them. So do I.