Urban segregation and school inequalities: Structural changes and the impact of the school distric policy reform in Parisian suburbs

In a country where the public school was considered to be the heart of the “Republican model” of equality, the perception of increasing school inequality and school segregation has become recently a worrying concern.

The first part of the paper will analyze the intensity and structure of middle school segregation in the Paris metropolis, using variables describing the socioeconomic background and nationality of pupils in the first year of middle school (collège); it will then discuss the recent trends of change.

The second part of the paper will confront those results about the school population to those regarding residential segregation. The former is not a simple translation of the latter, since several processes contribute to a distorsion between the two: demographic characteristics, particularly younger households and higher birthrate for some groups such as immigrants; economic inequality disadvantaging households with children; parents’ strategies to avoid the local school.

This last process is widely discussed, often referred to the “white flight” in US cities; but the first two processes mentioned have to be analyzed thoroughly in order to understand the scope and structure of the effect of parent’s strategies (which parents, in which local situations?) as well as the consequences of reforms stimulating school choice.