In this exceptional three part series, Eve and Laurel Zuckerman discuss On Achève Bien Les Ecoliers, with author Peter Gumbel, international journalist and professor at Sciences Po.

Peter Gumbel’s essay, which documents how certain teaching practices common in France can destroy confidence and make children ill, has been acclaimed both in France and abroad and is now a bestseller.

Gumbel demonstrates, to an extent that will surprise even the system’s critics, how French teaching methods shortchange not only the less able students, but the most gifted students as well. He makes several specific suggestions, such as replacing the 0-20 grading system with A,B, C and D, teacher exchanges and introduction of internationally recognized "best practices" into the classroom. (see parts one and two)

But is change really possible? Interview by Laurel Zuckerman.



Interview with Peter Gumbel Part Three: Can the System be Reformed?

Laurel Zuckerman : Peter, I completely agree with you about changing the grading system and the necessity for sending young teachers abroad in order to expose them to other norms and classroom practices. I think you are 100% right about the fundamental importance of good teacher training (see part one). But my questions concern the system’s ability to evolve. You seem to be optimistic. Why?

Peter Gumbel : Optimism is perhaps overstating it, but I'm not as pessimistic as some others for several reasons.

The first is that the system is so clearly failing the 10 million students it is supposed to educate that the political pressure for change is mounting. The devastating critique of schools earlier this year from the Cour des comptes is one clear sign of that pressure, but many other groups are weighing in, including employers and the armed forces.



Secondly, some things are already changing: look at the Grandes Ecoles, and the way they have opened their doors to the world. More than 20% of the students on the prestigious MBA course at HEC are now non-French! Ecole Polytechnique this year has 700 foreign students. At Sciences Po, every undergraduate is required to spend their third year abroad. All this will introduce French students to other teaching cultures and different classroom behavior, and to judge from students I know who have been abroad, it's always an eye opener.



And of course, since the Grandes Ecoles are at the pinnacle of this heavily centralized system, what they do inevitably spreads down through the rest. That's why I'm watching the current debate about how the Grandes Ecoles pick their French students - and who they pick - with great interest. This debate is not just about giving kids from deprived backgrounds access to an elitist system; it's about the very admission criteria of that system in the first place.

LZ In On Achève Bien Les Ecoliers, you detail classroom behaviors by teachers that are both inefficient and devastating for students. How to improve the classroom methods of teachers in place? (EN is France’s largest source of civil servants, with nearly 1 million government functionaries. How to retrain all these people—who cannot in any case be removed?)

PG Yes, the Education nationale is now larger, in sheer numbers, than the Red Army...



You'll probably notice that in the book I am careful not to attack teachers. As everywhere, there are some wonderful, inspirational teachers in France, some truly awful ones, and everyone else is somewhere on the scale in between.



Teachers, in fact, have become scapegoats for a system that is antiquated. They are badly paid, unmotivated, poorly trained (especially in modern classroom teaching methods) and have borne the brunt of all government "reform" attempts over the past 15 years, which all more or less consist of cutting staff.



Moreover, there is a curious and dangerous antagonism in France between teachers and parents, who tend to blame the "profs" for all their kids troubles.



The key for me is that there needs first and foremost to be a huge rethink of what school is really about. Once that’s done, there has to be a total revamp of teacher training to fit with the new definition (not just affecting new teachers, but on-the-job training for existing ones too).



I strongly believe that the mandate of French school should be enlarged. Now it’s simply a place where knowledge is transferred from an omnipotent authority (the teacher) to passive recipients (the pupils). It's high time for French schools also to be concerned with the personal development of their students, to build their self-confidence, to foster their creativity, to encourage them to participate and think for themselves.



Once that's clear, then you totally transform teacher training to focus on modern classroom techniques, psychological motivation and other practices that will help French teachers do a better job overall.



What really impressed me in Finland, the country that comes top of all the international studies, is that aspiring teachers there go through a lengthy grounding in every aspect of child development, and also spend a lot of time simulating a variety of classroom situations. And then, once they are let loose in the classroom, they are treated like professionals who know how to do their job, and are left to get on with it.



In France, the training is minimal or non-existent (15,000 new teachers this year set foot in classrooms with zero training!). And teachers here are not treated like professionals, but like 19th century factory workers in the industrial revolution, who, Charlie Chaplin-like, simply carry out the orders of central authorities - and are assessed by whether they get to the end of the school program, and not by how many of their pupils actually managed to keep up!

LZ How to reform teacher training? It seems to me to be a structural problem. In France 100% of college and lycée teachers pass the CAPES or agrégation competive exams. What is, in your opinion, the impact of these concours on problems we see in teacher training?

PG It's great to have teachers who are qualified to teach their subjects. That ensures a high level of academic quality in French schools (unlike in, say, the US, where a surprisingly large number of teachers end up teaching subjects they aren't very good at themselves).



What needs to change here is 1) there needs to be a huge injection of genuine "pédagogie" - modern, science-based, proven best international practices that use a large array of psychological, social and other tools to create a fertile and positive classroom atmosphere.



And 2) it's time to introduce into the concours a human element. It's not enough to be good at math to teach math. You also need to have the aptitude and personality to be a teacher. The obvious way to do that is to ensure the concours includes a variety of questions that test knowledge of teaching methods (see above). But also, there should be an oral exam, too, that takes a look at each potential teacher's motivation and personality. That's what happens in Finland, for example.

LZ I agree with you that a strength of the French system is that teachers are qualified to teach their subject. That is a significant advantage. But how to reconcile “pedagogical” training and the “human element” with a high stakes exam situation?

In many respects, the concours process itself subjects future teachers to the antithesis of good teaching practice—flat out competition, excessive criticism, focus on impressing judges (as opposed to communicating with students) and the mastery of arcane skills which are often detrimental in the classroom.

In your book you show that cruel behaviors suffered in the prepas are internalized and repeated by those who experienced them. Is not the same true for the competitive exam teacher recruitment process?

Can teacher training in France be significantly improved without changing the current methods of selection?

PG I don't have an issue with people competing to become teachers. (In Finland, only 1 candidate in 10 makes the cut). It all depends on the criteria that are used to pick the winners. If a strong human element is introduced as part of the concours, it would inevitably change what the judges are looking for. If you clearly have to demonstrate your ability to empathize with and motivate students, then some of the intellectual hazing that's part of the current system would actually weigh against the tough-nut candidates.

LZ What about money? At present, huge budgets, human resources, time and energy go into organizing the competitive exams for recruiting teachers. Each year about 100,000 candidates compete for about 10,000 civil servant slots in Education Nationale. Universities mobilize to provide preparatory classes (each candidate prepares for at least one year); and the exam itself requires buildings, staff, correctors, etc--the budgetary, human and intellectual investment in SELECTION is immense. It appears that so much effort goes in to SELECTING and ELIMINATING candidates that there is very little time, energy and budget left over for actually TRAINING them.

As a practical matter, how to increase and improve teacher training without a major shift of resources?

PG Yes of course you're right: there does need to be a huge shift in the allocation of resources.

Interestingly, the French used to be near or at the top of the list of countries that spent big on education. It's one reason why they used to boast that they had one of the best school systems in the world. In the past decade, however, many other countries have caught up and overtaken the French, who have slipped backed slightly in the percentage of GDP that they spend on schools.



There is a very substantial educational bureaucracy - about 300,000 of the 1.1 million jobs in Education nationale are non-teaching positions. So there is room there to shift resources down the system to the classrooms and to teacher training.



It seems inevitable, to me at least, that a real reform of the education system will require much more power and autonomy being given to schools themselves. In other words, a significant decentralization. That, I suspect, will be the next real battle if any government does get serious about improving the system, since the teachers' unions and civil servants engaged in education derive all their clout from this centralized system.



But if you read the various recent reports on education carefully, not just the Cour des comptes, but also the ones by Richard Descoings and Benoit Apparu, for example, you'll see that they all talk about the need to loosen the reins and give more decision-making ability to the grassroots.



(Little footnote: that's how the Finns reformed their system in the 1970s and 1980s. They essentially ended their centralized control and handed the financing for schools to local authorities, the equivalent of the communes in France)

LZ I definitely agree with you on autonomy. But is this not in conflict with the idea of a centralized national civil service (the famous “grille salariale”)?

For teachers this means that salary increases come from senority and (for an elite) passing the agrégation exam. Being or becoming a good teacher is not rewarded.

How to fix the reward system to encourage teachers –and administrators--to update their skills?

PG I think the biggest motivator would be job satisfaction. If you are treated like a professional and trusted to do the job well, if your work is valued by society and you collaborate well with your colleagues at a school that is a real community with team spirit, then teaching could be fantastic. At the moment, the French are a million miles away from that, and I can sense the huge dissatisfaction that results.

Interestingly, I've had a lot of reaction to my book from teachers themselves, and with only a few exceptions, they have been very supportive. They know the system doesn't work. They bear the brunt of the blame. (You can see some of those reactions in the Cahiers Pédagogiques review of my book, and also in the comments on Amazon)



I'm sure that empowering teachers is the right way to fix many of the problems in the system.



As for salary: this is a very tricky issue. Teachers here are relatively poorly paid. (The Finns earn about twice as much, for example). I know that there are efforts in places like the US to grade teachers and give them financial incentives, but it's hard to make it work well. What criteria do you use to grade a teacher? Civil service status here is a reward in itself.

LZ : Peter, thank you so much for your thoughtful detailed answers. As a last question, I would like to return to the situation in the grandes écoles where I have difficulty sharing your optimism (Science Po and Richard Descoings are, I think, remarkable, innovative exceptions)

I completely agree with you about the grandes écoles and the importance of the admission criteria, as do the members of the government.

“We are going to throw open the doors of places where tomorrow’s elite are formed,” Sarkozy declared in December 2008. “Social mobility is jeopardized by our inability to adapt our competitive exams,” stated Valérie Pécresse, minister of higher education and HEC grad, in October 2009 “Le contenu même des épreuves peut entrainer une certaine discrimination,” charged Luc Chatel, Minister of Education.

However, when President Sarkozy demanded that elite grandes écoles increase the number of financial need students from 10-15% at HEC, Ecole Polytechnique and Centrale to 30%., the initial response of the President of the Conference of Grandes Ecoles was to reject categorically quotas. “Quality will suffer,” their representative body, the CGE, objected. “We are a meritocracy and should remain one.” The voluntary targets for financial aid students were adopted only under extreme pressure from the government and do not necessarily represent a real change in attitude by the elites.

Is there not a danger that France’s grandes écoles will return to business as usual the second the pressure is off?

How to overcome ingrained and powerful forces of reaction from both left and right?

PG I don't share your skepticism. I have found the Grandes Ecoles to be very savvy, astutely aware of the educational system's failings and increasingly focused outward. They compete on an international level with the Harvards and Oxfords of this world, and they can see what others do, including trying to broaden student intake. What they don't want, and I can understand this, is a prescriptive government saying: here are specific percentages you need to meet. Quotas don't really work well anywhere - look at California and the whole issue of affirmative action at universities there. The Grandes Ecoles want to be allowed to set their own admissions criteria (as Harvard and Oxford are) without a bunch of overexcited politicians telling them what to do all the time.

On scholarships, if you look at the numbers, there has been a significant increase in the past few years, a reversal of the trend of the 1980s and 90s, when fewer and fewer kids from poor and deprived backgrounds went to the Grandes Ecoles. So the movement is in the right direction. These elite institutions should be encouraged to go further and rewarded when they do so - but not given specific numbers. That's so French! Exactly the sort of centralizing, knee-jerk reflex that has gotten the educational system in this country into the mess it's currently in...

Peter Gumbel's essay, On Achève Bien Les Ecoliers, is available in French bookstores and on amazon, FNAC and other bookselling sites.