Why Do Inequalities in 15-Year-Old Cognitive Skills Increased So Much in France?

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse increasing inequalities in French students’ cognitive skills during the 2000 decade, as France is the European country that experienced the strongest rise in performance variance at PISA tests. In particular, French educational inequalities increased due to a decline in the low-achieving students’ performances. We exploit the excellent comparability of PISA scores in reading between 2000 and 2009 and estimate educational production functions in both years. Using semi-parametric quantile decompositions, we assign the difference in the distributions of reading proficiency scores to the different effects of students’ family, school and institutional characteristics. We find that two thirds of the decline in the 20% lowest-achieving students’ scores is related to the declining quality of the French educational system rather than to changes in students’ composition. Our results suggest that the recent reforms of French education policies directed toward disadvantaged students were not successful at improving their performances at school.