The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

by Raghuram G. Rajan

Today, in any given grade in schools across France, the curriculum is the same. Nevertheless, the French too have not achieved their goal of uniform access to school education. As is common in centralised systems, the teachers who are assigned to schools in the most difficult neighbourhoods are often the ones who have the least power to wangle preferred assignments from the bureaucratic establishment. They are typically the most junior and least experienced. The quality of such schools is lower – in large part because of differences in early childhood learning among the student body and in community support – increasing the desire of any good teacher who is assigned to them to escape as soon as possible. So while the school system in the United States evolved from one that was totally decentralised, and had substantial community involvement in design, to one that has significantly more central direction in parts than at the outset, the French system has had central control for the last two hundred years. The advantage of a decentralised system is the community can shape it toward its needs; the advantage of a centralised system is that it offers more uniform instruction across the populace. Each system has its problems and fails to prepare people in a variety of communities for the market.

American vs french centralised education system