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

45 Pages Posted: 5 Dec 2014

See all articles by Marion Goussé

Marion Goussé

Université Laval - Département d'Économique

Noémie Le Donné

Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) - Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC)

Date Written: October 2, 2014

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.

Keywords: Educational inequality, Public policies, PISA, Quantile decomposition, Semi-parametric methods

JEL Classification: I20, I21, I24, I28, C14, C31, H52

Suggested Citation

Goussé, Marion and Le Donné, Noémie, Why Do Inequalities in 15-Year-Old Cognitive Skills Increased So Much in France? (October 2, 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2533735 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2533735

Marion Goussé (Contact Author)

Université Laval - Département d'Économique ( email )

2325 Rue de l'Université
Ste-Foy, Quebec G1K 7P4 G1K 7P4
Canada

Noémie Le Donné

Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) - Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC) ( email )

8, rue de l'Université
Paris, 75337
France

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
107
Abstract Views
676
Rank
456,834
PlumX Metrics