This is the title of an editorial in Le Monde from January 23rd. What are the facts? – says a blogger (www.blogajef.fr). For nearly 30 years, this has been a recurring topic in the news because these schedules likely have a significant impact on work efficiency and students’ academic results, and of course, even more so on the most disadvantaged.
In France, given the increasingly poor results of our educational system in nearly all international statistics, asking this question seems, at first glance, common sense.
The length of the school year, here, is one of the shortest (37 weeks) among OECD and European countries.
Here, a schoolchild attends school 144 days a year, whereas the OECD countries’ average number of school days is 186 (and 193 in Germany).
The four-day school week constitutes a French exception in Europe, and only Belgium comes close with 4.5 days.
The consequence of this situation, since our school programs are ambitious, is that we have, in France, the longest mandated class time for students in Europe, with an average daily duration (also the highest) of 6 hours.
It should be obvious that, based on this observation, one of the priorities should be to extend the number of school days throughout the year while reducing daily durations. There should be a national consensus on this priority, fully agreeing with the unanimous conclusions of chronobiologists.
This is the meaning of the Peillon reform, which, besides better distribution of school days, aims to dedicate more time to extracurricular activities (sports, etc.), in order to influence school behaviors: discipline, attention, cooperation, living together, etc., which are known to condition academic performance.
That said, this reform, beyond the corporatist reaction of primary school teachers who wish to remain on a four-day workweek, encounters a number of hurdles, primarily the issue of transferring the costs induced by an additional half-day of classes (service staff, heating, electricity, supervision of extracurricular activities) to municipalities that do not necessarily have the resources or the capacity to implement them by the next school year.
(Note: The mayor of Nice did not miss the opportunity to wave the red flag against government policy with the strength of the result from a consultation organized by the Town Hall itself.)
Almost everyone agrees on the diagnosis: teachers, researchers, doctors, parents, successive parliamentarians and ministers (whether from the right or left), whereas the remedy can only be one: change!
Then there are the interests of each group that knows how to assert them, except for the main beneficiaries, the children, who have no voice (except through their parents, who are also an interested party).
Then there is the particularism of each territory as shown by the mayor of Nice’s consultation: the people of Nice are massively opposed to the reform.
Fortunately, in 2010 we celebrated the annexation of Nice to France!
