Our research confirms the empirical importance of these two factors

Three educational policies have accompanied the democratization of the school in France: elongation of the school obligation, sectoring of the institutions and the orientation of students. The purpose of my work is to measure the consequences of these policies on educational inequalities from statistical sources to track school and professional individuals over a long period, paths in the broad sense: economic inequalities, spatial inequalities and inequalities related to the date of birth of individuals. It is all the more important to assess these policies that they remain the pillars of the French educational system and are at the heart of the debates on the reform of its functioning.

In 1967, Berthoin reform extended compulsory education in France with the minimum graduation age from 14 to 16 years. By exploiting the fact that she was concerned that individuals born from January 1, 1953, I show that this reform has not improved the professional destiny of affected generations. There was not that of fate: to the United Kingdom, the extension of compulsory schooling in 1973 has helped reduce wage inequality by strongly decreasing the number of students leaving school without a diploma. In France, two barriers explain that the prolongation of education has failed to reduce the number of young people who leave school without any qualifications: the massive practice of the repetition that led too many students to leave school before being able to pass the slightest degree and the fact that a professional diploma requires the pursuit of studies beyond compulsory schooling.

Contemporary reform Berthoin, the establishment of the school map is the second pillar of the democratization of the school in France. With Gabrielle Fack, we examined the effects of this device challenged on residential strategies and educational inequality at the college level. If the school map is today perceived as an ineffective instrument to combat educational inequalities, is that it is superimposed on a strongly differentiated urban fabric socially and can be easily circumvented by the use of a highly subsidized private sector. Our research confirms the empirical importance of these two factors. A work done from real estate and school data very rich covering the Academy of Paris since the middle of the 1990s shows that the sectorization of public colleges has a significant impact on the price of housing. The comparison of the price of real estate located on part and transactions of boundaries between educational sectors reveals that per square metre price increases of 1 to 2 when the score average (20) obtained by the students of the College of the examination of the patent sector increased by 1 point. We also show that this gap tends to disappear in the districts heavily staffed private colleges, which reflects the fact that the availability of the parents to pay for a good public College decreases when they have the opportunity to educate their children in private. More generally, the solutions proposed to reform the functioning of the school map (relaxation of the redistricting, redistribution of the academic sectors, etc.) are unlikely to reduce school segregation if they accompany not devices encouraging public and private institutions to diversify their social recruiting.

By focusing on the socio-economic determinants of inequality to the school, the debate on the reform of our system educational does probably not enough account the existence of other factors which may influence the school fate of individuals, beginning with the month of birth. The repetition, combined practice in early vocational guidance helps amplify the effects of this source of inequality, also surprising that underestimated. As it is usually assumed, the month of birth heavily penalises the academic success and this well beyond primary school: because students born in December are the youngest in their school cohort, they were twice as likely to intensify in their education than their peers in January and have 10 more likely to be oriented professional rather than General lycée lycée. This differentiated approach weighs negatively on their level of qualification and, to a lesser extent, on their professional fate. This phenomenon invites to think about the institutional mechanisms that could be put in place to attempt to remedy this amazing form of school injustice: in addition to a better awareness of educational teams to the influence of this factor and less use of the doubling, a possible solution would be to apply, at least at the primary school, a countervailing factor to the notes to the students according to their birth month.