zone d'éducation prioritaire - the ZEP Schools

So rewind for a second. I was in Mauritius this summer teaching English. English and French are both taught in schools, but English is the official language of Mauritius which is funny because less than 1% apparently speaks it. So while we were there, and especially because our program director was writing a thesis on the Mauritian education system we found out quite a bit about how the government runs the schools and what sort of funding and programs take place to alleviate the problems that come with all school systems all over the world.

So basically I just really wanted to write a blog post about that fact that I thought it was interesting that there are certain schools that are ZEP schools in France and in Mauritius.

Obviously they got the idea for ZEP schools from France (which is funny because they were "strategically renamed ZEP in 2003" in Mauritius) and both work by giving extra funding to under performing public schools.

In France, from what I've read, since they installed ZEP in the 70s and 80s it hasn't helped very much even though the idea of increasing funding to reduce class size and better performance was believed to be what would work. Apparently 1 in 5 teenagers in France go to a subsided school, and many of them are ZEP. And obviously this goes deeper as these problems come from the segregation along ethnic and racial lines of school districts (which just comes from economic segregation of housing and what not) and how it is hard to keep experienced teachers working there. And then parents sometimes just let their kids drop out of school all together.

In Mauritius, with a population made up mainly of peoples of Indian and African decent, ethnic and economic divide plays some part (especially when you find out that basically the Department of Education and numerous other government departments are run by all Indian staffs), but the defined purpose of the ZEP schools is to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals 1 and 2 and alleviate poverty. Thus the ZEP schools are funded by the government, UNDevelopmentProgram (in Mauritius and Seyschelles) and UNESCO. Here is the January 2009 update, probably the most interesting bits since it's the most recent stuff to come out of the UN about it.


And damn it if I actually find something interesting that I learned at college. This book was discussed in my anthropology class - Ethnicity, Immigration, and Nationalism - and it just came up when I googled 'ZEP schools france.' I could make this post longer, but I'd probably bore you all to death and just list statistics and reasons why I think the French education system is fucked up. But maybe I'll just leave that for another post.