Measures to Combat School Dropout in France: Macro and Micro Visions

Nowadays, every European country is concerned with the alarming problem of school dropout. At the European Union level, “the Europe 2020 strategy, through its ‘smart growth’ priority, therefore aims to tackle early school leaving and to raise tertiary education levels” (Eurostat, 2015). This strategy proposes a target of “reducing school dropout rates to less than 10% and increasing the share of the population aged 30 to 34 having completed tertiary or equivalent education to at least 40% by 2020”. The current dropout rate in France is about 9.5% (in line with the Europe 2020 target), and was achieved between 2008 and 2013. Comparative studies consider the dropout problem as a benchmark for the effectiveness of a system of education. Furthermore, school dropout is a social and political issue which solicits allEuropean countries to find new policies to address it, at a transnational, national and local level. We are going to discuss more specifically the French system of education and about some French policy measures adopted against the dropout problem recently. Therefore, it is interesting to focus on the macro and micro-level reasons of the dropout phenomenon (for instance, at the macro level transformations of the job market, new school regulation system, etc. and, at the micro level, dynamics and interactions within the classroom, etc.). Two books published in 2014 are useful to investigate the topic from both points of view.