The Duplication of Classes: The End of School Failure?

Before reaching the "100% success rate in first grade", we could start by focusing on the already ambitious goal of reducing the share of pupils who have very high academic difficulties in educational priority areas down to the share of pupils with high difficulties in schools that aren’t in educational priority areas, i.e. 18%. This would amount to reducing the number of pupils in very difficult positions by 22%, going from 40% to 18%.
 
Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio), which was implemented in Tennessee, in the US, in 1985, is an example of a successful large-scale experiment in the duplication of school classes. Students in small classes performed better than those in control classes. This progress is observed starting from the first year and is maintained thereafter, even when pupils from small classes then join regular-size classes. Two factors are considered decisive for the long-term success of the children tested in this project: the size of the class and teachers’ professional experience, linked to adequate pedagogy.

How can effective pedagogical transformations be initiated?

This government has chosen a scientific and evidence-based approach - built on the triptych of research, evaluation and deployment - and that’s a good thing. Agir pour l'Ecole is one of the associations that works closely with the Ministry on this approach. The latter aims to overcome the sterile opposition between "global" and "alphabetical" methods, yet it does not present itself as a magical recipe either.
 
A child spends an average of 864 hours per year at school. No extracurricular support program can match this time slot - which is why school is where we need to intervene.

How can we tell the success of one method over another?

30 years of research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and educational economics show that all children can succeed if they are taught how to read with the appropriate pedagogy. The latter rests on the acquisition of four skills that predict the reading level: the knowledge of letters, vocabulary, phonological awareness and listening comprehension. As the foundation for all learning, reading then notably enables students to understand the instructions of the other subjects taught.
 
Among others, our protocol is the result of several years of research and assessments conducted by researchers in France and abroad, by the Evaluation, Forecasting and Performance Department (DEPP) of the Ministry of National Education, the Institute for Research in Education Economics of the University of Burgundy and the Université Lyon II. The first assessments conducted on 150 classes in 2013 showed a 30 to 50% decrease in the number of pupils facing difficulties at the end of first grade. In 2017, in classes located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, the program allowed students to exceed the average level of French students. Each child, when given the appropriate cognitive stimulation, can learn how to read and have a normal experience at school.
 
This rational approach, based on an evaluated scientific approach, is now the matrix of public policies deployed in many countries. We believe that this approach can curb the spiral of academic failure that leads 150,000 pupils to leave school without a diploma each year.