Evidence-Based Education: A French Example. Three questions to Laurent Cros

In September 2017, France decided to take action and diminish the number of children per classes in priority education zones: it has indeed been proved that this measure improves literacy rates. Laurent Cros, director of the association Agir Pour l’Ecole which conducts fieldwork in schools across the country, explains to us how this policy works and why it is relevant.

You were one of the pioneering thinkers of the school reform that was launched in September 2017 to halve class sizes in priority education zones. Where did this idea come from? According to you, what does its efficiency stem from? What is your assessment of the current administration’s development of the policy?

In France, large towns’ suburbs and other poor areas have fallen behind national average for a long time now. Not a single reform in the past 30 years has managed to slow down this phenomenon. 

Yet a more extensive action, so as to decrease the average class size, had not been tested yet. However, international studies - among which Tennessee’s STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) in the US as well as a French experiment from 2002 -, show that a strong reduction of the number of students in a given class could bring a substantial level increase. 

This reform started last September on a large scale: more than 2,000 first grade classes have undergone this change. This is an unprecedented effort made for deprived neighborhoods, which will be extended to second grade classes next year. According to me, this is very encouraging.

You manage a non-profit organization, “Agir Pour l'Ecole” (which translates into “Act for School”), whose focus is on teaching young children how to read within classrooms, by working with teachers and by implementing relevant technology. Is reading still really priority for a developed country like France? What is the method you have chosen to adopt to teach how to read? 

International rankings, such as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), show that France is very late when it comes to the acquisition of fundamental competences. 

Our monitoring of classroom performance shows that this drop behind happens very early, sometimes in first grade: 20% of children do not learn how to read properly in first grade. This delay is yet rarely caught up because reading impacts other competences, like vocabulary, writing, comprehension, etc.  This is why the percentage tends to increase with time.  

In order to improve literacy rates, our organization Agir Pour l’Ecole uses methods from the field of cognitive psychology: group work, longer learning time for students with poorer results, repetitions of notions until they become automatic, etc. 

How do you conduct the evaluation of your experiments? How has the education community received your work so far? 

The process of evaluation resembles the one in medicine, during clinical testing. Our work is to promote evidence-based education. This means that we follow and monitor two identical groups of pupils. In one of these groups, we modify the pedagogic method; in the other, nothing changes (this is what we call the control group). At the end of the academic year, we assess the differences between both groups, to notice the results. 

In France, the scientific approach of education is only recent, so the culture of executives working at the Ministry of Education mostly rely on education theories from the 1960s and 1970s (inspired by Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori and Celestin Freinet). 

Thus, it is not easy to change their point of view in the short run. Yet we notice that teachers increasingly appreciate the scientific approach and do not wish to go back to old methods since they now obtain much better results. It is therefore very promising!