Educational change and new cleavages between head teachers, teachers and parents: global and local perspectives on the French case

Abstract

This article combines a global, national and local perspective to study the effects if educational changes over the last 20 years on the relationship between head teachers, teachers and parents in France. Five kinds of transformations - decentralization, marketization, accountability, managerialism and professionalization - are examined in terms of their impact on definitions of the social and professional identities of educational agents and on the redistribution of power among them. The first section of the paper examines main shifts in policy and practice that these transformations were designed to produce from the perspective of policy-makers. The second section analyses the interaction between these global discourses and transformations of French educational models and realities at the level of the nation state. The third section shows how reform projects interact in very different ways with school realities in two contrasting local settings.