TY - JOUR
T1 - The French zones d'éducation prioritaire
T2 - Much ado about nothing?
AU - Bénabou, Roland
AU - Kramarz, Francis
AU - Prost, Corinne
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the staff of the Department of Evaluation (Direction de l’Evaluation et de la Prospective, DEP) of the Ministry of Education, and in particular Jean-Paul Caille, Florence Defresne, Bruno Dietsch, Martine Jeljoul, Alain Lopes and Antoine Santolini for their support during the development of the data on establishments (FSE data), Claude Thélot for his valuable suggestions at the beginning of the project and the LASMAS-IDL (CNRS) for providing us with the student panels. We have also benefited from many valuable comments by participants in the NBER Summer Institute, the Education seminar of the LSE, the seminar of the DEP and CEPR conferences on the economics of education in Bergen and Paris. We are particularly grateful to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Stephen Machin, Denis Meuret and Thomas Piketty for their insightful comments and suggestions on a previous version. Roland Bénabou thanks the MacArthur foundation for the financial help and the Institute for Advanced Study for its hospitality during the year 2002–2003.
PY - 2009/6
Y1 - 2009/6
N2 - We provide an assessment of the French ZEP (Zones d'Education Prioritaire), a program started in 1982 that channels additional resources to schools in disadvantaged areas and encourages the development of new teaching projects. Focusing on middle-schools, we first evaluate the impact of the ZEP status on resources, their utilization (teacher bonuses versus teaching hours) and key establishments characteristics such as class sizes, school enrolments, teachers' qualifications and experience, and student composition and mobility. We then estimate the impact of the ZEP program on four measures of individual student achievement: obtaining at least one diploma by the end of schooling, reaching 8th grade, reaching 10th grade and success at the Baccalauréat (the national examination at the end of high school). We take into account the endogeneity of the ZEP status by using both difference in differences and instrumental variables based on political variables. The results are the same in all cases: there is no impact on student success of the ZEP program.
AB - We provide an assessment of the French ZEP (Zones d'Education Prioritaire), a program started in 1982 that channels additional resources to schools in disadvantaged areas and encourages the development of new teaching projects. Focusing on middle-schools, we first evaluate the impact of the ZEP status on resources, their utilization (teacher bonuses versus teaching hours) and key establishments characteristics such as class sizes, school enrolments, teachers' qualifications and experience, and student composition and mobility. We then estimate the impact of the ZEP program on four measures of individual student achievement: obtaining at least one diploma by the end of schooling, reaching 8th grade, reaching 10th grade and success at the Baccalauréat (the national examination at the end of high school). We take into account the endogeneity of the ZEP status by using both difference in differences and instrumental variables based on political variables. The results are the same in all cases: there is no impact on student success of the ZEP program.
KW - Expenditures
KW - Resource allocation
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U2 - 10.1016/j.econedurev.2008.04.005
DO - 10.1016/j.econedurev.2008.04.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:67349140644
SN - 0272-7757
VL - 28
SP - 345
EP - 356
JO - Economics of Education Review
JF - Economics of Education Review
IS - 3
ER -