France. A New Lebanon?

Some of you may have heard of the riots that took place in France a month ago when tens of thousands of students marched in Paris to protest a government education reform plan. It wasn't the marchers who rioted, however.

Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.

France has had a serious problem with both racial and religious isolation, tension, and violence for years, but the official response has simply been to ignore it and hope it will go away. After the recent rampage, even some of the die-hard head-in-the-sanders are starting to see the futility of that approach.

The article linked-to above, by Olivier Guitta, mentions a report on racial tensions in French public schools that was commissioned by the government but never officially released, even though it was completed last summer. Fortunately, someone leaked it, and a bit of searching turns it up here (file is .pdf).

I haven't had a chance to translate any of it for posting yet, but the bits I've read are pretty grim. One conclusion with which I take issue is that that the authors believe that schools are not the, or even a, cause of the problem, but rather are mere inheritors of it. There are empirical grounds for believing this to be mistaken.

Part of the problem in France is extreme housing segregation by race and religion. More extreme, it seems, than in the United States. But an excellent economic study of the effects of alternative school systems on housing segregation (file is .pdf) suggests that traditional public schooling leads to significantly more housing segregation than a private education marketplace. It further concludes that some sort of parental choice program that brings private schooling within reach of all families would lessen such segregation even more.

Yet another reason why nations on both sides of the Atlantic should be moving toward parental choice and away from state-run education monopolies.

UPDATE:

Interesting post-mortem article here about the demonstration, beatings, and French media reactions thereto.