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Revue française de pédagogie, n°218/2023

Déconcentration et territorialisation de l'État en éducation : les nouveaux visages des académies

Edited by Xavier Pons

Revue française de pédagogie - Recherches en éducation



This issue is the first to address the question of the regulatory changes currently at work in the French system at the "académie" level, the administrative divisions of the Ministry of Education headed by decentralised state authorities. While the latter's prerogatives are constantly increasing, including in terms of teacher management, very few studies have examined the political and institutional changes at work at this level. Académies are certainly areas of investigation for researchers, but rarely objects of analysis. When they are, initial studies have tended to conclude that they are not pro-active players. This is not the perspective of the articles in this issue, which are devoted to a variety of themes: dealing with educational difficulties, steering by results, teacher management, schooling for new immigrant pupils, etc. Each using their own theoretical approach, sometimes based on a monograph, more often on inter-academic comparisons, they show how a new and very important area of regulation in the French school system is being institutionalised. After reading this issue, it is difficult to continue with an analysis of education policies that is limited to studying the local implementation of national injunctions, as if major mediations were not taking place at the level of these académies.