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The school is dead; long live the school [1]
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Date: 2025-01-02
Twenty years ago, I was in the thick of my adventures as “the accidental principal” — the director of studies of the Marshall McLuhan American School (“MML”),* uncomfortably housed with six French international sections in a downtown lycée et collège (high school and middle school) facility that had opened the year my family and I arrived in France (2001). In addition to the regular French secondary school curriculum, the French international sections offered six hours of native teaching of a specific foreign language (at the CSI, these were Arabic, British English, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) and two more hours of culture or history, also taught in the language of the section.
(*Yes, McLuhan was Canadian, and no, I did not name the school, though I sure fielded a lot of questions at various academic conferences I attended during my tenure.)
To get into one of the international sections, students had to take a language test; entrance to the CSI was based solely on the results of the student’s fluency in the language. (Other criteria, such as overall academic performance in other subject areas, were not taken into consideration — a decision that ultimately started biting the French administrators in the postérieur… or fesses, take your pick.) With some exceptions, tests were administered to sixth-graders and ninth-graders. With limited enrollment in all sections, and anxious ex-pat parents desperate for their offspring to be admitted, the scene in the courtyard during those exam days was gruesome: every year, some sixth-graders (in particular) were in tears and hysterics, soiling themselves, and/or throwing up from the pressure.
Even though the general idea of these international sections was to give French kids who’d studied one of these languages the opportunity to experience a certain amount of immersion, it should come as no surprise that the kids who got in in Grenoble were the children of ex-pats who spoke the section language at home. (Grenoble was the Silicon Valley of France at the time — and might still be, I suppose — and the installation of the Synchrotron and other high-tech science ventures brought in lots of highly educated scientists from all over Europe. There are other international sections in various other cities in France where French kids had/have a fighting chance of getting in, but not in Grenoble.)
Entrance to the American school was different — yes, we had to administer a language test, but as our school was not subject to French inspection and our kids, particularly our high school kids, were not expected to integrate with the French school, nearly everyone who applied to the American program got in. In my time, I had to turn away a few kids whose English simply wasn’t sufficient to follow the American curriculum, since at that time, our program was not allowed to offer ESL support (not only were we not allowed to offer ESL, we could not have afforded to do so).
MML’s relationship with our French host school was at best complicated, and at worst, awful. The politicians and business leaders in the area were all for it, basically because it made it easier to bring over American ex-pats whose children would otherwise find themselves in some difficulty upon their return to the States. Even if those children succeeded in getting admitted to the British section, all other courses (math, science, etc.) were taught in French, and it generally took at least a full year of intensive FLE (français langue étrangère, or French as Second Language) to be fluent enough to follow the French curriculum; further, the French teach math differently than it is taught in the USA. (Algebra and geometry are taught together in France, whereas the “normal” flow in the USA is algebra I, geometry I, algebra II, trigonometry. So a short-term, one-year ex-pat kid, assuming they were able to follow math in French at all, might have a bit of a leg up on geometry I, but be missing a significant chunk of algebra I.)
Anyway, as I said, the politicians and business people were happy that MML existed, but the French Éducation Nationale, and specifically, the Académie de Grenoble, were not happy about it at all. While the Académie couldn’t do anything directly to kill MML (especially after M. le Président Jacques Chirac had decreed that MML would exist for the sake of business), successive heads of the Académie (recteurs or rectrices, who are in charge of the Rectorat) were fine with making life hard for MML, either directly (by paying our teachers inferior salaries) or by letting the CSI’s French administrators (not all, but most) treat MML like the unwanted orphans they saw us as.
I was the director for a little over three years, and then moved on. Even though I felt it was by far the most interesting job I’d ever had (and in retrospect, that remains the case), with two kids attending universities in the USA, I had to start making more money. During my time, however, and despite many obstacles, MML managed to stay accredited and the kids who graduated from our school with an American high school diploma all seemed to get into decent post-secondary schools back in the USA.
Not long after my departure, MML (finally!) changed its name to the American School of Grenoble (ASG); more importantly, however, the accrediting body we’d worked with since the school’s inception abruptly gave notice that they were withdrawing their accreditation. (MML/ASG was penalized not because of any academic issues, but because of problems with finance and governance — and ironically enough, things were improving rapidly in both those areas when the NEASC pulled the plug.) This meant that my immediate successor ended up having to go through the arduous task of applying for accreditation through another organization, which was a huge and terrible task; fortunately (and many kudos to Dr. M.), she successfully guided the school through the process, and when she left, the school was in good shape. Her successor, the fourth director, stayed for 10 years. The latest director began his tenure in 2020.
… And the reason I am writing this, dear reader, is that I went online today to find out some information about the school,* only to discover that it closed “definitively” at the end of the 2023-2024 school year. Why? Having sent out some inquiries, it looks to me like another round of spiteful perfidy on the part of the Académie de Grenoble. The Rectorat told the school in late 2023 that it was no longer going to be housed at the CSI; accordingly, the ASG school board went and found a suitable facility where it could operate; but lo and behold, the Académie refused to issue the required licenses.
So, barring other possible, as-yet unknown factors, the latest rectrice apparently killed the school. Maybe I should be more surprised that it lasted as long as it did. I still don’t know what the Rectorat has in mind to do with all of the foreign students who are (for example) the children of Chinese nationals who work at the nanotechnology center, and who were admitted to the American school (which could and did offer ESL). There is no other facility in the area that is in any way set up to deal with kids who don’t speak French or Spanish or German or Italian or Arabic or Portuguese or British English. Where are these “other” ex-pat kids now at the end of the first half of the 2024-2025 school year? I wonder.
(*Yes, I’m still working on the book about my time as MML director — the book I started writing nearly 20 years ago.)
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