School Business

Follow that money and the first big destination is private tutoring — a sector far larger than most people assume and oddly invisible in the official picture of French education. Parienty gathers the scattered figures to show a market worth, on the order of, a couple of billion euros a year, built on a mix of small ads, informal cash arrangements, and large, listed companies running the whole thing as a franchise business. The dominant players turned helping with homework into a scalable product, complete with branding, call centres and sales targets.

The business model rests on a quiet piece of public policy that most of its customers never think about. In France, hiring someone to help at home — a tutor included — comes with a generous tax break, originally designed to encourage household employment and fight undeclared work. The effect is that the state covers a substantial share of the tutoring bill through foregone tax. Parienty's point is sharp: a service that widens the gap between families is being underwritten, in part, by the public purse, and it is underwritten most for those who pay the most tax.

Tutoring is only the most visible channel. Parienty widens the lens to the broader architecture of choice and privilege that has grown up around French schooling, and here the role of public money becomes stranger still. The country runs a large network of private schools — overwhelmingly Catholic — that are under contract with the state, meaning the state pays the teachers' salaries. These schools charge fees, select in practice through geography and reputation, and yet draw the bulk of their core funding from the same public budget as the schools next door.

This creates a system that looks free but functions as a market. Families manoeuvre. They move house to land in a desirable catchment, enrol in a private school with a strong reputation, or play the rules around specialist options and language tracks to reach the establishment they want. Each of these moves is technically open to everyone and realistically available only to some. Parienty's recurring observation is that the formal equality of access coexists with a thoroughly unequal ability to use it.

Step back from the invoices and the tax breaks and a larger pattern comes into focus. What the marketisation of schooling does, in Parienty's analysis, is quietly reassign the job the school was built to do. A public education system exists in part to loosen the grip of birth — to give the child of a modest household a real path that doesn't depend on the family's resources. A market layered on top of that system does the opposite: it lets resources reassert themselves, converting parental income back into children's prospects, which is precisely what the school was meant to interrupt.

The effect is not that poorer children are formally shut out. It's that the terms of the competition shift beneath them. When a meaningful share of pupils arrive with tutored advantages, holiday cram courses and strategically chosen schools, the baseline rises for everyone and the unassisted child competes against a field that has been quietly upgraded. Parienty's point is that inequality here doesn't look like exclusion. It looks like a race in which some runners started earlier, with better coaches, and no one announced it.

Back at that kitchen table, the parent doing sums is not doing anything wrong. They're acting on the same fear everyone else is acting on, using the tools available to anyone who can afford them. That's the quiet trap Parienty exposes in School Business: no villain is required. A selective system, an anxious public and a tax code that rewards paying for help combine into a market that grows on its own, each rational individual choice adding up to a collective drift away from the equality the school was supposed to guarantee.