France must answer school protests with a public funding plan

The scale was unmistakable. The Education Ministry said classes were fully or partly suspended at 891 schools on Tuesday. That disruption matters to students who want to be in class. It also makes a clear response to the demands more urgent, not less.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said, in remarks reported by PBS News in its AP coverage, “The government and school leaders must listen to students’ concerns and find solutions.” Listening is a start. The next step is showing what officials will do with what they hear.

Listening needs to produce a public ledger

The Education Ministry has opened an anonymous online consultation for high school students. It runs from Monday, Oct. 5, through Oct. 23, asks students to describe difficulties and suggest changes, and is due to produce a national summary at the end of October.

That channel gives students a way to set out their experiences. But collecting responses is not the same as identifying which problems officials will address, what those remedies will cost or how the government will fund them. A summary is a beginning; families and school staff need a plan they can assess.

The government should publish an inventory of the problems it recognizes, the proposed remedies, the estimated costs and the officials responsible for delivery. It should explain how it will pay for the work and how the public can track progress. If staffing, crowded classrooms and deteriorating facilities compete for attention, officials should make their priorities and reasoning visible.

That does not require accepting every demand automatically. A public assessment could distinguish urgent repairs from longer-term changes and explain the trade-offs. What matters is that decisions become answerable to the people who depend on public schools, rather than remaining inside the institutions whose priorities students are challenging.

Safety is real; it is not a school plan

Police used tear gas in Paris and elsewhere on Tuesday. Small groups clashed with riot officers at the end of a largely peaceful Paris march, the AP report said. Officials have a responsibility to protect students, school staff, officers and the public. Clashes cannot be dismissed, and peaceful demonstrators should not be treated as responsible for every act by others.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez defended the police response as proportionate in almost all cases. That position deserves scrutiny alongside the incidents that prompted questions about force. On Monday, Oct. 5, a 15-year-old boy lost a hand in an incident involving a police stun grenade in Lens; the circumstances are under investigation. The injury demands a transparent inquiry, not a premature verdict about what happened.

The strongest case for a forceful response is that blockades interrupt classes and clashes can endanger people. The 891 schools with fully or partly suspended classes show that the disruption was real. Public safety matters, and the government should address it.

But disruption does not answer why students and teachers are pressing for changes to school conditions. Nor does it make crowd control a substitute for decisions on staff, facilities and resources. The government can protect people while treating the demonstrations as a demand for action on public education.

Put the people with power on the record

The government should do both: protect people and answer the protest. The Education Ministry and the officials responsible for education priorities should produce a costed needs assessment, explain how improvements will be funded and set out measures the public can use to track progress. Authorities should also publish the findings of investigations into police conduct when they are complete.

Lecornu and the officials with power over education priorities should deliver that accounting. Students have brought school conditions into the national debate. The next move belongs to those who can decide what changes will cost, how they will be paid for and when schools will see them.