French President Emmanuel Macron has announced plans to allow children to begin returning to school as of May 11, but French educators fear that the lockdown measures put in place to combat the coronavirus will already have accentuated educational inequalities.
Those inequalities existed well before the lockdown, but they are likely to have increased. Children living in disadvantaged areas often don’t have the same access to technology and internet services as their wealthier counterparts. The challenges are even tougher for those whose parents don’t speak French.
School administrators have done their best to find ways to bridge the gaps, such as providing tablets for students without computers in the home and arranging remote tutoring, but they still worry that vulnerable students will have fallen even further behind once schools open again.
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