This stigma created by the classification as a "priority" district is all the more damaging because it is not reversible, since the colleges that have left the city's policy (those illustrated by the blue diamonds in Figure 1) do not benefit from a renewed attractiveness, reflecting the existence of ratchet effects that undermine the reputation of public schools in the targeted areas in the long term.
Zoning policies thus reinforce school segregation, and it is very likely that they contribute to reinforcing the urban segregation that they are precisely intended to combat, especially saudi arabia phone number list in the presence of insufficient resources – or too much of them spread from one district to another – to generate sufficient benefits likely to counteract the territorial stigmatization caused by the perimeter of the targeted districts.
These labeling effects generated by priority geography are added to those of priority education policies . The "ambition réussite" networks (which became REP+ priority education networks) have also led to massive school bypass effects. For students living near a middle school classified as "ambition réussite", the probability of enrolling in the local establishment was halved compared to students living near middle schools close to the eligibility threshold, but who did not enter the system (Davezies and Garrouste, 2020). Symmetrically, the probability of enrolling in the private sector was multiplied by two.
These avoidance strategies were carried out exclusively by the least socially disadvantaged and best-informed families. Here again, this suggests that the "priority education" label was interpreted by the most advantaged families as a negative signal about the local middle school. If we take into account the fact that priority education middle schools are by definition more socially and academically disadvantaged, but also the fact that relatively more advantaged families avoid these schools, then the gap in success in the Brevet des collèges between students in "ambition réussite" network middle schools and other middle schools is no longer statistically detectable. The "ambition réussite" system therefore simply cancelled out the gap in academic performance between middle schools targeted by priority education and the others.