The Contradictions of Compensation: Compensatory Education Enactments in Secondary Education

Abstract

This study examines the role of the compensatory education program on the development and management of educational failure in compulsory lower secondary education. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it reveals the everyday struggles regarding how to deal with “difficult” students, as determined by educational ideologies, resources, teachers’ schemes of perception and professional logics. The program is stigmatized and associated with “disruptive” students and hard pedagogic work, with negative effects on students’ and teachers’ experiences and expectations and reveals a limited capacity to compensate for pupils’ disadvantages. Rather than compensating social inequalities, it manages pupils’ social heterogeneity through segregation and exclusion form the inside.