France historically showed its will to welcome migrant children in its public schools throughout the 20th century (Noiriel, 1988; Sayad 2014). The Center of Training and Information for the Enrollment of Migrant Children (CEFISEM)¹ and The Academic Center for the Enrollment of Allophone Children Recently Arriving in France and Children from Itinerant Families and Travellers (CASNAV)² can stand as two strong examples of the state efforts to fulfil its commitment towards the allophone migrant children. Also, the state is trying to develop teaching practices that can adapt to the needs of these children (Mendonça Dias, 2012). For example, the special program The Pedagogical Unit for the Arriving Allophone (UPE2A)³ and the Pupils with Little or No Schooling Before (NSA)⁴ aim to teach French as a foreign language and gradually integrates children in the “ordinary” class. However, although the right to education in France is in principle relatively open in its form for the allophone children⁵ , its implementation can be sometimes more restrictive and heterogeneous (Armagnague-Roucher et al., 2018). These restrictions can be classified into two main categories: administrative and pedagogic. On the administrative level, the access to schools can be denied due to the public policy practices at the level of the municipality (Valette, 2018). As for the pedagogical restrictions, they are linked to the lack of comprehensive integrational program (Armagnague-Roucher et al., 2018). The dominant French logic of universalism, or “one size fits all,” in the education policies underlies both types of obstacle. It permits asking whether there is an underlying form of systematic discrimination in the educational system in that allows only “deserving migrant” (Fassin, 2005) children to access their educational rights in the country.
This ethnographic paper will tackle the question of school access and the regular attendance in the city of Saint Denis of a Levantine displaced ethnic minority known as the Ḍome that started arriving in France since 2014. To do so, the paper will be divided into three main parts. The first part will give a background about this ethnic minority and its migration trajectories in one hand. On the other hand, it will interrogate how to conduct an ethnographic action research in a migratory context (Galitzine-Loumpet and Saglio-Yatzimirsky, 2018). It will expose the position occupied by the researcher as an “insider-outsider” (Dwyer and Buckle, 2009) shifting between several roles in the community. On the second part, the paper will examine both administrative obstacles on the city level and the educational limits of the national program UPE2A in relation to the question of regular attendance and literacy progress of the Ḍome children enrolled at schools. This examination will raise the question of systematic discrimination against precarious communities living in poor areas that are classified by the French Ministry of Education as “Priority Educational Districts’’⁶ (ZEP). The last part will further examine the question of systematic discrimination by analyzing the practices of the Ministry of Education during the first Covid-19 confinement between March and May 2020.

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Notes
¹ In French: centre de formation et d’information pour la scolarisation des enfants de migrants.
² In French: Centre académique pour la scolarisation des enfants allophones nouvellement arrivés et des enfants de familles itinérantes et de voyageurs.
³ In French: Unité pédagogique pour élèves allophones arrivants.
⁴ In French: Élèves non scolarisés antérieurement.
⁵ See the law of the Ministry of Public Instruction n°11696 on March 28, 1882, Article 4.
⁶ In French: Zones d’éducation prioritaire.