I grew up in a small, traditionalist corner of France called Alsace. The old schoolhouse I attended as a student hadn’t changed much since my grandparents’ generation. Our desks still had holes that once held inkpots.

The French classroom of my youth, though austere, was a place of high expectations. As eight-year-olds, we spent countless hours memorizing French verb conjugation. We wrote with fountain pens. We learned grammar through long dictations—a ritual of French schooling—and silently copied as our teachers walked between our desks. In 3rd grade, we started to learn a foreign language.

After my family immigrated to the United States in 1998, I found myself in a suburban New Hampshire primary school that was the converse of its French counterpart. Our classroom was colorful and chaotic. The curriculum—particularly when it came to language instruction—was underwhelming. Instead of reciting dictations, our teacher read Harry Potter to us on the classroom rug. And gone were the fountain pens. Many of my new classmates hadn’t even been taught to write in cursive.

When we talk about raising expectations of our kids, Americans often assume that responsibility lies chiefly with teachers—they are the ones who must overcome the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” While it’s true that teachers’ beliefs about their students matter, it’s not their fault that they work under systems—their teacher preparation program, their school district, their state—that have historically neglected to set a high bar for students.

From my experience in two educational worlds, I’ve seen that high expectations for students start with the rigor and quality of the standards placed on schools, particularly in the early grades. Unlike my 4th grade New Hampshire classroom, my French primary school was designed to demand a lot of its students. By the time I completed 3rd grade in France, I had received a foundation in reading and writing that is unmatched even by most middle schoolers I’ve taught in American public schools.

Take the baccalauréat, a series of university admissions exams that French students take at the end of secondary school. Like A levels in the UK or Finland’s Matriculation Examination, the content of the baccalauréat is woven into the national K–12 curriculum and was, at least in the past, known for its difficulty. French schools also use a normalized and objective grading system, in contrast to American schools’ “idiosyncratic” approach. French teachers, meanwhile, must graduate from selective, specialized teaching colleges, where they learn shared national standards.

In America, as David Steiner points out, “three of the major pillars of our education system—how we prepare teachers, what we test, and what they teach—embody industries that exist in their own bubble.” Furthermore, while other countries clearly define and align standards of knowledge, many American public schools deemphasize academic rigor in favor of the acquisition of scientifically tenuous “metacognitive skills.”

I left France over 25 years ago, and its schools have since fallen into a similar crisis for similar reasons. Starting in the 1980s, French politicians eased academic standards to boost the number of students passing the baccalauréat, most recently with French President Macron’s reforms. Today the pass rate for the baccalauréat général is 96%. When my parents finished their secondary schooling in the late 1970s, it was closer to 60%.

In seeking to “democratize” education, French leaders eroded the quality of their schools. France has steadily plummeted in international education rankings—they’re now behind the U.S. in reading performance and science literacy. In 2023, a government report found that more than a quarter of French students lack the required level of language and math skills when they enter secondary school. Teachers, having to cope with difficult working conditions, are leaving the profession in record numbers.

Few American parents would want to recreate the strict French classroom I grew up in for their own kids. Yet if we want to raise expectations for our students, particularly in light of the ongoing academic decline in both France and the United States, we must first commit to rigorous standards.

There are hopeful examples. Some states like Colorado are holding their universities’ teacher preparation programs accountable to the science of reading, while others like Florida have bolstered and aligned K–12 standards, assessments, and teacher training.

The opposite course—with policies like downplaying standardized tests or eliminating advanced classes—will only continue the scourge of low expectations. That mindset has been disastrous for France and has only made their schools less equitable.

We cannot expect much out of our students if we do not care how and what our schools teach them.

Thibaut Delloue works in school choice advocacy and resides in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a U.S. Navy veteran and was formerly an ESOL teacher and operations leader inside independent schools.