pp. 93-126

This article studies the determinants of practices for avoiding the school imposed by the French school districting system. The model presented here for Paris middle schools resituates pupil mobility within the competing spaces pupils are enrolled in, without attending to the question of their motivations for enrolling where they do. By examining interaction between pupil characteristics and pupil’s position in educational space (i.e., the sectors from which schools actually get pupils and surrounding neighborhoods), the model leads to identifying the social-spatial configurations that work to redistribute pupils toward schools whose profiles better fit their social profiles. Thus integrating different context levels allows for characterizing the social-spatial determinants of inequalities among social categories.