Really?

France and the veil - the dark side of the law

"When the headmistress saw that I was wearing a veil outside school she told me that I couldn't wear my long skirt. She said I was to dress properly, with jeans and a top, or to leave school. So I left." Nineteen-year-old Aurélie, from Paris, knew that there were no grounds to expel her from school - the 2004 law that bans wearing "conspicuous religious symbols" in French schools only applies to headscarves, it doesn't extend to long skirts - but she couldn't face the confrontation. "She [the headmistress] was telling me all sort of things, that I wouldn't find work, that God wouldn't feed me. A counsellor told me she was saying nasty things about Muslims in the staff room. I thought it was unfair", she says, "Why could I not be free to practise my religion and go to school?"

...

Following the 2004 law forbidding religious "conspicuous religious signs at school" (of which 3 Sikh boys were the collateral victims during the first year of application), Tevanian and others decided to make their own assessment of the law. They counted the girls who had been expelled for wearing the veil but also those who had resigned or failed to show up at the start of the school year and interviewed those who had agreed to take their veil off. Very quickly, they found numerous abuses of the law: cases where veiled girls had been denied the right to sit at an exam or to enrol at university, cases where veiled mothers had been barred access to a school when they had come  to pick up their child's end of term report - or barred from accompanying a school outing. And also cases where banks and gyms had refused access to veiled women. Actions against the veil had multiplied in higher education, in the workplace and in in public spaces

But it's a binary decision at the end : either covered hair is allowed, or it isn't

I would dispute even that. The same way you can hide your cross in your shirt you can also wear a bandanna other girls wear as purely a fashion item, but even this wasn't acceptable in the Islamophobic craze.

What's more, organisationally, schools don't have autonomy to fix local rules

What local rules do you mean? Are you speaking about the pre-2004 situation, or some rules above the ban pushed for and enacted by the conservative national government (with Socialist support) in 2004?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}