The Zone d’Education Prioritaire (ZEP) or Education Action Zones policy, put in place in 1981 by Alain Savary, is often summarized as “giving more to those who have less”. A historical overview of its two decades of existence, in the context of wide regional devolution, leads to considerably relativize the dominant representations of the means really allocated to this policy. The attempt to adjust lower secondary schools subsidies according to the variety of projects rapidly fell foul of administrative entrenched habits and of the logic of financial management. Real differences between educational regions as well as between départements (administrative zones) have been observed in the distribution of additional resources, long very modest. The improvement of supervision rates in ZEP high schools from the mid-90’s results either from localization within yet more subsidized categories (“sensitive”, “violence prevention”), or from a decreasing number of students without a decrease in subsidies. The “ZEP bonus”, created in autumn 1990, constitutes a large part of the budget for the ZEPs but has not in practice enabled in return a stabilization of the staff and an improvement in the functioning of the schools concerned.