Society, Family and Inclusive School 2024-2025

Study Notes

Course name: Society, Family and Inclusive School
Professor: Fatmanil Doner
Course year: 2024-2025
Lesson: Education and ethnic-cultural inequality
Learning Outcome 1: Understand the relationship between school and society, using sociological concepts to identify fundamental types of social inequality (social class, gender, and ethnic culture) that schools both fight and perpetuate.

Learning Outcome 3: Understand how the relationship between school and society in different historical periods has influenced approaches to social inequality, viewing it as a social reality with an impact on education.

Race: A social construct categorizing people based on perceived shared physical traits, maintaining a sociopolitical hierarchy.
It's based on collective, hereditary, and unchangeable physical/biological characteristics (skin colour, hair, eyes, facial features).
Race attributes value judgements (better/worse, good/bad) to physical traits, impacting perceptions of ability, intelligence, and civilization.

Ethnicity: Categorizing people based on shared culture (language, food, music, dress, values, beliefs) related to common ancestry and history.
Human communities are defined by racial, linguistic, and cultural affinities.
Groups distinguish themselves from other populations through cultural particularities (language, religion, traditions).

Conditions: The migration process, origin formation and apprenticeship schemes, linguistic differences, non-uniform migrant families (families with members not all in Spain, families constituted in steps, and transnational families, single parent, divorce and new pairings etc.).
Social Origin of Migrants: Often experience a double impact: ethnic minority and social class origin.
Lack of Resources: May lack resources to compensate for disadvantages (e.g., after-school classes).
Family Pressure: In some cases family pressure in terms of studies (greater educational expectations to obtain better job opportunities than parents) or a lack of incentives.
School Segregation: Concentration of certain ethnic groups in neighbourhoods can lead to segregation.
Educational Outcomes: Educational outcomes of minority children depend more on access to educational resources (skilled teachers, quality curriculum) and less on race.
Foreign Student Numbers: (2023) The number of foreign students rose to 944,992 after an increase of 37% in 6 years.

Onion Boado (2014): Analyzed the relationship between family and school characteristics, and the gap in children's mathematical knowledge at the end of primary school.
Question 1: Has a worse position of immigrant children already been detected in primary education in terms of their results in the most important subjects?
Reasons for Disadvantage: Several factors, including those from the home and the school environment, may explain disadvantage.
Cultural Capital: An indicator that measures differences in cultural capital in families through the estimate of the number of books in the household.
School Ownership: Children born outside Spain are more represented in Public schools.
84% of children from outside Spain attends public schools, while 62% of children born in Spain attend public schools.

Early Disadvantage: Students of immigrant origin in Spain show credible signs of disadvantage from a very early age.
Challenges for Spanish System: The Spanish education system, while historically viewed as equitable, faces a challenge integrating immigrant children.
Limited Educational Resources for Immigrants: A general pattern is that immigrant households have limited access to educationally relevant resources (parental education, socioeconomic status, cultural capital).
Reduced Effect of Early Education: The positive effect of early education for native children is less positive for immigrant children in primary education.