Society, Family, and Inclusive School Lesson 6

Society, Family and Inclusive School Course 2024-2025, Professor: Fatmanil Doner, Lesson 6: Education and Ethnic-Cultural Inequality

• Course title: SOCIETY, FAMILY AND INCLUSIVE SCHOOL
• Course year: 2024-2025
• Professor: Fatmanil Doner
• Lesson topic: Education and ethnic-cultural inequality

Learning Outcomes

• LOS 1: Understand the relationship between school and society through sociological concepts, including fundamental types of social inequality (social class, gender, and ethnic culture) that schools both fight and reproduce.
• LOS 3: Understand how the relationship between school and society changes throughout history and how social inequalities manifest as social realities impacting education.

Basic Concepts: Race and Ethnicity

• Race: A social construction and categorization of people based on perceived shared physical traits, maintaining a sociopolitical hierarchy. It is based on collective, hereditary, unalterable physical and biological characteristics (skin color, hair, eyes, facial features). These physical features are given a valuational significance, (better/worse, good/bad) based on ability, intelligence, or supposed degree of civilization.
• Ethnicity: A characterization of people based on shared culture (language, food, music, dress, values, beliefs) related to common ancestry and history. It defines human communities through racial, linguistic, and cultural affinities, differentiating them from other populations.

Ethnic Diversity and Schooling

• Conditions: Factors influencing ethnic diversity in schooling include migration processes, linguistic differences with the origin country, non-uniform migrant families (variations in family structures, regrouping, transnational families, single-parent, divorces, new pairings), and apprenticeship schemes.
• Impact on Students: Students from ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic classes often experience a dual disadvantage, facing both ethnic and socioeconomic challenges. This may result in a lack of resources (e.g., after-school classes) and/or family pressure for high educational attainment for better job opportunities than their parents.
• School Segregation: Concentration of certain ethnic groups in specific neighborhoods may lead to school segregation. Educational outcomes for minority children are largely influenced by unequal access to resources like skilled teachers, quality curriculum, rather than race itself.
• Student Population Growth: Foreign student numbers in Spain increased by 37% in 6 years (to 944,992 in 2023).

Immigration and Educational Achievement

• Onion Boado (2014): Analyzed the relationship between family and school characteristics, and the gap in children's mathematics knowledge at the end of primary school.
• Key Questions: Is there a worse educational performance by immigrant children at the primary level, specifically in key curriculum subjects? What factors contribute to the educational disadvantage experienced by immigrant children early on? These factors can be due to home or school issues.
• Factors explaining Immigrant Disadvantage: Several factors contribute, including those originating in the home (familial pressures, economic resources, cultural capital) or the school (curriculum, teaching methods, social environment).
• Impact of Household Characteristics: Factors like parents' education levels, number of books in the home, and socioeconomic status influence students' education. Children with mixed/native parents generally show better educational performance.
• Cultural Capital: The number of books in the home can serve as a proxy for a family's cultural capital. Less than 30% of native households report fewer than 25 books. 60% of immigrant households fall into this category.
• School System's Role: In addition to family factors, the school system plays a role in educational inequality. Ownership and socio-economic composition of the school may be important factors. Age at the start of schooling is another significant factor to consider.
• Achievement Gap: Comparing children of immigrants to native children demonstrates an achievement gap, often widening even when immigrant children start schooling earlier than their native counterparts.
• Ownership of the School: Children of immigrants born outside Spain are more often enrolled in public schools compared to children born in Spain. Public school attendance rates for the students of immigrants born outside Spain (84%) is higher than children of natives enrolled in public schools (62%).
• Conclusions: Students of immigrant origin in Spain demonstrate significant signs of disadvantage at a young age. The Spanish education system, although typically perceived as equitable in international assessments (PISA, TIMMS, and PIRLS), needs to address the integration of immigrant children.

Overall

• The overall trend is that immigrant households have limited access to educational resources relevant to academic performance. The beneficial impact of early schooling, that's been observed internationally, isn't quite as strong for immigrant students. Despite this, schools in Spain demonstrate few contributions toward differing outcomes between immigrant and native students.

Explore the critical issues of education and ethnic-cultural inequality through this quiz based on Professor Fatmanil Doner's course. You'll learn about how social inequalities manifest in education and the evolving relationship between school and society.