Immigrant Families’ Relationship with the School System: A Survey of Four Working-Class Suburban High Schools.
Abstract
Over the last twenty years, research on the school careers of migrants’
children has focused on their academic success. In a 2009 Population
article, Y. Brinbaum and A. Kieffer showed that the educational
difficulties of children of immigrant background were largely explained
by their socioeconomic environment. Pursuing this line of study,
Mathieu Ichou and Marco Oberti adopt a different perspective,
examining the links between migration and education via the
relationship of students’ families with the school system and their
attitudes to their children’s schooling. Using data from a questionnaire
survey and interviews conducted in disadvantaged suburbs of the
Paris region, the authors compare the various ways in which families
apprehend their children’s education. This multidimensional approach
reveals the complexity of families’ relationship with the school system,
and shows that findings are highly sensitive to the type of indicator
used to measure it.