Apart or together: Motivations behind ethnic segregation in education across Europe

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

There is a longstanding academic and policy debate about the possible causes underlying the performance gap between ethnic majority and minority students across Europe. The fact that ethnic minority students underperform compared with their peers from the majority has been widely demonstrated by a range of national as well as cross-country comparative studies (OECD 2006, Crul and Schneider 2008, Holsinger 2009, Dronkers 2010, Park and Sandefour 2010). A number of factors underlying this gap have been identified, of which the most important are the generally lower socioeconomic status of ethnic minority populations and the linguistic disadvantages of children from such backgrounds. However, by analysing the intersecting effects of these two factors, some important country-specific differences were revealed: when groups with similar status and identical language backgrounds were compared, the gap disappeared in several countries (France, Norway and Sweden), diminished significantly in others (for example, in Germany), but stayed significant in others (Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland) (Park and Sandefour 2010). These results suggest that behind the performance gap there must be other factors related to the organisation and practices of education.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMigrant, Roma and Post-Colonial Youth in Education Across Europe
Subtitle of host publicationBeing 'Visibly Different'
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages17-33
Number of pages17
ISBN (Electronic)9781137308634
ISBN (Print)9781137308627
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2014

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