School Choice, Ethnic Divisions, and Symbolic Boundaries

S. Lund

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137480071
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book enriches empirical and theoretical understandings of how school choice and school segregation are generated by the construction and negotiation of ethnic divisions by placing emphasis on feelings of belonging and we-ness as important structuring forces that guide and restrict students' school choices.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This book begins with a critique of traditional educational research on how class and ethnicity interact with school choice. It takes a new starting point of analysis in concepts of structural and symbolic boundaries, social belonging, and emotions. These concepts are introduced to develop an enriched theoretical understanding of school choices and how they are guided and restricted. It sets out to offer a complementary explanation for the segregation found between immigrants and native students in the education systems of many of today’s economically rich and migration-intensive societies. The empirical focus is on teachers and students who participate in the most prestigious academic upper secondary school program in Sweden, the Natural Science program. Sweden is taken as an example, but the intent is to theorize beyond single state boundaries.

Keywords: cultural identities; immigrants; meaning; social belonging

Lund, Stefan. School Choice, Ethnic Divisions, and Symbolic Boundaries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137480071.0004.

The affective and moral meaning of “us” what might be called “we-ness” is a fundamentally structuring social force. The other side of we-ness, equally potent, is difference: who are they, and why are they here?

– Jeffrey C. Alexander 2013, p. 536

Livia, a 16-year-old second-generation immigrant of Rumanian background, has chosen and been accepted to the Natural Science program at City Academy. Since the early 1990s, the Natural Science program in upper secondary education has been regarded as the program with the highest status in Sweden, generally attracting students with top grades from compulsory school and middle-class backgrounds (Broady et al. 2009). The young woman is very glad to have been accepted to City Academy, since the school has among the highest required admission points compared to the other 12 upper secondary schools in Malmö offering the Natural Science program. In the multicultural city of Malmö, approximately 50 percent of the students in the Natural Science program are of immigrant background. Livia, who lives in a segregated neighborhood inhabited by immigrant families from many nations, tells her story about the multicultural nature of the student body in Malmö, and how the diversity of students influences the talk that circulates in the upper secondary school market:

There’s talk in Malmö that City Academy and Lyceet High School are the two best upper secondary schools. But that’s not true anymore. New groups of students have sneaked into Lyceet High. I think Lyceet High nowadays is a “jugge school”, because a lot of Yugoslavians go there. ( . . .) City Academy is a calm school, which makes it possible to study. I have a friend who goes to Lyceet, and when I go there with her it’s like coming to a recreation area. The students have their feet on the tables, they shout, and it’s turbulent in the corridors. They have the same programs as we have at City Academy, but these other things differ ( . . .) Central High School is also a pretty decent school, but there are a lot of “blattar”¹ there. Then we have Langlet High School, where there are a lot of “refugees”. Blattar – they’re immigrants who are kind of Swedish, but behave in a specific way. It is like a personal style they’ve adopted in their neighborhoods. ( . . .) Refugees are the ones who have recently arrived in Sweden. They’ve participated in a preparatory program at Langlet, and then they start in a national Natural Science program at that school. They’re really newcomers, so they could be defined as refugees. Then I know that a lot of people put the same marker on City Academy as Scientia High School. They think City Academy is too posh. I really don’t agree with them, because Scientia is an upper-class school with just Swedes, but City Academy can’t be defined as a posh upper-class school, not in my mind anyway. But I do have friends who think this way. But they forget that the students at City Academy aren’t upper class, they’re just very ambitious students. ( . . .) The problem with City Academy is maybe that you have to be ambitious and aim for the highest grades. Otherwise you won’t fit in.

As we can see in the above quote, Livia believes that the ethnic composition of the school’s student body is based on social categorizations such as (1) ethnic divisions (juggar-blattar-refugees-Swedes), (2) social manners (orderly-chaotic), (3) social class (posh-middle class), and (4) academic ambitions (high grades–average grades). To clarify the social categorizations used by Livia and other school actors we will meet in this book, I would like to outline the Swedish context in this regard. The official categorizations for discussing diversity in Sweden are “immigrant” or “immigrant background”. Immigrant background refers to someone born in another country or whose both parents were born outside Sweden. In the official statistics, approximately two million first- and second-generation immigrants are living in Sweden, which has a total population of nine million. When Livia discusses ethnic divisions between the different upper secondary schools, she is not referring to the official categories; she is not talking about people from a specific country, Scandinavian or west European students with immigrant backgrounds. Instead, when describing the ethnic composition of the school’s student body she refers to people who are visibly identifiable as not Swedish, speak accented Swedish and/or are associated with tough, immigrant neighborhoods and thuggish behavior (Voyer 2015). In the forthcoming interpretations and analyses, these two ways of categorizing students will be used. My empirical interest, however, is related to how students and teachers, in discourse and praxis, generate social categorizations that in turn become part of the students’ school choice processes.

Livia continues her story by telling how the schools’ student body compositions affect feelings of belonging and thus students’ school choices. Students’ clothing, personal lifestyles, and preferred social interactions are part of these school choice processes. Two friends of hers have recently moved to a different school. Zahra and Samia, both first-generation immigrants from Iraq, started their first year in upper secondary school at City Academy, but changed to Langlet’s Natural Science program during the first semester:

Zahra and Samia feel more at home with the other students at Langlet, and their school performance has also improved since they changed from City Academy. There’s nothing right and wrong here. It’s really just about whom you belong with that matters ( . . .) But I will say this: the thing that really matters is if you feel Swedish or not Swedish.

The choice of school in Livia’s words has to do with social belonging and young people’s feelings of fitting in at one school but not the other. The ethnic composition of the school and whether students feel Swedish or not Swedish seem to be a central aspect of students’ school choices in Malmö. In order to develop the significance of what she means by being Swedish or not Swedish, Livia compares City Academy with her experiences of studying at compulsory school. At her compulsory school, in her age group there had been only ten Swedish-born students with both parents born in Sweden, and although most of the students of immigrant background had been born in Sweden they did not feel Swedish:

What’s interesting is that the students at my old school, though they were born in Sweden, always said they came from their parents’ home countries. At City Academy it’s the complete opposite. Students with an immigrant background say they were born in Sweden if that’s the case, and then they mention that their parents moved here from another country. If you were born here, you say you’re Swedish. And you know, if you – like the rest of the students – speak proper Swedish and behave like the other students at City Academy, they’ll also define you as Swedish. At my old school the majority of the students with an immigrant background were born in Sweden but saw themselves as immigrants, blattar, or refugees.

In my interpretation Livia wants to describe that Swedishness, and its relation to different school cultures, influences students towards expressions of diverse kinds of cultural identities,² but also specific types of behaviors and appearances. Livia tells me that she has become more Swedish since she started at City Academy, and that she is proud of her development. In her own mind, she speaks excellent Swedish and has adjusted to the elite school culture. On the other hand, she is troubled that her visual appearance causes others to frequently ask questions about where she was born: “I can never be as Swedish as you (talking about me as an interviewer), but still, I feel Swedish, I talk like a Swede, I have Swedish friends and I behave like a Swede”.

Livia’s observations about schools and students in the Natural Science program in Malmö illustrate a puzzle: namely, that school choice in a local school market is related to three different but interrelated pathways in which the “free” school choices of individuals are guided and restricted.

The first pathway is connected to the organizational structure of an educational system in a specific time and place. In the present system, a dominant structural boundary that restricts students’ educational choices is the final grades they have attained from compulsory school. This logic defines certain schools as more “attractive” than others, and the more students who are competing to get into a specific school, the higher the grades required to get in become. This results in school competition, whereby the “thresholds” for being accepted to a certain program vary between schools. Since school achievement is partly dependent on various social factors, primarily the educational level of a student’s parents, this is one way in which the choices of “less privileged” students are restricted vis-à-vis those of the privileged (Ball 2003, Power et al. 2003, Reay et al. 2011, Beach & Dovemark 2011).

The second pathway is related to the ethnic composition of the schools. Studies in a number of countries indicate that student body composition symbolically influences school choice. In a study from the United States, Saporito (2003) shows that the school choices of white and wealthy students are not only based on school characteristics such as test scores or safety, but also reflect avoidance of schools with higher poverty rates and higher percentages of non-whites. A study by Bifulco and Ladd (2007) confirms that schools’ ethnic compositions influence both white and black students’ school choices, with white students avoiding schools with more than 15 percent black students, and black students avoiding schools with more than 50 percent black students. A Dutch study states that native Dutch parents are significantly more interested in finding a match between schools’ student compositions and their own social background (Karsten et al. 2003). Ethnic minorities, on the other hand, choose schools with a good academic reputation. In a large-scale study of four Swedish cities, Bunar and Sernhede (2013) conclude that school choice is closely connected to the student body ethnic compositions, which in turn influence the white native-born middle class to avoid schools with “too many immigrants”. Finally, Kallstenius (2013) demonstrates that inner-city schools’ headmasters in Sweden experience that school choice has a weak relation to school organization and students’ academic results; instead, school reputation, school location, and student body structure parents’ and students’ school choices. If a school gradually increases the proportion of students with a mother tongue other than Swedish, then this contributes to rumors that the school has a messy work atmosphere and poor educational quality (White 2007, Sikkink & Emerson 2008).

Finally, the third pathway in Livia’s story tells us that students’ cultural identities (mainly related to feelings of Swedishness), social manners, and academic ambitions enact their feelings of belonging. In fact, these different symbolic meaning systems seem to work as structuring forces in school choice processes. Students use their social and cultural preferences in school choice processes, which guide them towards social contexts where other students are “like me”. At the same time, this also implies that social contexts where students are “not like me” are actively rejected (White 2007, S. Lund 2008). In other words, school choices are not only an issue of strategic or pragmatic rationality (White 2007). How students ascribe meaning to educational contexts and their feelings of belonging also structure parts of the school choice processes. My interpretation is that students’ categorization of the schools, programs, and school cultures construct symbolic boundaries that can generate feelings of affinity or exclusion: I belong to this school! Simultaneously, symbolic boundaries are conceptualized through distinctions of exclusion: I do not belong to that school!

Considering these three pathways, School Choice, Ethnic Divisions, and Symbolic Boundaries, will thus take us beyond common perspectives on school choice. In a general view of the theoretical research agenda, school choice can be associated with Dusenberry’s (1960, p. 233) classical distinction between sociological and economic analyses: “Economics is all about how people make choices. Sociology is all about why they don’t have any choices to make.” Scholars in the field of economy have put their emphasis on individuals’ instrumental and calculative decision making. The basic assumption in social choice theory is that students and parents are expected to inform themselves about what different educational choices mean for their future life chances, and based on this information make rational choices that best meet these preferences, out of narrow self-interest. Following the argumentation of Forsey et al. (2008), students are not “. . . atomistic beings; they are deeply connected to the social structure in which they are embedded” (p. 12). Educational choices and their interactions with context as well as class, ethnicity, and gender are by all means centrally important for and in the generation of social equalities and inequalities (cf. Gewirtz et al. 1995, Ball 2003, Apple 2004, Bunar 2010, Reay et al. 2011, Gudmundsson et al. 2013). But, as Livia points out, school choice is also filled with cultural and social values that help establish symbolic boundaries that define the borders of belonging and influence identification of and with educational forms and ways of being in education and formal learning. Following Geertz (1980), the attempt in this book is to connect school choice to meaning, students’ behavior and feelings of belonging, rather than explaining school choice through explanations operating behind the students’ backs.

Within a cultural sociological perspective, symbolic boundaries refer to meanings associated with students’ feelings of belonging in a specific school culture (Voyer 2013). Education is filled with cultural and social values, and this establishes symbolic boundaries that define the borders of social belonging. Symbolic boundaries are thus assigned to the different actors in the local school market, and, depending partly on their social background and ethnicity, and partly on their feelings regarding cultural identities and definitions of others, students respond differently to these values. Returning to the quote by Jeffrey C. Alexander at the beginning of this introduction, symbolic boundaries include social belonging, or “we-ness”, as a structuring force in school choice processes. Who am I? Who are the other students at my school? Equally important is difference. Who are the students at other schools and why are they there? (Alexander 2013). Thus, symbolic boundaries “. . . also separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and group membership” (Lamont & Molnár 2002, p. 168).

My aim with this book is to enrich the empirical and theoretical understanding of how school choice and school segregation are generated by the construction and negotiation of ethnic divisions, by placing emphasis on the relationship between structural (admission grades and the present educational system) and symbolic boundaries, for example, social belonging and we-ness, as important and structuring forces that guide and restrict students’ school choices. Specific interest is directed towards students’ and teachers’ construction and negotiation of symbolic boundaries. Through this, the analysis will generate empirical and theoretical insights into how symbolic boundaries are constructed discursively and in educational praxis, and how students’ school choices are guided and restricted through these constructions.

To unravel this purpose, I have focused upon students who have chosen the Natural Science program in the city of Malmö. I would like to state three arguments for this methodological choice of study context. First, my choice to study this particular group of students is related to previous analyses of students’ different access to information as a vital part of the educational choice process (Gewirtz et al. 1995, Ball & Vincent 1998, Ball 2003, Kallstenius 2013). Livia’s story, as well as those of the majority of the other students we will meet in this study, can be regarded as stories from “well informed” choosers. They are embedded in social networks that provide them with informal and first-hand information about the schools; knowledge that is conditioned by where they are and whom they know (Ball & Vincent 1998). This is an important pre-understanding for the kind of analyses that will be conducted in this book; for example, students’ school choices cannot be explained through differences in their access to information about the schools and their educational standards.

Second, previous research has focused primarily on students’ choices of upper secondary schools and disregarded the fact that the choice of school (on the upper secondary level) is intimately intertwined with the choice of program (White 2007). Other studies have focused on how decisions are made between academic preparatory and vocational programs (cf. Svensson 2001) or how different demands and expectations of identity formation, learning identities, and behavior are requested depending on which program students are studying (Johansson 2009), but instead leaving out the aspect of school choice and ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  The Study
• 3  School Choice and the Natural Science Program
• 4  Negotiating Academic Behavior and Social Manners
• 5  Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index