MSc Sociology
Migration and Ethnic Studies
Master Thesis
Too difficult for me?
Children of migrants and horizontal inequalities in education: a matter of class.
By Nicolò Di Bernardo 11261331 Amsterdam August 2017
Supervisor:
Yannis Tzaninis
Second Reader:
Margriet Van Heesh
Table of conTenTs
b) Methodology 41
B.1 Case selection: the suburban area of Quarto Oggiaro and the CEF project 41
B.1.1 The sample 42 B.1.2 The validity of a research with youngsters 44 B.2 Data Collection 45 B.2.1 Participant Observation: on limits and how to over-come them 45 B.2.1.1 When? April and May: the months of the
fu-ture 46
B.2.1.2 Where am I? Who am I? 47 B.2.1.3 Researcher or volunteer? For the sake of vulner-able groups, at the expense of vulnervulner-able people 47 B.2.1.4 Feeling like a student, looking like a teacher: a matter of positionality 48 B.2.1.5 Where again? The outside as a way of breaking free from my role 48 B.2.1.6 “You know, she is worried for your re-search…” 49 B.3 Focus Group: let’s talk about it 50 B.3.1 Procedure 51 B.3.1.1 Chocolate! 51 B.3.1.2 Fast brainstorming 51 B.3.1.3 Discussion 52 B.4 Semi-structured interviews: can we talk about it? 52 B.4.1 Where did I take the interviews? Piazzetta Capuana and its benefits 53 B.4.2 Table of contents: what was I looking for exactly? 53 B.4.2.1 Former educational aspirations vs actual choice 54 B.4.2.2 The formal advice 54 B.4.2.3 Other actors and the informal role of teachers 55 B.4.2.4 A bad student identity in relation to the schools: (in)capabilities translated in specific aspirations 55 B.4.2.5 Alternative readings of student identities 56 B.4.2.6 Knowledge as an expectation over schools and their complexity 56
InTRoDUcTIon 4
a) THeoRY 13
A.1 Social inequality in education: an overview 13 A.1.1 Absolute and relative inequalities 13 A.1.2 Conflict theories in education 14 A.1.2.1 Relative inequalities in the processes of transi-tion: the hypothesis of differential selection 16 A.1.2.2 The theories of cultural deprivation: pre-exist-ing social inequalities in the school context 17 A.1.2.3 The New Sociology of Education: teachers as active selectors and the fight over adequacy 19 A.1.2.4 An all-inclusive reading: cultural deprivation as a function of school selection 20 A.1.3 Puzzling evidences: modest educational trajectories are the result of rationality and free will? 21 A.2 Back on the track: the second-grade choice 23 A.2.1 The focus on the choice of family and children: RCT and Cultural Explanation 24
A.2.1.1 A Bourdieusian understanding of children’s self-exclusion 25 A.2.2 Students’ aspirations as an intersubjective construc-tion: teachers, families, children 28 A.3 The role of school: the unequal orientation advice 29 A.3.1 The orientation as a sub-field: a symbolic fight over the choice 31
A.3.1.1 The structure of the sub-field: a first definition of cultural capital 35 A.3.1.2 Families who cannot fight and the search for children’s account 36 A.3.1.3 Hypothesis: children who fight, children who lose 37
KnoW YoUR Place – on how to change mind PaRT I – children in the symbolic fight 58
1) A student with special needs 58 1.1 ‘Self-exclusion’ as the result of structural exclusion: learning to be a NAI student 61 1.2 Even the worst have bright dreams: the imperfection of a self-exclusion explanation 63 1.3 An obscure symbolic fight 65 2) The advice as the ultimate truth: Fabio’s choice 67 2.1 A haphazard advice? 68 2.2 Teachers who “know me well”: the importance of symbolic power in the fight 70 2.3 Total compliance: the advice as the starting point of a realistic decision-making 73 2.4 Another source of power: teacher’s knowledge over the
reality of the choice 75
PaRT II - The lack of cultural capital: stories of
adjustments 77
3) The renounce of Milka: a matter of family and teachers 77 3.1 “Too difficult for me”: a matter of knowledge and rep-resentations 81 3.2 Disliking university “after a while” 82 4) An ‘autonomous’ renounce: the story of Franky 83 4.1 “I wanted to be a doctor, because I thought that everything was easy…” 84 4.2 Second thoughts before the advice: a matter of hierar-chies 85 4.3 Lyceum is for the superstars of Italian 88 4.4 The linguistic lyceum is not for all the bilingual 90 5) Mika and Franky - Conclusion 91
PaRT III – flIGHT aTTeMPTs, TWo
‘aU-TocHTHonen’ cHoIces 94
6) Families who aim ‘low’: the private fight of Clash 94 6.1 Families who aim high and have the means to do it 96 7) Antoine: when daring comes with a green light 98 8) Clash and Antoine - Conclusion 100
PaRT IV - a DIffeRenT PeRsPecTIVe WITH DIffeRenT Means: The heretics and their as-sets 102
9) Simon – the importance of connection 102 9.1 What am I? An alternative reading of global capabili-ties 104 10) Simon - Conclusion 108
conclUsIon 109 RefeRences 114
InTRoDUcTIon
All over the Italian news and political debates, the increased flows of migrants coming from the Global South is raising many concerns. Too often their en-couraged and missed integration was considered the prelude to a social disaster. However, one topic passed over almost in silence for what concerns immigration: education.
It is indeed quite hard to hear that “immigrants are stealing our degrees”, or that “they don’t want to integrate with our school system”.
Still, numbers grew significantly in the last decade for what concerns the youngsters. Just between 2010 and 2015 the rate of foreign1 students enrolled in public
schools had a 20,9% increase, whereas ‘native’ students show a 2,7% decrease (ISMU, 2016). In 2014, the number of foreign youngsters amounts at 1.125.000 people, around 10% of the resident population under the age of 20 (Molina, 2014).
What is happening in the Italian schools, now that they are more and more pop-ulated by the children of the newcomers?
A fair, heartened political answer would be, “Nothing. There is no they. There is us all”.
1 For convenience, I am using this term to encompass the “2”, “1.75”, “1.5” and “1.25” generations of “migrants”, as well as any other special category that indicates the migration back-ground of one’s family – or better, the absence of a parent that was recognized as a naturalized Italian. This is what most of the researchers underpinning my work did (Romito 2016; Parziale 2016). However, one should bear in mind how multifaceted and fragile such term is. As the reader will see, I do not believe that such broad category has any explanatory value in itself for the kids that fall within it. Moreover, to blindly adopt such category is harmful as it entails the construction of children of migrants as pertaining to clear-cut groups of the social world that one must study as a special case distinguished from the rest. Therefore, to adopt this term often means to reify the conceptual architecture that (re)produces children of migrants’ daily discrim-ination (Schinkel, 2013). However, it is a fact that Italian citizenship is still defined with the ius
sanguinis (Serino and Britton, 2011). Just like autochthonen and allochtonen categories in
the case of the Netherlands, this distinction makes sense insofar as it reflects a difference that is still legally and practically enforced. The use of such broad category will prove to be useful for now, as it allows me to identify on the macro level the result of several structural discrimination mechanisms that are based indeed on those dichotomous, essentialistic and groupist notions of migrants’ groups and cultures that I reject (Pascale, 2008). As in Brubaker (2004), I am here
The principles set out in the current legal order provides that every foreign stu-dent have the right to education and should access in the same “forms and man-ner” provided for Italian citizens (D.P.R. 394/1999).
However, I am not here to discuss over the ius soli, or how race discourses should not be brought into force by law and practice.
Ethnic difference does matter a lot in Italian education, and figures speak clear. One just has to start looking at school statistics under the name “foreign stu-dents” to realize that the gaps are too wide to be a coincidence.
According to the statistics of Italian Ministries of Education, children of mi-grants are overrepresented in school dropout rates, flunk rates and other indexes of educational failure (Molina, 2014).
While at the primary school (6-11 years old) differences between children of natives and foreigners are minimal, the gap grows at the first grade of secondary school (11-13): at the age of 14, right before entering the second grade, 90% of children of ‘natives’ was in time, while only 44% of children of migrants was not flunked yet.
In the second grade, the divide is maintained or reinforced: in the academic year 2012-13 more than the 40% of migrants’ offspring had already dropped out at the age of 18 - around the double of the already unsatisfactory rate of Italian youngsters (Molina, 2014).
How to interpret such failure?
A first naïve interpretation of these data is the one offered by a reifying culturist perspective. Migrants from the Global South would have some inherent cultural features that make them different and can affect every aspect of sociocultural integration, including school performances (Schinkel, 2013). However, this is not the case here, as a number of scholars rightfully discourage the use of such methodological nationalism and discard it as a new form of deceitfully sophisti-cated racism (Brubaker, 2004).
Racism might indeed be the answer for most of the problems involving Global South ‘foreigners’ in Italy. Long ago, it has been proven that racism directly af-fects ‘foreign’ students, since teachers’ stereotypical representations over race can have considerable consequences on one’s performances (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968).
In all my work however, the reader should imagine racism as the omnipresent threat that can potentially exacerbate any of the scenarios that I will offer. The explanation that I intend to adopt in fact have little to do with racism itself, but rather with the consequences that structural racism might have when it forces migrants from the Global South in the lower and most precarious areas of the social stratification.
In the case of Italy, structural discrimination in the labour market concerns mi-grants coming from a variety of countries of the Global South: among them, there are Albania, Romania, the Philippines, China, Tunisia, Senegal, Morocco, Eritrea and Sri Lanka (Allasino et al., 2013). Migrants from these countries are object of structural discrimination and over-represented in low-income neigh-bourhoods, especially for what concerns the northern cities (SecondGen, 2014). The ethnic segregation of migrants from the Global South can have a serious impact also on their children’s school performances.
In the Netherlands, where the topic of the “failed” migrant youth has long been in the eye of the media, Paulle and Kalir (2014) called for a new theoretical and methodological imaginary on foreign youth integration that makes use of em-pirically grounded categories. Integration scholars should not start their analysis with the uncritical use of informants’ (essentialist) categories, but rather with their own empirical and highly objectiveaccount of the distribution of material and symbolic resources – as they are proposed in Bourdieu’s conception of class and different forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986).
By debunking established-outsider dynamics (Elias and Scotson, 1965), in fields of study commonly understood to be indicative of socioeconomic or even cul-tural integration as in the case of educational attainment, one can analyse specific social configurations as a dynamic whole of processes-in-relations. Such pro-cesses are marked by unequal distribution of the resources that constitute the objective constraints social agents move within. Migrants are likely to be
penal-ised in such processes, whereas their parents are segregated in one extreme of the established-outsider continuum (Paulle and Kalir, 2014).
My intention is to apply the same perspective to the run for educational qualifi-cations in Italian schools in which children of migrants are hampered.
In fact, one can observe comparable results with foreign students’ school failures by looking for students’ social background. Italian students whose parents do not hold a university degree and, more generally, children with lower socioeconomic status show significantly poorer school performances and lower educational tra-jectories (Almadiploma, 2016).
The hint that the school failure of migrant children might be a matter of class brings attention back to what is at stake in the successful educational perfor-mance, closed off to a certain “them”.
The performance of children of migrants from the Global South will be indeed the key for inter-generational upward mobility of the ethnically segregated for-eigners. One can easily try to guess what the Italian discourses of belonging will look like in the future by asking: how well are the second-generation students go-ing at school? Statistics pertaingo-ing the educational trajectories of the children of lower-class and migrant families offer a pretty dismal prospect for their upward mobility (Parziale, 2016).
In the perspective that I will adopt, schools are crucial part of this phenomenon. A complex web is systematically filtering out specific ‘kinds’ of students (Young, 1971). Among them, it seems to be that also foreign students are more likely to result unfit.
What I focused on with this research is a particular quantitative evidence that is still hard to explain: the transition from the first to the second grade. Thirteen-year-old students face a critical moment as the main path splits into three major branches: an academic, a technical and a vocational type. The choice of one school over the other has a great deal of influence over the educational and social trajectory that children will take once obtained the diploma (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006). In particular, the strict separation in the three types is characterised by rather different standards of quality, which is probably one of the reasons for the successful educational trajec-tories of those who enrol in an academic track (Benadusi and Giancola, 2014).
Apparently, the highly significant jump they have to make constitutes a filtering process itself - a selection of certain students over others. Children of migrants are among the least successful in this transition.
Statistics grasp in fact a considerable divide between the choices of children of Italian and children of migrants: in the year 2011, only 18,7% of foreign stu-dents were attending a lyceum, against 43,9% of Italian stustu-dents (Queirolo Pal-mas, 2002; Ricucci, 2010; Azzolini, 2011; Azzolini and Barone, 2012). Howev-er, similar results can be obtained by controlling for socioeconomic background (Almadiploma, 2016; Cavalli e Facchini, 2001; Pisati, 2002; Ballarino e Pani-chella, 2014).
What the quantitative analyses capture then, is a differentiation of the three paths along both class and ethnic lines. In the international literature, this is known as the tracking effect: the formal stratification of the second-grade school with consequences over the inter-generational reproduction of social inequalities (Hanuschek and Woesmann, 2005).
The data concerning the second-grade choice are extremely relevant, but also puzzling. As a matter of fact, the decision to enrol in one or the other track is up to the free will of families and children, and accessing any of the three major paths is virtually free from costs (Parziale, 2016; Romito, 2016).
Why, then, so few foreign and working-class students enrol in the academic track? Is it just a matter of different tastes and aspirations? How is it possible that some families reproduce their own segregation voluntarily?
Throughout my problem definition and discussion of the data, I will make use of the analytical toolkit offered by the extensive work of Pierre Bourdieu on social inequalities in education.
In particular, what will prove to be useful is his conception of educational and job aspirations as the result of the complex relation between symbolic dimension and material conditions (Bourdieu, 1984).
Through the formulation of the concept of habitus, Bourdieu (1972) puts for-ward an interesting account of those particular social configurations in which social agents contribute to maintain the status quo of a structure and reinforce the very same conditions that penalised them in the first place. The concept of
habi-tus is at the heart of his theoretical efforts, and is particularly true for educational
aspirations as it places the subject in a circular, mutual relation with her structure of opportunities (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970).
Considering that the subject is contributing to structuring her structure, she has the chance to change its functioning – however, more often it is that very same structure is affecting her own dispositions and choices. When this happens, the individual is subjected to a symbolic violence that makes her adapt to the structure, accept it as the order of things, validating and contributing to her own unequal condition through action.
This first insight provides a first trail to follow in order to build a framework of analysis.
To understand how families and children reproduce their own inequality in Italy, one needs to know the exact mechanisms that regulate the allocation of educa-tional qualifications. The path that leads up to holding a university diploma is an arduous one, which sees also children of migrants unfit, but not just them. Their systematic failure within the school system is not only attributable specifically to their race, but rather to the way one gets to score in an institution that is ap-parently meritocratic but that is legitimizing de facto social inequality for certain social strata of the overall Italian population. What is the structure of opportu-nities for children of migrants with a low social background in the schools, and what are the consequences for the unequal choice they willingly reproduce? It is clear that, in order to understand the position that children of migrants actively assume in the school system, one first needs to dive into that unequal reality of things that binds their vantage point.
Basing on what processes and criteria children of migrants are less likely choose a higher second-grade school like a lyceum? What makes of a student a good or a bad one, and, in particular, what makes her feel she is not fit a lyceum?
My first hypothesis is that the final choice is affected by what children consider to be possible or impossible for them through the new habitus they develop in the months of the orientation.
In the times that precede the enrolment in the second-grade schools, all the children are exposed to a form of symbolic violence that leads them to re-struc-ture their former educational aspirations (Romito, 2016). An intersubjective construction of their objective possibilities can lead some of them to reconsider their former aspirations as unrealistic, and aim for technical or even vocational schools. The main force that define the reality of things is that of the school sys-tem, through teachers and their advice (Romito, 2016).
The knowledge that teachers have grants them in fact the symbolic necessary to speak and establish their construction of the objectivity of the second-grade choice.
When children’s aspirations are in conflict with their powerful recommendation, students are more or less able to withstand such violence and uphold their previ-ous desires, depending on their endowment of some forms of cultural resources. However, I believe that they do fight, or try to. They wonder over the choice and they try to build up their own assessment.
How is that children come to define the reality of things? What is that they lack, when they re-structure their aspirations? What do these forms of knowl-edge concern exactly, what are the realities to define? After the conduction of semi-structured interviews in the CEF, I believe that when children think of the “reality of the choice” they try to answer two sub-questions. How good am I as a student? How good students have to be in that school? Hence, knowledge over one’s global capabilities and knowledge over the school are both the means of teachers’ violence and the means of children’s resistance.
Just as missing such forms of knowledge makes a renounce likely, the endow-ment of these resources can enable children to uphold their former aspirations and dare for the impossible.
By linking the condition of domination with a condition of lack, I want to show how the detrimental condition of children of migrants have a large common ground with what a lower-class condition entails in terms of educational trajec-tories. The factors that make the condition of the children of migrants peculiar can only follow from these premises, as it pertains the structural mechanisms of distribution of these resources.
Children of migrants will prove to be different insofar as they have migrant par-ents, but only for what experiencing emigration from the Global South entails in terms of access to resources in the reception context, or better, in their home, the home of their children.
In the firstpart, I will lay down the overall theoretical framework that informed my data collection and analysis over the second-grade choice. After a brief over-view of the main perspectives over how social inequality is reproduced through-out the school system, I will address the specific transition between the first and the second grade and the many accounts of it that have been suggested. On the basis of the recent ground-breaking findings of Romito (2016) over the symbolic violence in the second grade and the influence of social origin on the way it develops, I will put forward my own understanding of those general and particular dynamics that lead children of migrants to choose for one track over another. The particular frame of their second-grade choice that I will have by the end of this section is the one that drove the methodology I adopted and that will animate the entire analysis.
I divided the presentation of my findings in three parts.
Initially, I will introduce the reader to the basic mechanisms of symbolic violence that re-structure students’ habitus and that I consider with Romito (2016) to be affecting the final choice of children of migrants.
Secondly, I will look closely to the dynamics that foster such re-structuring pro-cess, to identify its core elements and the specific resources that children lack to be able to choose for the higher tracks. A third part will offer a narrow perspec-tive over the different but yet similar choice of two students with Italian parents, a process that was linked to different configurations of the very same symbolic fight.
In the fourth and last part, I will focus on the little signs of resistance that a few students showed me. These students are the “heretics”: those who manage to choose for something else, to access stages of education in which they are not as welcome as their classmates are (Parziale, 2016). Their story will enrich the con-clusion of my thesis, contribute to the theoretical knowledge available over the second-grade choice, and stimulate some policy recommendations.
After having observed how a lack can hamper a higher aspiration, the choices of the heretics can help make clear how specific cultural resources can make a big difference in the decision of children, no matter their social background or the origin of their parents. My few positivist readers will like to see how, when the availability of information changes, children can or cannot follow the education-al paths that structureducation-al conditions would have prohibited.
The answer to my questions can only by achieved through qualitative analysis, with a focus on children’s perspectives over the choice. However, in order to understand the mechanisms of the symbolic violence that targets them, it is first necessary to construct a theoretical framework that shows the role that family and the school system can play in the reproduction of social inequalities.
a) THeoRY
a.1 social inequality in education: an overview
In what follows, I will outline the theoretical perspectives on social inequalities in education of which this study of the second-grade choice is part.
First, I will introduce the concept of relative inequality, and the main theoretical accounts that were provided to explain what mechanisms determine the gener-al school selection of students depending on their socigener-al background. Theories of conflict will prove to be central for my argument. Once I have shown how children are subject to a different treatment in the schools that is ascribable to their social background, I will dive into those exact mechanisms that affect their apparent self-exclusion from the higher tracks, and that will lead my research. This first review is vital for having a thorough understanding of how the school system puts into effect the exclusion of children with certain social origins from the higher tracks, since this is not at all manifest nor acknowledged in the Italian debate over school inequality yet.
In the following pages, I hope to clarify the path that brought me to the formu-lation of my research question. While doing that, I will provide the reader with a broader range of evidence that will turn out to be useful throughout the analysis of the data I collected.
a.1.1 absolute and relative inequalities
When it comes to school inequalities and educational reforms, the first index that was ever taken into account was that of absolute inequalities.
The study of absolute inequalities addresses the inter-generational development of the share of individuals pertaining to a certain social class that have access to the various levels of education. Although important, these parameters do not fully explain the overall configuration of school inequalities and, when tak-en into account alone, they ofttak-en lead to ambiguous conclusions (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006).
If one inquires further, the school inequalities associated with social origins are the product of at least two sets of factors. The first encompasses those mecha-nisms that influence the overall schooling rates, and that affect every individual disregarding their social origin. The second set of factors concerns the mecha-nisms that affect the distribution of educational qualifications among students with a diverse social background: in other words, those factors that determine unequal opportunities of accessing a given level of education and achieving its qualification, depending on the class ascribable to each student (Mare, 1980). This last set of mechanisms concerns the “relative inequalities” in education. These involve the amount of economic, social and cultural resources that are useful or necessary for accessing a given level of education – resources whose availability can vary as it depends indeed on the social background of the student (Bourdieu, 1986).
A first almost ‘experimental’ demonstration of difference between absolute and relative inequalities is that of the many educational reforms that took place in Europe during the 20th century.
Asa great number of empirical studies have shown, while these reforms addressed absolute inequalities and aimed at increasing the global access and participation to the first stages of education, the effects of relative inequalities have largely re-mained unchanged (Shavit and Blossfeld 1993, Goldthorpe 1996, Becker 2003). Hence, social inequalities persist even when primary and secondary school are made compulsory and accessible for everyone regardless of the social background - and this seems to be particularly true in Italy (Breen et al. 2005; Panichel-la and Triventi, 2014). Such evidence challenges the extremely optimistic and liberal-minded perspective of functionalist theories, disproving that the simple diminishing of global inequalities in education can fill the gaps among students with different social background.
a.1.2 conflict theories in education
The major mistake of a functionalist perspective, which considers absolute ine-qualities as the only key factor, was that of taking for granted the existence of a set of structural and cultural forces that was fostering successfully a common
in-terest in reducing educational inequalities for everyone (Barone and Schizzerot-to, 2006). Conflict theories in education were far from making this same opti-mistic mistake.
Neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian perspectives in fact offer a rather gloomy but ex-tremely pertinent account of the persistence of relative inequalities in education. According to neo-Marxist theorists, the increased openness of education (i.e. the decrease of absolute inequalities) makes sure that higher-level classes can integrate the subordinate classes in the prevailing model of labour division, legitimizing the overall structure of social inequalities by invoking a specious meritocracy in the school system (Brint, 2006). Likewise, neo-Weberian theorists frame qualifications and degrees as tools that allow the elites to monopolize the access to prestigious positions in the social stratification. When lower-class families try to access certain valuable stages of education, their attempts are constantly hampered by the power elites, who save certain qualifications for the few (Breen, 2005).
In sharp contrast with the assumptions of a functionalist perspective, the neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian theories have the merit to acknowledge that what lies beneath the relative inequalities in education is a more or less explicit conflict over the supply of those valuable educational qualifications that might alter the
status quo when they fall in the ‘wrong’ hands. The persistence of relative
ine-qualities is but the result of a successful dominance of the powerful over the weak (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006). Most of the times, this dominance is thought to be well deserved and part of the “order of things”, and thus is accepted uncrit-ically by those who are prevented from accessing certain educational resources. This is what happens when one considers the school system to be meritocratic, whereas the principles that regulate it are indeed the result of a symbolic fight over what is to deemed valuable (Brint, 2006).
If I fail one year of school, who is to blame: myself for the effort I put and the capabilities I have, or an intangible upper bourgeoisie that has plotted for pre-venting people like me to obtain that degree? The second hypothesis sounds like a conspiracy theory only insofar as one does not consider conflict to be a practical realisation: a violence performed unwittingly by the social agents who act in ac-cordance with a limited universe of possible discourses, a doxa (Bourdieu, 1972; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).
Conflict theories, although closer than others to a broad explanation of how rela-tive inequalities persist in education, are still problematic and incomplete. In par-ticular, Barone and Schizzerotto (2006) noticed how in Italy the effects of the social background on the acquisition of school qualifications decrease significantly for higher stages of education. This apparently counterintuitive evidence under-mines the neo-Weberian assumption that the higher is the social position that a given school qualification can grant, the greater it should be the conflict that is preventing subordinate classes to compete for it and acquire it. So, where are the gatekeepers for students with low social origin who try to attend the higher stages? a.1.2.1 Relative inequalities in the processes of transition: the hypothesis of differential selection
The hypothesis of differential selection in its last formulation can be of help here (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964, 1970).
According to such hypothesis, the reproduction of relative inequality is to find not only in the barriers that the disadvantaged, ‘anomalous’ students face within the higher stages of education, but also and most importantly in those barriers that lie in the processes of transition from one stage to the other.
Hence, the proportion of members of the lower class would be lesser when the stage of education is higher. The relatively few lower-class students who have man-aged to pass the trials would then be endowed with equal or even greater school resources than their privileged peers and score for the best (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964). This would explain the apparent little impact that social origin seems to have in the acquisition of, say, a university master’s degree, while in fact an unequal treatment is still in force throughout the school system that prevents children with certain social origin from accessing it (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006).
What are then such mechanisms? In relation to what, how, and by what exact cri-teria the ‘anomalous’ students are more rigorously selected, and thus prevented from having equal access to education? How are poor and good school perfor-mances traceable to students’ social background?
In what follows I propose an overview of how the unfitness of a student is tracea-ble back to her social origin, so to understand how the selection in the transition from the first grade to the second grade can penalise students with lower social background and among them, students with migrant parents.
a.1.2.2 The theories of cultural deprivation: pre-existing social inequalities in the school context
In understanding the reproduction of social inequality in education, I based on a first, still widely shared explanation: cultural deprivation theory. With this term, I am encompassing a variety of different accounts that will turn out to be useful throughout the analysis. All of them are lumped together by a common emphasis on the disparities in the quantity and quality of the cultural resources provided to children with different social background (Brint, 2006). This knowledge gap does not depend on the genetic transmission of cognitive abilities as some theo-rists proposed (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994), but is rather the result of diverse processes of socialization.
Poor school performances would be attributable to a lack in the domestic trans-mission of those forms of knowledge that determine school success. The dep-rivation that affects lower-class children is a lack of knowledge in the domestic context in which they are born and grew up (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006). A first reading proposed by Bernstein (1971) emphasized the connection be-tween school performances and the acquisition of specific speech codes. Since the early childhood, lower-class children learn to speak in a restricted speech code. This deficiency in language generates a number of shortcomings in the development of those symbolic-play skills that are fundamental to gain the cog-nitive abilities necessary for school success (Orr and Geva, 2015).
The reading of Bourdieu and Passeron (1970) is similar, but more comprehensive. Middle- and upper-class parents transmit to their children not only their speech codes, but specific values, codes of conduct, motivation and every kind of knowl-edge over the functioning of the education system that would allow them to score for the best with the least effort.
When they are home, children belonging to the higher strata of society are ex-posed continuously to the good informal lectures of what comes to constitute a
middle-class habitus. This transmission is often implicit, “invisible” (Bourdieu, 1986), and thus difficult to spot when explaining the evident disparities in chil-dren’s educational achievement2.
Bourdieu defined such forms of implicit and explicit knowledge to be part of a “cultural capital”, inasmuch as they act as “assets” (Bourdieu 1986, 4) that a child can play to succeed in the school context. Children who lack most of these forms of knowledge the first day of school are already doomed to be among the last, especially when the schools provide them insufficient knowledge to succeed but never fail to select them basing on the very same lack (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964).
Theories of cultural deprivation address the severe reproduction of the status
quo in education, that is attributable to class disparities and that is still hard to
change, but surely not as hard as DNA transmission is – as it was claimed by theorists of a ‘cognitive elite’ (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994).
Their inadequacy as students is nothing but the echo of the power struggles that forced their parents in the position of the dominated. These children are likely to inherit this very same position, as long as they do not have at their disposal the resources that are useful in the school system and they are selected and prevented from accessing its higher stages3.
2 In some cases, this transmission can be explicit as well. Just think of the help that the family can give a student with her homework (Coleman, 1988). In the Italian school system, parents’ help is taken for granted, or at least strongly encouraged (Parodi, 2012). Some parents might lack the knowledge to help the child in the homework, other parents might have it but lack the time to transmit it due to economic needs, or even because there are not aware of their informally required contribution. Also in this case, both the working-class family (Ballarino et al., 2001) and the migrant family (Barban et al., 2008) are unwillingly part of the reproduction of inequality - contributors of their child’s cultural deprivation due to structural constraints to which they are subjected.
3 This theoretical vantage point will be particularly useful to understand how children of migrants can incur in similar and yet different and harsher evaluations than their peers with an autochthonous family. When the resources that are necessary to move comfortingly in a given field can also be transmitted by the family, the migratory background of one’s parents can put in a different position a ‘second-generation’ child that otherwise would not be any different than their Italian working-class peers (d’Addio, 2007).
This is true for school performance in itself but, as I will show you, it also applies to the way one student formulates the educational choice. When the position in the field of one’s family matters, and when this position is defined by the cultural capital that one has, second-generation migrants find themselves in a different condition that have nothing to do with what they are, but rather with what resources they have and mostly what resources they lack to choose a lyceum.
a.1.2.3 The new sociology of education: teachers as active selectors and the fight over adequacy
Another line of thinking, known as the New Sociology of Education, focused on school reproduction of inequality and students’ forms of resistance (Giroux, 1983).
This school of thought pointed at the pivotal role that the teachers - and the interactions they have with their students - play in defining the school perfor-mances of lower-class children as “poor”.
This theory criticised the cultural deprivation account and claimed for the first time that students pertaining to the lower classes are not at all culturally deprived. The numerous empirical observations within the classroom context showed how ‘disadvantaged’ children were socialised to particular sub-cultures that had the same dignity of the middle- and upper-class cultures, but that the school system was actively ranking as less valuable in everyday practice (Willis, 1977).
Middle-class teachers assess the performances and adequacy of every child basing on their own middle-class culture, and therefore are ready to regard different values, attitudes and cognitive styles as inappropriate both in the school and in society. The key point here is that school is actively selecting children basing on their dominant perspective (Young, 1971).
This hypothesis is consistent with a conflict theory of education, and yet gives us a different perspective over what conflict means. The New Sociology of Educa-tion moved beyond an account of how the stereotypical percepEduca-tion of teachers influence school practices (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968) and offered a broad-er look ovbroad-er how the micro-level intbroad-eractions that teachbroad-ers have with students are affected by a definition of school value that is the result of power relations (Young, 1971). When teachers operate a selection through their grades, they are producing and justifying the social marginalization of the offspring of those very same social agents who could not have their say on what is to consider “ap-propriate” or “valuable” in the school system. In other words, the working-class children will always be selected negatively as long as working-class people do not get to win the symbolic fight that defines what is valuable in the school system.
By monopolizing these criteria, the Italian middle-class created the school in its own image, thus granting an easy access to the higher stages of education only to certain ‘kinds’ of students (Young, 1971). This differential is even more im-portant to acknowledge, as these categories are often the same that children (and parents) adopt to rank themselves in the school hierarchy - to assess what they were taught to call “intelligence” in what one could call a process of subjectivation (Foucault 1975, Davies 2006).
a.1.2.4 an all-inclusive reading: cultural deprivation as a function of school selection
The theory of the New Sociology of Education was first put forward as a strong criticism of the cultural deprivation theories. However, the two are not at com-pletely incompatible and can be joined in an overarching theoretical framework that explains how social inequalities are reproduced throughout the stages of the school system.
Recognizing the centrality of teachers in fact allows us to emphasize a specific reading of cultural deprivation theories proposed by Bourdieu in his latest work (Bourdieu, 1984).
To say that working-class children are subject to cultural deprivation is not to say that they are “stupider” than their privileged classmates. According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1964), there is not a single culture, just as there is not a single speech code.
What makes a given form of knowledge a full-fledged form of “cultural capital” is nothing but its usefulness in a particular context defined by a particular set of outspoken and tacit rules. This is what Bourdieu defined as a “field”: a specialised and semi-autonomous social-spatial arena of action in which agents’ position and pursuit of desirable resources depends on a particular set of rules and endow-ment of forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1984).
Whether it is the familiarity with a specific speech code or a specific code of conduct, what forms of knowledge are necessary to move with ease in the school context will be defined by the practices of the teachers, who conduct lessons and make evaluations.
Students’ ranking, and thus their fitness to the school system, have a lot to do with the particular practices of the individual teachers who manage the class-room. However, the recognized capabilities of a student also depend on a con-sensus pertaining the broader norms that regulate the school system (Bourdieu, 1984). Once the symbolic fight over the structure of the school field lays down the features of the “ideal student”, teachers are provided with a set of arbitrary ‘objective’ criteria to assess what position is to recognize to the student – or, to put it bluntly, whether she is a “good” or a “bad” student.
The definition of the knowledge of middle- and upper-class families as “cultural capital” does not imply in any sense its absolute superiority, but rather stresses its relative usefulness for moving in a school institution that indeed was, and still is, founded on middle- and upper-class values. According to Bourdieu, schools were set up to integrate children in the middle-class and assimilate them to its values. However, when it fails even this mission, as it might be happening in some schools (Bourdieu, 1978), the selection it operates is at the disadvantage of those students who have few or no other sources of such forms of cultural capital (Webb, Schirato and Danaher, 2002).
What the New Sociology of Education clarifies, then, is the active role that the school system, through the sense practique of the teachers, plays in the repro-duction of relative inequalities (Bourdieu, 1994). Children’s performances are ranked as more or less adequate and valuable with reference to the school field. Such evaluation is proposed as an objective assessment of their cognitive capabil-ities that justifies their selection and their (missed) access to higher educational or job positions according to criteria that children internalize and make part of their own habitus (Bourdieu, 1972).
a.1.3 Puzzling evidences: modest educational trajectories are the result of rationality and free will?
Except for negligible variations, both these sets of theories are still widely rec-ognised to be able to provide the best explanation of the persistence of relative inequalities in education (Brint, 2006). Nevertheless, Barone and Schizzerotto (2006) report some quantitative evidence in the Italian school system that is still hard to explain without a wider perspective.
The most puzzling data concern the vertical inequalities in education, i.e. the disparity in the levels of education that children are able to achieve depending on their social background. In their research, descendants of the lower classes appear to be less prone to undertake long educational trajectories even if their school performances are high and would formally allow them to do so – and even when reforms on global inequalities made a certain stage of education free of charge or virtually accessible in terms of fees.
If teachers’ flawed grades were the only factor involved in the reproduction of vertical inequalities, one should at least observe a gap in the levels of education achieved that is parallel to the gap in the school evaluations of the categories taken into account.
Take for instance the access to the Italian university, where tuition fees are (or should be) defined according to each household’s income and should not be a barrier in itself. The discrepancy between the rate of working- and upper-class students enrolling in a university should at least reflect the discrepancy of the final grades that the two samples obtained at the end of high school. But this is not what is happening (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006)
Therefore, in the attempt to explain the gap in the access of high stages of educa-tion, researchers conventionally focused on family and individual decision-mak-ing processes in the area of education, as well as on the structure of constrains and opportunities in which such processes take place.
In accordance with recent evidence (Romito, 2016), I argue that the differences in access to the higher stages of education can be explained with the differential selection operated by the school system. One can find this active unequal selec-tion in the transiselec-tion from the first to the second grade of the public school, and the way families and children construct their aspirations toward three extremely different educational paths. Through some specific school devices, teachers adopt discriminatory practices that can affect the free will of children and their fami-lies, leading them to reproduce and reinforce the gap between second generation and Italian students (cf. Introduction).
In order to do understand how this is happening, it is first necessary to have a closer look to the mechanisms that regulate such choice.
a.2 back on the track: the second-grade choice
Until now, we have been talking of relative inequalities in their ver-tical dimension. The social inequalities of the verver-tical dimension are those that concern the height of the level of education that children are more or less likely to achieve depending on their social background. In Italy, a great number of researches examined the long-term trends in the re-lationship between education and social origin, focusing particularly on the un-equal possibilities to access the university and obtain a degree (Barone 2009, Cobalti and Schizzerotto 1993, Pisati 2002).
For what concerns vertical inequalities in the second grade, figures are clear: nowadays, thanks to the global inequality reforms, every student is very likely to enrol in a second-grade school regardless social background (Panichella and Triventi, 2014). Nevertheless, to say that all children are likely to enrol in a sec-ond-grade school, is not to say that this transition is free from relative inequali-ties. The stage of the second grade in fact is divided in three major tracks: a voca-tional, a technical and an academic track. As well shown by a vast literature, each of these tracks provides rather different educational qualifications and discloses different educational and occupational destinations (Checchi and Flabbi 2007, Parziale, 2016). In particular, the academic track grants students an easier access to the university and inter-generational mobility, whereas attending a technical or a vocational track facilitates their immediate entry in the lower positions of the labour market (Muller and Shavit 1998, Checchi and Flabbi 2007, Cappel-lari 2005, BalCappel-larino and Checchi 2006, Mocetti 2008).
Does the social background of first-grade students play a role in defining what ex-act second-grade diploma they will run for as they choose one track over the other? These questions concern the horizontal dimension of inequality, an extremely overlooked aspect of the intergenerational transmission of inequality in Italian education.
Up to now, the choice among the vocational, technical and academic tracks was investigated predominantly through quantitative analyses. A great number of studies showed how students with lower social background are more likely to
attend technical or vocational schools, whereas students with higher social origin are more likely to enrol in the academic tracks (Checchi and Flabbi 2007, Pisati 2002, Barone and Schizzerotto 2006, Conte, 2012, Checchi, 2010). However, how such horizontal inequality reproduced?
Italian researchers provided great evidence over the persistence of relative ine-qualities in the school choice, but quite poor accounts of the social mechanisms that underpin this divide.
This is probably because of a particularity of the Italian system: there is no for-mal tracking on behalf of teachers, and students can enrol in whatever type of school irrespective of their previous school performance (Barone and Schizzerot-to, 2006). Moreover, upper secondary school recently became free in terms of direct costs, since there are no fees and schools are located in any city above a minimum size (Panichella and Triventi, 2014). Even the most ambitious tracks like lyceums are thus virtually easy to access even for a working-class student with poor school records.
How is it then that this gap is still observable even in conditions of global equal-ity and freedom of decision?
a.2.1 The focus on the choice of family and children: RcT and cultural explanation
In these circumstances, it is easy to regard the decision-making processes of fam-ilies and children as the main reason of this gap.
This is why most of the researchers devoted to the topic are still interpreting the effects of social origin in a Rational Choice Theory (RCT) framework of analysis (Parziale, 2016).The main hypothesis is rather simple: there is a preference for shorter educational trajectories on behalf of the working-class families (Boudon 1973; Becker 2003). Whereas families from the middle- and upper-class see in lyceum and university degrees a great occasion for granting social stability or upward mobility to their children, working-class families would frame the same choice basing on the structure of risks and opportunities they live in and the way they perceive it - and hence, under radically different terms. Hence, for even grade, working-class would be less willing to take the risks of an economic
in-vestment in education, and prefer shorter trajectories (Barone and Schizzerotto, 2006).
For a well-informed family, the second-grade choice might indeed be related to the factors of longitude – to the calculation of whether enrolling in a university would be feasible or not in terms of direct and indirect costs.
Nevertheless, this is definitely not enough to claim that all the decision makers involved will consider these long-term factors only – nor to be sure that they will consider them at all (Romito, 2016).
The same focus on students and families was put by another set of theories: that of the cultural explanation. With this term I am here encompassing a heteroge-neous group of theories developed both in the US and European Academia. What they all have in common is the idea that the educational attitudes that drive school choices are determined by cultural processes pertaining specific so-cial milieux – the “private worlds” the students enter whenever they get out of school (Schwartz, 1990). In this perspective, working-class children and their families would perform a cultural self-exclusion from the most prestigious educa-tional paths. Drawing on the symbolic repertoire of their working-class parents, children would develop anti-school attitudes that match with the social condi-tion imposed on them, reproducing and justifying their social marginalizacondi-tion through their own tastes and aspirations (Willis, 1977).
a.2.1.1 a bourdieusian understanding of children’s self-exclusion
Bourdieu proposed a reformulation of this hypothesis that seems to be more pertinent, as it brings school back to its centrality in the reproduction of edu-cational inequalities. The self-exclusion of children would be not so much the result of their processes of socialization, but rather of the way they experienced school, that in turn is determined by the specific features of the school field in which they move.
Drawing on the work of Lewin (1948), pioneer of the yet to come social psychol-ogy, Bourdieu aimed at understanding how social aspirations are constructed and change over time. In Les héritiers: les étudians et la culture (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964), social aspirations are shaped in light of experiences of success
and failure in the school field as well as the degree of familiarity that one student has with the hypothetical object of desire. According to Bourdieu, the reason for the self-exclusion of working-class children lies in the complex relationship be-tween symbolic dimension and material conditions: in the effects of a symbolic violence that leads them to desire only what they can realistically desire.
In other words, students of the working-class do not aspire highly because they have internalized the limited opportunities that exist for those without enough cultural capital in the school field (Swartz, 1997). Drawing on their current per-formances, students learn the limits of their objective possibilities in terms of education and reconcile themselves to these, as they accept not to dream the im-possible (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). However, these renounce stems from in the perceived order of things, and thus the acceptance of one’s limits and the re-structuring of one’s aspirations is unproblematic but rather self-evident, “rea-sonable” (Bourdieu, 1977).
Hence, class-dispositions in education would be explainable in terms of a class-specific habitus: a set of durable and sub-conscious ideas about how the school field works that children develop according to the position they are able to hold in it – a position that is indeed unequal, as it was affected by their social or-igin, their valued endowment of cultural capital in the school field (cf. A.1.2.5.). The theorization of Bourdieu can help us explain the horizontal inequalities in the choice of the second grade as the result of the differential selection operated by the school system. This is because the modest aspirations of children of work-ing-class and migrant families would not be the result of an unspecified ‘free will’, but rather the effect that structural inequality performed on them has on the subjectivity of the discriminated. Through such habitus then, working-class children would validate such unequal reality by renouncing to a high education-al trajectory, and reproduce the very same structureducation-al conditions that prevented them from the high aspiration in the first place.
This determines what he called the circularity between habitus and field. Chil-dren internalize their externality, and thus the position that they decide to take in relation to the school field depends on the position they already occupy in it. As I have shown already in the previous paragraphs, this position is highly affected by the social background of the child due to her inadequacy in a
par-ticular configuration of the school field (cf. A.1.2.5.). When a child observes her own failure and considers herself as lacking the means for excelling in schools, it would thus be ‘natural’ for her to draw on this socially constructed inadequacy and set the limits of the impossible second-grade school she cannot even dare to desire. Through her acquisition of such a habitus, the imposed unequal position would take the form of an unequal position-taking in the second grade, and school inequality would be reproduced through children’s sincere will and tastes. That is what I thought as well in the first place, and this perspective will indeed turn out to be useful throughout my analysis.
However, my own observations as well as those of Romito (2016) have proven that the ‘game’ played over the choice is more complicated than that.
Many of the children with low social origins I talked with were indeed accustomed to their school failure, but, despite their evident disadvantages in the school field, they explained me how they were first aspiring to enrol in a lyceum.
Their modest choice could not be explained with their modest original aspirations (or the aspirations of the families), as some of those who did not choose a lyceum were initially inclined to attempt social mobility through their school choice. This evidence is particularly pertinent for the spurious category that is at the heart of this inquiry: migrant families and their children. Recent Italian and international literature showed how for equal social background the educational aspirations of migrant families are even higher than those of ‘native’ families (Santero, 2012; Brinbaum and Cebolla-Boardo, 2007; Jackson et al., 2012). Working-class families and children, and among them migrant families as well, can aspire for something more than the trajectory that social background and school practices would suggest. Well, then how come that the final choice of the most ambitious children I talked with was still favouring technical and vocation-al tracks and rejecting the enrolment in a lyceum, in line with nationvocation-al statistics? What are migrant and working-class families (and their children) thinking when they perform their own unequal condition through the choice of a technical over a lyceum track – as well as of a vocational over a technical track?
Only qualitative research could provide a detailed account over the way the de-cision makers take this choice, and the specific factors related to the social back-ground that can influence it.
a.2.2 students’ aspirations as an intersubjective construction: teachers, families, children
My research aims at explaining the downward choice of migrant children by taking into account these theoretical perspectives.
In particular, I will show how cultural deprivation and the new sociology of education theories are still relevant in explaining that ‘free’ choice that RCT and Cultural explanation theories attribute to the sole autonomous development of one’s aspirations.
The focus on the household in fact disregards the role that teachers can play in such choice apart from the way they grade students.
It is still true that the choice for the second grade is explainable in terms of the individual and group choices that the family makes as claimed by RCT theorists, since the decision is still formally free according to Italian regulations.
However, recent quantitative and qualitative research over the second-grade transition have shown how the decision-making process is definitely not all ra-tional, and how the final choice is not defined exclusively within the household, but rather in the interactions that families have with teachers. More specifically, teachers deliver a formal, unequal advice that is free from obligations, and that families are more or less able to disregard depending on their social background (Romito, 2016).
a.3 The role of school: the unequal orientation
ad-vice
Around December of the third and last school year, two months before the dead-line for the enrolment in the high school, families receive a letter from the first-grade school.
This letter is an “orientation advice” in which the school board expresses its opin-ion on whether the student is more suitable for attending a professopin-ional, techni-cal or lyceum school.
The recommendation teachers make is free from any obligation and only aims at helping families and students in making their own independent choice for the second grade4.
The advice reflects an assessment of the capabilities of the students, that teachers perform basing on both the skills they acquired throughout the years of study in the first grade, and their potential as a student in the range of schools of the second grade.
However, this orientation advice is far from being the simple translation of the grades received by students throughout the years of study – thing that would make the advice, at least formally, meritocratic.
According to Checchi (2010), the grade point average of the students is predic-tive of teachers’ advice only whereas the score is extremely high or low. For all those students who fall in between these two extremes, the advice varies with the social background of the student, meaning that students are significantly more likely to be recommended a lyceum trajectory when their parents have high edu-cational qualifications – and, presumably, a middle- or upper-class background. The same findings emerge when comparing the advices provided to students with the origins of their parents: for equal grades in the final exam of the first grade, children of migrants are advised to enrol in second-grade schools that are
4 The measure was imposed succintly in the 1966 and was never object of changes or ad-ditions. In the deliberation, one can read: “Lastly, the advisory board delivers, for those admitted to the exams, an orientative advice over the choices of the individual nominees, substantiating it with a non-binding opinion. Such advice will be validated during the final examination”. From: Art. 2 comma 2, D.P.R n.362 14 Maggio 1966, n. 362: norme di esecuzione della Legge n.
located lower in the hierarchy5 (Conte, 2012).
The figures offered by these two researches are clear: children of working-class families and, among them, children of migrants in particular, appear as having a double penalty.
On the one hand, the average of their educational attainment is lower, as cap-tured by statistics (Molina, 2014; Parziale, 2016) - a figure that can be explained
with theories of cultural deprivation as the result of a variety of other factors that pertain the selection made by the school system, rather than the objective global capabilities of the children (cf. A.1.2.5).
On the other hand, even by assuming the grade to be a fair and crystal-clear assessment of children’s global capabilities, the advice is still penalizing children pertaining to these social categories, as their social background makes the differ-ence in itself in the formulation of the advice for children that are in the grey-ar-ea of an average school performance.
A deepening of the dynamics that lead teachers to formulate, probably in good faith, these unequal advices falls outside the scope of this research. What is most important here is to acknowledge that the school system, through the device of the orientation advice, is currently pushing for a reinforcement of the divide be-tween the choices made by migrant and working-class families on the one side, and Italian middle- and upper-class families on the other.
I used the word “pushing” because, as I said, families are formally free not to fol-low this advice. Hence, it is difficult to draw a direct causal link between the une-qual advices and the uneune-qual choices on a macro level. Since the responsibility of the choice is upon the family and the child, one could still read the school choice as the simple reflection of the tastes and calculations of families and children.
5 For instance, among those who had 8 as a final grade, the advice was that of enrolling in the academic track for nearly 80% of the Italian students, compared with 30% of students with foreign families. Always with an 8, children of migrants are more likely to be recommended to enrol in a technical track (52% against compared with 19% of Italian students) and in a voca-tional track (16% compared with 1% for Italians).
The gap becomes smaller but persists for higher grades. With 9 as a final grade, around 95% of Italians are advised to enrol in the academic track, while only the 57% of children of migrants is deemed fit for it, and the remaining 43% is directed towards a technical.
However, Checchi (2010) provides another interesting evidence: for equal ad-vice, parents with a higher level of education are more likely to choose a school that is set ‘higher’ in the hierarchy - for instance, by enrolling the child in a lyce-um whereas the suggestion was that of a technical.
Parents with a low level of education, instead, tend to follow the lead of the advice and the school choices developed within their families are more likely to respect the unequal limits set by the orientation advice.
This gap in the ‘brave’ choices of families depending on their so-cial background is even more interesting for us since, once again, com-parable results can be obtained by dividing families on a national ba-sis, i.e. by dividing “Italian families” and “foreign families” (Conte 2012). Working-class families and migrant families are more likely to fulfil the ad-vice to enrol in a technical or a vocational than Italian middle- and upper-class families are. One might still interpret the data with a RCT or a Cultural Ex-planation framework of analysis: working class and migrant families would be more likely to choose for lower tracks apart from teacher’s advice. When the advice is delivered, Italian middle-class families exercise their right to disre-gard it, while working class and migrant families just have no need to do it. Recent empirical evidence over the relationship between teachers and families during the orientation offers a rather different reading of this data.
In particular, the empirical work of Romito (2016) explored how the choices of students with a low social background are often affected negatively by the advice. Working-class parents do initially aspire for the higher tracks. Once the school board delivers their unequal low advice, families would reformulate their choice in accordance with it. This would be, he says, due to their lack of the resources that are necessary to take a ‘brave’ autonomous choice regardless of teachers’ perspective.
a.3.1 The orientation as a sub-field: a symbolic fight over the choice
As above, the choices of working-class families are more likely to fit the new lim-its set by the orientation advice. What is then the relationship between the two? Is it possible to claim that such families are adapting their educational aspirations in response to the advice?
Romito (2016) explored this possibility in an ethnography on the interactions between families and teachers that affect the final choice. Drawing on the analyt-ical framework offered by Bourdieu, Romito defined the processes of the choice for the second grade as pertaining to a sub-field of the school field that has its own characteristics.
This hypothesis followed my same observation.
As he was researching on the reasons for the self-exclusion of working-class fam-ilies from the higher school tracks, Romito (2016) noticed how in many cas-es low-income familicas-es were willing to enrol their child in a lyceum, but then changed their mind and opted for a technical or a vocational school.
Hence, he conceived the processes of transition to the second grade as pertaining a sub-field, right because what happened to those who pass through this transition (namely the school track that parents and chil-dren will choose) could not be explained solely in terms of external factors such as their current position in the school field or social background itself. It was clear to him, just as it was evident to me when I started my observa-tions, that ‘something else’ was going on in the time children and families had to choose a school track. What was it then?
According to his work, it was indeed the influence of a number of school devices pertaining the orientation processes. Among them there is the limit set by the advice, with the many processes-in-relations that will determine how each family will read it and react to it.
Right before the delivery of the advice, Romito noticed how some parents were explicitly negotiating the definition of the student capabilities of their own child with the teachers – they wanted them to recognize that she could attend a lyce-um.
In these negotiations, it was easy to identify a symbolic fight, i.e. an act of resistance towards a symbolic violence performed by the school system through teachers. In a Bourdieusian framework of analysis, a symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition over the dominated agents of categories of thought and
percep-tion that they learn to consider just. Thanks to the symbolic power that their position in the field grants them, the dominant agents can lead the dominated to incorporate those unconscious structures that lead them to perpetuate the struc-ture of actions of the dominant (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).
The enjeu of the symbolic violence observed by Romito (2016) was not so much the evaluation of the student itself, but rather what global “student identity” was to recognize to the child in the advice: what objective school capabilities he had and the exact second-grade schools that these would have allowed her to attend according to teachers and parents.
The evidence of such fight, together with the recognition in families’ choices of a clear ‘field-effect’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) that was not explainable with the dispositions that the actors had previously developed in the school field, made him hypothesize that the choice was not defined within the context of the family only.
As well shown by his research, that of the choice is rather an intersubjective process that involves families, children and most of all teachers – a process reg-ulated by particular principles that are to investigate through empirical research (Romito, 2016).
By taking that of the orientation as a stand-alone field, one can see how the reproduction of horizontal inequalities might be the result of those plays and symbolic fights in which the actors interact and define the “reality of things” pertaining the realistic educational future of their child. The question that par-ents and teachers try to answer is “what second-grade school is this student (my daughter) able to attend for real?”
Romito (2016) observed how, trying to find an answer to such question in this field, families and children are often subjected to specific forces that contribute to structure and re-structure their habitus, thus conditioning their practices and in particular the final school choices.
The term ‘symbolic violence’ should not mislead the reader and make her think that every choice is subject of bickering. An explicit conflict between teachers and families is indeed very rare. Way more often, parents find in teachers’ advice
