Fanny D'hondt

Do Attitudes toward School Influence the Underachievement of Turkish and Moroccan Minority Students in Flanders? The Attitude-Achievement Paradox Revisited.

While many ethnic minority students underachieve compared with their ethnic majority peers, they often hold very positive school attitudes. Mickelson (1990) explained this attitude-achievement paradox by the existence of a double set of attitudes. Abstract attitudes reflect the dominant ideas about schooling, while concrete attitudes refer to a person’s perceptions of reality and originate from the educational benefits people expect to obtain on the labor market. According to Mickelson, only students’ concrete attitudes influence achievement. Applying Mickelson’s theory in Flanders, regarding students of Turkish and Moroccan descent, we could not find evidence that abstract and concrete attitudes play a role in the achievement of ethnic minority students. Qualitative research suggests that this could be due to distinct interpretations of success and ways of dealing with perceived constraints. This contrasts with ethnic majority students, who are more likely to end the school year unsuccessfully if they hold pessimistic concrete attitudes.

The Role of Ethnic School Segregation for Adolescents' Religious Salience.

Abstract Public concerns over the possible effects of school segregation on immigrant and ethnic majority religiosity have been on the rise over the last few years. In this paper we focus on (1) the association between ethnic school composition and religious salience, (2) intergenerational differences in religious salience and (3) the role of ethnic school composition for intergenerational differences in religious salience. We perform analyses on religious salience, one five-point Likert scale item measuring religious salience among 3,612 16-year-old pupils in Belgian secondary schools. National origin was used as a proxy for ethnicity. Ethnic minority pupils in schools with a higher share of ethnic minorities tend to be more religious. This relation holds for Muslim as well as other religious and ethnic minorities. Ethnic school composition also moderates the relationship between migrant generation and religious salience: second generation migrants tend to be more religious in ethnic minority dominated schools. For ethnic Belgians the association is moderated by their religious affiliation: Catholics tend to be more religious, while non-affiliated ethnic Belgians are less religious in schools with a higher share of ethnic minority pupils.