Understanding academic inequalities beyond bias

After a visiting scholarship at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Mathieu Ichou successfully completed his PhD in 2014. In 2015, he was awarded the European Consortium for Sociological Research prize for his thesis, “The origins of academic inequalities: a contribution to the study of the academic trajectories of children of immigrants in France and England”.

In his work, the young sociologist denounces the way immigration is commonly equated to social problems and failure at school.

Your thesis on the academic development of children of immigrants attempts to debunk a certain number of preconceptions about immigration. Can you tell us more about your approach?

Mathieu Ichou: I think the most important thing I try to challenge is the idea that immigration is mainly a social problem.
Immigrants, children of immigrants and immigration in general – especially nowadays, but it was also the case a few decades ago – are mostly talked about in the media and by politicians as a problem, something that is only visible when it creates a problem. This premise is not a good starting point for the sociological study of immigration. In my work, I did not start with the idea that immigration is a problem and I think this enabled me to make progress on two fronts.

First, it enabled me to separate children of immigrants and school failure. In fact, the data shows that being a child of immigrants does not overwhelmingly lead to failure at school, or at least it is not because your parents are immigrants that you are more likely to perform badly at school. The view that equates children of immigrants with school failure overlooks the broad heterogeneity of the so-called “second generation”.

The second consequence is to show how important it is to consider the parents of these children not only after they have crossed national borders, arrived in France, and become visible here, but also before they migrated. The experiences of the parents and their social characteristics in their country of origin are essential factors in understanding and explaining the academic outcomes of their children in the country of destination, in my case France and England.

Is it easy to find the data required to study the school careers of children of immigrants?

Mathieu Ichou: To a large extent, France forbids the collection of ethnic and racial data. One might think that without directly measuring ethnicity it is extremely difficult to quantify the academic performance of children of immigrants. This is only half true, as a lot can in fact be done with the existing data. Like most researchers in this field, the main indicator I used is the country of birth of the children’s parents. This is because I was mostly interested in the consequences of migration on children’s schooling, rather than in the consequences of ethnicity or race per se.

That said, I think that one important area of research, which I could only touch upon in my thesis and which would greatly benefit from the collection of proper ethnicity data, is the study of discrimination in schools. Existing research shows that children of immigrants often feel they are discriminated against at school, especially when it comes to choosing which track of upper secondary school (lycée) they will go into. But very little is known about the extent of this discrimination and the stages of schooling at which it takes place. The collection of data on ethnicity would be a big step towards answering these kinds of questions.

Are educational outcomes significantly different in the UK and France?

Mathieu Ichou: My thesis is a comparison between France and England – I purposely do not say Britain or the UK because my data only covers England. Carrying out fieldwork in England was a great opportunity for me to stay in the country for a whole academic year as a “junior visiting scholar” at Nuffield College in Oxford and also an academic visitor through the OXPO programme in the university’s department of sociology.
I think when people make comparisons, they often tend to insist on the differences; the main question people ask is “what are the differences between England and France?” What my thesis shows is that the common elements are more significant than the differences between the two countries.

Can you tell us more about these similarities?

Mathieu Ichou: I don’t mean to say that everything is similar in both countries, but I hope to have shown that the basic mechanisms of inequality, the processes by which academic inequalities are created in both countries, are similar. These are the processes by which resources from parents are transmitted to their children, and which mean parents with more resources often raise more successful children – this is true not only in immigrant families but also in the general population. The specificity of immigrant families is that parents’ resources are not only gained or defined in the country where the children are schooled but also in the parents’ country of origin.
So, I think that the common points between France and England are definitively more important than the differences in that regard.

And what main differences did you observe?

Mathieu Ichou: If I have to cite one salient difference between the two countries I would probably stress differences in the school systems. One difference particularly affects the academic development of children of immigrants: in France, special education is delivered in entirely separate classes. When people have significant learning difficulties or trouble learning the French language, they are put in separate classes, and children of immigrants are over-represented in these classes. It is a form of internal segregation within the school system and statistics show that once a child has attended one of these classes, it is very difficult for him or her to go back to mainstream classes.

This is also true for example for the vocational track in upper secondary school: once you are channeled into this track, where children of immigrants are also over-represented, it is then very hard to get back into the mainstream academic track. In England, the approach is different. Except in extreme cases, any child that is diagnosed with special educational needs, whether learning difficulties or attention disorder or difficulties with speaking English, will remain in their normal mainstream class and will simply benefit from extra resources. Extra help may include a part-time teacher who is specifically devoted to explaining exercises to them at a slower pace, etc.

Again, at the upper secondary school level, tracks are much more flexible than in France. It is possible for pupils to choose a combination of vocational and academic subjects. This means they are not entirely segregated or relegated into less prestigious tracks from which they can never get out.
Generally speaking, the fact that the French system is more stratified and hermetic is detrimental to the academic achievement of children of immigrants. The fact that the English system is slightly more flexible is beneficial to them.

Indicative Bibliography

Ichou, Mathieu (2014), “Who They Were There: Immigrants’ Educational Selectivity and Their Children’s Educational Attainment,” European Sociological Review, 30(6): 750-765.
Ichou, Mathieu (2013), “Different origins and the origin of differences: the academic achievement of children of emigrants/immigrants in France from the start of primary school to the end of compulsory education,” Revue française de sociologie (English), 54(1): 1-46.
Ichou, Mathieu (2015), “Les trajectoires scolaires des enfants d’immigrés,” Cahiers français, (385): 43-48.