Teaching to the track: grouping in reception education for Newly Arrived Migrant students

ABSTRACT

Educational tracking has been studied abundantly in previous research. However, the transitions of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) to these (tracked) educational settings are understudied. To facilitate the transition of NAMS to regular secondary education, many countries organise reception classes. This is a separate form of education for NAMS between 12 and 18 years old that immerses them in the language of instruction (i.e. Dutch) and prepares them for participation into regular secondary education. Studying the organisation of reception education is essential to evaluate the inclusiveness of education for NAMS. We take two schools in Flanders (Belgium) as case studies to study in-depth how the grouping of students in reception education influences which track NAMS enter in regular education. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the two schools (2017–2019) and quantitative data on four generations of NAMS (2014–2018) were collected in one of the schools. The five conceptual dimensions of tracking, as developed by Domina et al. (2019. “Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools.” Sociology of Education 92 (3): 293–322), were used to analyse the data. The results show that the grouping of NAMS has a distinct impact on their transition to the tracked education system.

KEYWORDS:

• educational tracking
• reception education
• categorical inequality
• cultural reproduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In these analyses we used the five ability groups as a continuous variable. When using an alternative operationalization with a dummy variable (C–E = 0 and A–B = 1) the odds ratios stay similar (see technical appendix).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Emery

Laura Emery ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. student at the sociology department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and member of the research group TOR. Contact information: Laura Emery, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Sociology Department, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, [phone].

Bram Spruyt

Bram Spruyt ([email protected]) is a professor of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) and member of the research group TOR. His research interests include the sociology of education, cultural sociology and public opinion research. His recent work on education has been published in Social Forces, The Sociological Review, Leisure studies, Youth & Society, Young, European Journal of Education and Educational Research. Contact information: Bram Spruyt, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Sociology Department, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, [phone].

Piet Van Avermaet

Piet Van Avermaet ([email protected]) is a professor of Linguistics at the Ghent University (Belgium) and director of the Policy Research Center on Diversity and Learning. His research interests include multilingualism, social inequality in education, language policy and practice and language assessment. His research on education has been published in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Contemporary Educational Psychology, British Educational Research Journal, Teaching and Teacher Education, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, Language and Education and International Journal of Inclusive Education. Contact information: Piet Van Avermaet, Ghent University, Linguistics Department, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 49, 9000 Ghent, [phone].