Single parenthood and educational performance in Belgium - A Community approach

In Belgium, each community has its own schooling system and there is a performance gap between the French and the Flemish Community, in favour of this latest, which remains for some part unexplained. Since being in a single-parent family harms the educational performance and that the proportion of single-parent families is higher in the French Community, we want to assess the relevance of including the family structure in the mitigation of the Community gap, using PISA data from 2003, 2009 and 2012 and applying robust OLS regressions. Our results show that the raw Community gap has a size of around one and a half year of schooling and that only 26% is explained by the variables already highlighted in the literature. We also show that the family structure, both at student and school levels, can further explain 20% of this raw gap. However, our paper cannot identify the channels at stakes as the main one was found to be the Economic, Social and Cultural Status (ESCS) which was already included in the first variables from the literature review. Nonetheless, we see that we cannot disregard the inequality of chances based on the family structure in Belgium anymore.