Belgium : Cultural versus Class explanations for ethnic inequalities in education in the Flemish and French Communities

This chapter provides a comparative, systematic review of research conducted between 1980 and 2016 on the relationship between ethnicity and educational inequality in the two main political/cultural regions of Belgium (the Flemish Community in Flanders and Brussels – VG and the French Community in the Walloon region and Brussels – FWB). We distinguished five different research traditions: 1) The ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, 2) The ‘culture and educational outcomes’ tradition, subdivided into three smaller streams of studies: ‘Ideologies, cultural schemes and identities’, ‘Motivations and attitudes towards schooling’ and ‘History, constraints and opportunities’, 3) The ‘language proficiency’ tradition, 4) The ‘school effectiveness research’ tradition and 5) The ‘racial and racial discrimination in school’ tradition. Most of the research traditions were found in both research contexts, however, they were not elaborated upon to the same extent in each region. Furthermore, there appeared to be little interaction between both research contexts. While a considerable proportion of research in VG is written in English and to a lesser extent in Dutch, most research in the FWB is written in French. In the VG, both policy and research consider the importance of socio-economic context and highlight the importance of structural school features, such as tracking and ethnic composition in developing ethnic inequalities but focus mainly on cultural features, such as expectations, aspirations, language and prejudice. In the FWB, both researchers and policy makers tend to reduce ethnic inequalities to structural social class inequalities, with cultural differences (between the dominant and minority groups) treated as a consequence of these.