Session Information
23 SES 03 B, Market Ideas and Practices (Part 1)
Paper Session
Contribution
The Brussels Capital Region (Belgium) is a cultural and institutional fragmented area. The institutional reforms of 1970-1989 divided Belgium into 3 Regions and 3 communities with their own distinct organization and policy-domains. The communities – the Flemish, the French-speaking and the German-speaking – correspond to the three official languages and organize their own cultural matters. The three Regions, the Flemish, the Walloon and the Brussels Capital Region, are geographical exclusive and were instituted in order to pursue own economic goals. As education is a community matter, schools and school policies can be organized by the Flemish as well as by the French or German speaking community. As a consequence there are currently two, completely separated, parallel educational systems in the Brussels Capital Region. Some 70% of the schools are in French speaking, while 30% are Flemish. Peculiar to this situation is the fact that there are more Flemish schools than theoretically needed: the number of schools exceeds the number of possible Flemish speaking people in the region. A large number of non-native speaking pupils populate the Flemish schools in the region (approx. 65%) (Cantillon, 2009).
As a growing capital the Brussels Capital Region is also confronted with a disproportional larger segment of social disadvantaged and a culturally very heterogeneous population. This social and ethnic duality is reproduced in schooling patterns in the sense that like other metropolitan areas, Brussels has distinct “elite” schools as well as “black schools” (Burgess, Wilson & Lupton, 2005). The fear to become a ‘black school”, i.e. a school with a majority of pupils with foreign roots, incites school boards and principals to control the intake of pupils (Henig 1996). Parents also try to select schools, on the basis of reputation and image (Crowder, 2000; Wells & Crane, 1992). Flemish schools had the reputation of being “better” and “whiter” than French speaking schools. As a consequence many French-speaking and migrant parents opt for a Flemish school for their children. This “pull-mechanism” exacerbated the divide between primary schools in which most of the pupils were Flemish-native speakers, while other schools consisted almost totally of children from (socially disadvantaged) immigrant families.
In order to counter ethnic and social segregation, the Flemish Equal Opportunity Act (GOK) from 2003 forbids schools to select at the intake. In Brussels this act gave rise to an agreement between all Flemish schools to provide equal access to all children, reserving 45% of the “seats” for Flemish-speaking children and 30% for children from social disadvantaged families. This system was expanded in 2009 by the introduction of a system of web-based registration for children and the use of a choice maximization algorithm (Cantillon, 2009).
The current paper evaluates the social efficiency of the agreements in Flemish primary schools. We want to know if the policy measures (free access and introduction of reserved seats) gave rise to a more equal distribution of pupils in schools, according to their background (in terms of language and social status).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Burgess, Simon M., Deborah Wilson, and Ruth Lupton. (2005). Parallel Lives? Ethnic Segregation in Schools and Neighborhoods. Urban Studies 42:1027–56. Cantillon, Estelle. (2009) Regulating School choice in Brussels, Brusselstudies, n° 32, nov 2009. Chubb, John E., & Terry M. Moe. (1997) Politics, Markets and Equality in Schools. In Harker, Patrick T. (ed.) The service productivity and quality challenge. Dordrecht / Boston / London : Kluwer Academic Publishers, 435-469. Crowder, Kyle D. (2000) The Racial Context of White Mobility: An Individual-Level Assessment of the White Flight Hypothesis. Social Science Research 29:223–257. Henig, Jeffrey R. (1996) The Local Dynamics of Choice: Ethnic Preferences and Institutional Responses. In Fuller, Bruce & Richard Elmore (eds.) Who Chooses? Who Loses? Culture, Institutions and the Unequal Effects of School Choice. New York: Teachers College Press, 95-117. Hess, Frederick M. & David L. Leal. (2001) Quality, Race, and the Urban Education Marketplace. Urban Affairs Review 37:249–266. Hutchens, R. (2004) One measure of segregation. International Economic Review 45/2, 555-578. Jenckins, S.P., Micklewright, J. & S.V. Schnepf (2008) Social segregation in secondary schools: how does England compare with other countries? Oxford Review of Education 34/1, 21-37. Karsten, Sjoerd, Guuske Ledoux, Jaap Roeleveld, Charles Felix, and Dorothe´ Elshof. (2003) School Choice and Ethnic Segregation. Educational Policy 17:452–477. Saporito, Salvatore J. & Deenesh S. Sohoni. (2007) “Mapping Educational Inequality: Concentrations of Poverty among Poor and Minority Students in Public Schools.” Social Forces 85 (3): 1227–1254. Wells, Amy S. & Robert L. Crain. (1992) Do Parents Choose School Quality or School Status: A Sociological Theory of Free Market Education. In Cookson, Peter W. Jr. (ed.) The Choice Controversy, Newbury Park, CA: Corwin, 174-196.
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