Immigrant Families’ Relationship with the School System: A Survey of Four Working-Class Suburban High Schools.

Over the last twenty years, research on the school careers of migrants’ children has focused on their academic success. In a 2009 Population article, Y. Brinbaum and A. Kieffer showed that the educational difficulties of children of immigrant background were largely explained by their socioeconomic environment. Pursuing this line of study, Mathieu Ichou and Marco Oberti adopt a different perspective, examining the links between migration and education via the relationship of students’ families with the school system and their attitudes to their children’s schooling. Using data from a questionnaire survey and interviews conducted in disadvantaged suburbs of the Paris region, the authors compare the various ways in which families apprehend their children’s education. This multidimensional approach reveals the complexity of families’ relationship with the school system, and shows that findings are highly sensitive to the type of indicator used to measure it