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 Populationarticle, Y. Brinbaum and A. Kieffer showed that the educationaldifficulties of children of immigrant background were largely explainedby 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 therelationship of students’ families with the school system and theirattitudes to their children’s schooling. Using data from a questionnairesurvey and interviews conducted in disadvantaged suburbs of theParis region, the authors compare the various ways in which familiesapprehend their children’s education. This multidimensional approachreveals the complexity of families’ relationship with the school system,and shows that findings are highly sensitive to the type of indicatorused to measure it