Italy: Four Emerging Traditions in Immigrant Education Studies

As compared to other national contexts with a longer immigration history, social scientists in Italy have only recently turned their attention to ethnic inequalities in education. In the past two decades, though, the number of studies has grown substantially parallel to the increased presence of immigrant-origin children in Italian schools. In this chapter, a systematic overview of the empirical literature on ethnicity and educational inequality in Italy is provided. The review includes over one hundred studies coming from different disciplines (chiefly sociology) that have been published between 1990 and 2016. The reviewed studies cover mostly all educational levels, with the partial exception of tertiary education, where the presence of immigrant-origin students is still limited. These studies have been classified into four research traditions: school inclusion and intercultural practices; political arithmetic; educational outcomes; and interethnic relationships. These traditions reflect the temporal evolution of the empirical studies on the topic in Italy and are characterized by distinct focuses, research designs, data and methods. For each of the four traditions, the main findings are summarized and the substantial contributions to the understanding of ethnic inequalities in education are critically appraised. In the conclusions, we provide a comparative look at the main contributions of each tradition as well as the weakness points and propose suggestions on how ethnic educational inequality research could be further developed in the country.