Home-School Proximity, School Appeal, Immigrant-Origin Youths: A Case Study in Bologna

This work is part of a project titled “Social Exclusion and Selection in Lower Secondary Education: School Segregation Dynamics and Criteria Concerning Immigrant-Origin Students”, undertaken at the University of Bologna’s Department of Political and Social Science. The project addresses questions such as: Is home-school distance greater for immigrant-origin students with respect to Italians? Is home-school distance greater in areas with a higher degree of resident foreigners? Do immigrant-origin students and families tend to opt for the school closest to home to a greater degree than Italians do? Within this framework, this paper has a precise purpose involving the classification of individual schools as “appealing” or “repulsive” towards certain socially characterized subgroups of students. More specifically, do “appealing” schools (i.e., institutions attracting culturally advantaged families) tend to coincide with those having a lower incidence of immigrant-origin students, and – conversely – do “repulsive” schools tend to cater to their needs? Data were provided by the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational System for Schooling and Training (INVALSI), the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), and the 2011 ISTAT (Italian Statistical Bureau) population census. The text thus highlights the role of families’ stock of cultural capital via the characterization of individual lower secondary schools in Bologna as (culturally) appealing or repulsive. Educational institutions exerting “pull” towards students from culturally advantaged families (and/or warding off students from disadvantaged households) tend to have a very low share of immigrant-origin enrolees, thus offering a sort of refuge to upper class natives wishing to “flee” from negatively perceived schools. Moreover, non-state schools and appealing schools tend to coincide. Bologna also features an additional, potential obstacle to integration, via the geographic concentration of appealing schools near the city centre and its “whiter” neighbourhoods. One can optimistically acknowledge the fact that about half of schools are “neutral” – i.e., they neither repel nor attract culturally advantaged students to a strong degree and thus promote a social and ethnic mix.