Culture, identity, belonging, and school success

The big puzzle of inequality in education is not that children of immigrant parents with low levels of formal education do not succeed in school; this is the expected outcome. More interesting is why some of these children succeed against all odds, or how what Bourdieu (1990) called cultural reproduction can be disrupted (Cooper et al., Chapter 5). Some researchers have looked at parental, school, and teacher factors, while others have emphasized systemic institutional educational factors. Much less attention is spent on the impact of factors like culture, belonging, identity, and future orientation. Culture, both working‐class culture and the culture migrants bring with them, is often regarded as impeding success when the implicit (and often explicit) goal of schooling is cultural assimilation. In this volume, however, the authors examine, with different types of often long‐running ethnographic research, how immigrant cultures can be a resource or under which conditions they can become one.