Choosing, Then Leaving: Fragile Integration in Danish Public School Classrooms

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Integration Efforts in School Choice Systems (Table 12)

Abstract

A common Danish adage is that people meet their lifelong friends in public elementary school, and indeed, the Folkeskolen (People’s School) has a long history of creating social class integration through schools mirroring the composition of the local population (Rangvid, 2010). How this integration works with immigrants has proven more challenging (Skovgaard Nielsen & Andersen, 2019). In recent years, the Danish government has grown increasingly concerned that the failure to integrate immigrants can destabilize their extensive social welfare system (Skovgaard Nielsen & Kromhout, 2023).

In Copenhagen, Denmark, out of its 660,000 residents about 28% are immigrants and their descendants; with Pakistani and Turkish citizens forming the largest groups (Statistics Denmark). Coinciding with the rise of non-western immigrants, in 2005, the Danish government implemented a parental school choice reform, giving Copenhagen’s 55,000 students the choice of 63 public and 57 private, mostly faith-based schools (Skovgaard Nielsen & Andersen, 2019). In certain gentrifying neighborhoods, white Danish and immigrant parents and their descendants have opted-out of their local school in favor of less diverse private or public schools, contributing to ethnic isolation (Rangvid, 2007).

This case study research was conducted in the spring of 2024 with an international team of researchers to examine parent-led school integration efforts (Yin, 2014). In Copenhagen, we conducted 18 parent interviews, met with two politicians, and conducted site visits at six schools. Six interviews were later conducted on Zoom (N=24). All interviews ranged from 60-90 minutes and were recorded, transcribed, and coded using Dedoose online software.
Our findings show that despite the larger pattern of school segregation, in certain gentrifying neighborhoods, white Danish families are intentionally enrolling in the local public school. All students have the potential to form strong social connections due to students being part of the same class for ten years, from grade zero to nine, looping with the same teachers. Significant efforts are made by the teacher, parents. and parent groups to connect students and families via smaller assigned playgroups and collective birthdays. As a result, there is great potential in this model to create enduring and cohesive social connections across different racial/ethnic/religious/SES groups, foundational to social integration beyond numerical desegregation (Tyson, 2011).

However, our study demonstrates that this model is also quite unstable. White Danish parents prioritized their children’s neighborhood friend group as a significant reason to choose their local school, yet if they became “unhappy” in their class (Debs et al., 2023), they often pulled their children out for choice options, especially in the upper grades. When students leave their local school, it can have a destabilizing effect on the carefully maintained class dynamic. Once a class begins experiencing significant student attrition and changes demographically, it has a snowball effect, leading larger numbers of families to leave the school and fewer resources for the students left behind. The fragility of the class as a social unit can ultimately undermine integration efforts between white Danish families and non-western immigrant families, showing how fleeting integration is in public school classrooms.

Authors

• Allison Roda, Molloy University

• Molly V. Makris, Guttman Community College - CUNY

• Rikke Skovgaard Nielsen, Aalborg University

• Mira C. Debs, Yale University