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The Choice of School in French-speaking Belgium: The Growing Role of Labels and Networks in Judging the Reputation of a School

Sun, August 13, 10:30am to 12:10pm, Palais des congrès de Montréal, Floor: Level 5, 511B

Abstract

In French-speaking Belgium, the choice of parents is free, but any form of evaluation and public information on the quality of schools is proscribed. Schools’ reputation has thus long been used by parents to remove uncertainties about the quality of the schools. We hypothesize that networks and labels are devices for judging reputation whose role is currently growing due to a reform of enrollment at the entrance of secondary education. Having to fill out a form indicating several choices, parents from the working-classes tend to become choosers and without the certainty of obtaining their first choice parents from middle and upper-classes develop an even more strategic attitude. They focus less on the distinctive identity elements (e.g. educational and pedagogical projects) than on the categorical identity elements or "labels" (e.g. "Catholic school", "general education", school located in a "good neighborhood"...) more readily accessible. We discuss the potential repercussions of this evolution on the production of social inequalities in relation to the choice of school suggesting that middle and upper classes seems to be better equipped than the working-classes to face the uncertainty of schools’ quality as far as they are accustomed to mobilizing social networks granting them access to personalized “judgment devices” and “hot knowledge”. Empirically our communication is based on a qualitative research by semi-structured interviews aimed at comparing the school choices of middle-class parents with those of the working classes at the level of a “local space of interdependence” located in the urban context of Brussels.

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