DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 350 711 EA 024 412

AUTHOR Henriot-van Lanten, AgnesTITLE Immigrants and Schools in France: Recent Changes in

Policy and Research.PUB DATE Apr 92NOTE 22p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the

American Educational Research Association (SanFrancisco, CA, April 20-24, 1992).

PUB TYPE Speeches/Conference Papers (150) -- InformationAnalyses (070)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Academic Achievement; *Cultural Differences; Cultural

Influences; Cultural Pluralism; *Educational Policy;Elementary Secondary Education; Ethnic Groups;Foreign Countries; *Immigrants; *Minority Groups;Social Integration; Social Theories; *SocioculturalPatterns

IDENTIFIERS *France

ABSTRACTRecent changes in policy and research regarding

immigrants and schools in France are examined in this paper. Thefirst part discusses changes in France's social and politicalcontext--in the immigrant population and in educational policies. Thesecond section reviews theoretical explanations of immigrant schoolperformance with regard to social class and cultural differences,institutionalized discrimination in the schools, and the role offamily mobilization. Most of these theories focus on school processeswithout considering their link to other socializing agencies, such asthe neighborhood and workplace. A multilevel analysis of theseagencies is needed to understand the structural factors thatinfluence minority school performance, such as neighborhoodsegregation and job discrimination. A model is presented that usesthree parameters to compare the differences between immigrants ofdifferent nationalities in school attitudes and performance: thedegrees of integration, assimilation, and participation. Two tablesare included. (Contains 43 references.) (LMI)

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American Educational Research AssociationAnnual Meeting

San Francisco, April 20-24 1992

IMMIGRANTS AND SCHOOLS IN FRANCE :RECENT CHANGES IN POLICY AND RESEARCH

By

Agnes Henriot-van ZantenEquipe de Sociologie de l'Education

Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueUniversite Rene Descartes - Paris V

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION°Mee of Educational Research and Improvement

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IMMIGRANTS AND SCHOOLS IN FRANCE :RECENT CHANGES IN POLICY AND RESEARCH

By

Agnes Henriot-van ZantenEquipe de Sociologie de 1'Education

Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueUniversite Rene Descartes - Paris V

France's status as an immigration country rests on a paradox. Although atseveral moments in its history the percentage of immigrants in thepopulation has been superior to that of the United States, it has not usuallybeen perceived by the international community as an immigrant, not to saymulti-ethnic, nation. Both the official ideology of assimilation and itstranslation into nationality laws, employment, residential and educationalpolicies, and the silence that has until fairly recently surrounded immigrantspecific problems explain this contradiction. Nevertheless, since the 1970's,and particularly in the last decade, changes in the composition of theimmigration groups and in the immigrants' social, economic and legalposition have contributed to cast them at the center of the political sceneand to bring about significant albeit still minor changes in official discourseand action. One of the main changes concerns the increased focus onschooling. As in the United States in the 1960's, schools are both beingstrongly critized for producing and reproducing social and ethnic inequalityand segregation and reinvested as the main pathway for immigrants'integration (Henriot-van Zanten, 1991).

Social science literature on immigrants still remains relatively scatteredand heterogenous despite recent review works such as the one conducted byDubet (1989). Researchers of course do not work in a vacuum and theabsence of political interest, of official statistics (it is only since the middle ofthe 1970's for instance that children of foreign origin are counted separatelyfrom French children in the statistics published by the Ministry ofEducation) and of government support for research on this topic partly

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explains this situation. Scientific reasons, however, are important too.Research in this area has frequently been conducted with political orremedial goals in mind by a handful of individuals strongly related topolitical associations or social work and educational institutions. For a longperiod, Marxist-oriented university sociologists have tended to consider it asa marginal question given the preeminence of class over cultural factors;Anthropologists have until recently been more interested in rural societiesand remained too small a community to defend a different point of view.Nevertheless, both as a consequence of the renewed lay interest in the"immigrant problem" and of the influence of anglo-saxon paradigms andmethods of inquiry, a small but interesting number of works have beenproduced in the last years on the schooling of immigrants.

THE CHANGING SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT

Changes in the immigrant population

One of the major changes that has affected immigration in Fiance, as inmany other European countries, concerns the composition of theimmigrant population. Although the immigrant population representstoday a slightly higher share of the total population than in the 1930's(6.8%), it has become much more visible because of its heterogeneity and ofthe increasing weight of immigrants from non-EEC countries. As illustratedby the table below, there has been a consistant decrease of immigrants fromneighboring European countries such as Spain and Italy and an increase ofimmigrants from the African and the Asian continents. Inside theEuropean group, it is also important to note the increase and the subsequentstability of the Portuguese and the recent arrival of immigrants from theEast of Europe. Inside the non-European group, the North Africans(Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians) still constitute the dominant group,but recent waves from Turkey and from South East Asia, have introduced amuch greater variety of origins.

Table 1 : Evolution of the distribution of immigrantcommunities in France since 1954

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NATIONALITY I 1954 1975 1982

Europeans 81.1 61.1 47.11Portugese 1.1 22.0 20.8Italians 28.8 13.4 9.1Spaniards 16.4 14.4 8.7

Polish 15.3 2.7 1.8Others 19.5 8.6 7.4Africans 13.0 34.6 42.8Algerians 12.0 20.6 21.6Moroccans 0.6 7.6 11.7Tunisians 0.3 4.1 5.1Others 0.1 2.3 4.4.Asians 2.3 3.0 8.0Turcs 0.3 1.5 3.4Others 2.0 1.5 4.6

I Americans 2.8 1.2 1.4

Source : INSEE - Population Census

A second major change concerns the nature of immigration. Prior to the1970's, immigration was mainly manpower immigration, that is amouvement of unskilled individual workers who came to France fromsemi-industralized or non-industralized countries either on the',. own orthrough private entreprises to find better jobs and better working conditionsand who were expected to contribute to economic development in periodsof expansion. Although progressively the overt ideology became that ofassimilating these workers by providing state services and by facilitating theentry of family members, it is not until the definite freeze imposed on therecruitement of foreign manpower after the oil crisis of 1973 that the natureof immigration changed. Initially intended only to stop the flow of arrivals,strict reglementation encouraged in fact immigrants to stay, to bring theirfamilies and to adopt a long-term social mobility perspective for theirchildren. As a result, immigration could no longer be perceived by theFrench governement and the population as a transient phenomenon but asan inescapable enduring social reality (Mauco, 1977).

A third important change concerns the social, economic and legal status ofimmigrants. As in many other European countries, immigrants havetraditionnally occupied lower-status jobs in the industrial or in the buildingand public works sectors of the economy. Recent analysis show thatimmigrants, although not initially as affected as French workers by theeconomic crisis that led to the disappeareance of thousands of unskilled jobsin industry, are presently very severely concerned by unemployement.Nevertheless, the most recent statististics reveal that the unemployement

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rate grows more slowly and even decreases among immigrants as they aremore willing than French workers to accept temporary and hard jobs. Asmall but significant number of them have become more qualified and havemoved up in the social scale to become white-collar employees. Ethnicbusiness of various kinds, especially in the food or the cloth industry, havealso flourished in big cities. Their situation with regard to the law has alsobecome less precarious with the delivery of ten-year work permits and thegrowing number of "second and third generation" immigrants whoaccording to the French nationality code can choose to become French atadolescence.

Despite these positive steps toward integration, immigrants have alsoprogressively become the target of ultra-nationalist movements and of asmall but significant fraction of the population who see them as a threat toFrench culture and society. In fact, changes in the composition, the natureand the legal status of immigrants are presently calling into question thetraditional image of the French melting pot where individual workers ofEuropean origin integrated the economic and social system, progressivelyassimilated into the cultural system and earned French nationality andpolitical rights as a reward for many years of efforts and goodwill (Noiriel,1988). The second or third generation youngster of Algerian descent hasbecome the symbol of the "new immigrant". This youngster is seen as athreat to the French conception of citinzenship because it is automaticallyentitled to French nationality. It is seen as a threat to the cultural idealbecause although he has assimilated many elements of French culture, heremains essentially "different" and has even recently started to revendicatean ethnic identity. It is seen as a threat to the democratic society because hispersistent exclusion from the social and the economic system shakes thefoundations of the egalitarian model.

Changes in Educational policies

These social transformations call into question the functionning of schoolsperhaps even more than in other European countries as the French systemof education was explicitly conceived from the onset as a powerful agency ofthe nation state. The primary school system instituted by the School laws ofthe Third Republic (1881-1886) rested on a clear political project thataffirmed the primacy of the general on the particular, of logic on experienceand of a lay ethic on particular beliefs. The school was conceived as one of

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the main vehicles for the transmission of a unique, national culture thatshould provide the basis of political cohesion and stability. It was alsoconceived as a democratizing agency where equality was synonymous withuniformity, that is with the existence and the extension of a "commonschool" where an homogenous teaching force will teach the samecurriculum in similar premises to interchangeable children throughout thecountry (Costa-Lascoux, 1989; Anderson-Levitt, Mazurier & Sirota, 1992).

It is not therefore surprising that the schooling of immigrants did notreceive until the last years more than a limited attention : they as all otherswere expected to assimilate and to integrate into French society through the"common school". The main dispositions taken in the 1970's to cope withthe arrival of important waves of immigrant children in urban schoolsrepresented in fact only a slight departure from general principles to ensuretheir adaptation. The first measures were essentially designed to deal withthe linguistic problems of immigrant children. They consisted in thecreation of special classes in primary and secondary schools giving areinforced training in the French language (CLIN, CLAD, CRI). They werefollowed by the creation, between 1975 and 1986, of centers for the trainingand the information of teachers concerning the specific problems ofimmigrant children (CEFISEM) in each of the Academies (regionaleducational authorities). Since 1975, schools receiving a large immigrantpopulation have also had the possibility of proposing the teaching of thechildren's native tongue and culture at school by teachers from their owncountries (ELCO).

Not only were these measures modest in scope but, as underlined by theBerque report (1985), implementation problems have considerably hinderedtheir efficacity. Adaptation classes have not in many cases fulfilled theirgoals because they have been given to ordinary teachers and notunfrequently to beginners. The programs and methods of teaching have notreceived sufficient attention either. Many teachers have just appliedcurriculum programs designed for teaching French as a foreign languagewhereas the linguistic problems of the children are frequently very differentin nature. The focusing on linguistic difficulties has also led to a neglect ofother areas of learning and of the necessary articulation with the primaryschool common program. Moreover, in an important number of cases,these classes have been used to isolate immigrant children with learningdifficulties not necessarily related to their mastery of the French language

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and thus contributed to their school segregation.

Although the introduction of the teaching of the children's natives tonguesand cultures into school curriculum reflects a shift from the traditionalassimilationist perspective toward a "cultural pluralism" perspective, in factthe impact of this policy has also been quite limited because of variousreasons : lack of place and of pedagogical materials, limited pedagogicalcompetence of the teachers sent by the different countries having signed atreaty with France, distance between the official language and the culturepresented in those classes and the various dialects spoken by the children athome and their experience of immigration, lack of integration into thenormal curriculum and interference with other courses. All these reasonshave led a growing number of immigrant parents to refuse to send theirchildren to these classes.

The working of the CEFISEM centers has been extremely diverse and verymuch dependant on the strenght of the initial team, on the importance ofthe network of outside contributors whether teachers, university professorsor social workers and on encouragement from local educational authoritiesand training centers. It must be kept in mind that their task has beenimmense given the fact that only in 1986-1987 was it decided that allteachers-in-training should receive a minimum special teaching on theschooling problems of immigrant children while in the Ecoles Normales.More generally, the problems encountered by the CEFISEM and by all themeasures taken in favor of immigrant children must also be attributed tothe lack of a coordination structure providing a coherent frame of actioneither at the national or at the local level.

Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 1980's there has been an importantreorientation of the educational system that could have considerableimplications for the schooling of immigrant children. Although notexplicitly designed to deal specifically with their problems, EducationalPriority Areas, created in 1981, have been chosen using as one of the maincriteria the percentage of immigrant children at school. The actionprograms that have been elaborated by teachers working in those areas havefrequently concerned immigrant children especially those centered ongiving different kinds of school aid ("soutien scolaire") inside and outsidethe school. These new projects, that are part of a global decentralizationreform, also open up new possibilities fo: dealing with the interaction

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between schooling problems and housing and employment problems.However, as pointed out by Lorcerie (1988), there seems to be a growing gapbetween organizational reforms and political discourse. Politicians andteachers' representatives seem both convinced of the necessity of applyingspecific measures to disadvantaged populations and unwilling to present alegitimate rationale for positive discrimination in favor of immigrantchildren because they fear that the break-up of the unified system will giveway to the constitution of a dual system of education that will reinforcesegregation and exclusion.

THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS OF IMMIGRANT SCHOOLPERFORMANCE

The overwhelming impact of social class

A consistant line of thought concerning the schooling of immigrantchildren has been, as we mentionned earlier, to consider them as equals toFrench working-class children. It seems certainly difficult to ignore thatimmigrant children belong in their great majority to lower-class families(90% versus 44% French children), that they come much more frequentlyfrom large families (53% from families of four children or more vs. 17.5% ofFrench pupils); that their parents have had little formal schooling (87% ofparents have at best just completed primary education for 46% of Frenchparents) or that they are much less likely to have mothers active in the laborforce (13% vs. 43% of French pupils) (Duru-Bellat & Henriot-van Zanten,1992). What seems questionable is the tendency of most official reports andstatistical research works (Bastide, 1982; Boulot & Boyson-Fradet,1987) toconsistently minimize the differences between immigrant and working-class children.

Differences are indeed frequently small when one compares French andimmigrant children of similar social characteristics but this is not always thecase. Immigrant children still differ from French children for instance inthe number of years of attendance of pre-school although the gap betweenthe two categories has tended to narrow rapidly in the latter years. Statisticsalso show that an important minority (9.2%) of immigrant children entersthe primary school at 7 years-old, that is one year behind the norm, which isthe case of only 1.4% of French children. This phenomenon is directly

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related to the time of arrival in France (among immigrant children born inFrance this percentage decreases to 4%) but it also points out to specificproblems already encountered at pre school level. At the end of the firstyear in primary school 25% of immigrant children born in France repeat theschool year. This is still a much higher percentage than that of Frenchchildren belonging to the category of unskilled workers (19.2%).

Moreover, differences between lower-class French and immigrant childrenare not always in favor of the former. As noted by researchers in othercountries, one of the most interesting questions concerning immigrantchildren is how an important proportion of them manage to stay andsucceed at school despite so many barriers (Suarez-Orozco, 1989; Gibson,1992). In France, it appears clearly that immigrant children improve theirperformances at higher levels of the educational system. At the end ofprimary school, immigrant children are more frequently one year or morebehind the norm than French children (44.9% vs. 27.6%) but the differenceturns in their favor when one compares them with lower-class Frenchchildren. The situation is the same concerning orientation into specialclasses officially created to host children exhibiting intellectual deficiencies.Although immigrant children are much more represented in those classesthan French children, they still are in a better position than lower-classFrench children.

At the secondary level, the comparison between French and immigrantchildren becomes more complex as the "common school" dissolves intotracks and options of unequal social value. During the first two years whichare common to all children, immigrant children are less likely than theirFrench classmates to fall behind and repeat school years. The same is true ofthose who are able to attain the second cycle leading to the baccalaureat and,eventually, to higher education. These good results are neverthelesshampered by the fact that immigrant children are much more likely to beoriented toward vocational and technical education and to special educationsections. They are therefore less likely to complete general secondaryschooling.

Cultural deprivation and cultural differences

The explanation of the specific characteristics of immigrant schooling interms of primary cultural differences which has been so dominant in

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American anthropological research has had much fewer adepts amongFrench sociologists of education. Although the American literature onlower-class and minority children that developed during the 1960's in theUnited States received considerable attention from educational researchersin France in the early seventies, most critical reactions of culturaldeprivation theories focused exclusively on the "class ethnocentriscm" ofpolicies and research works which explicitly or implicitly assumed thesuperiority of white middle-class families' aspirations, education practices,language and attitudes to schooling (Isambert-Jamati, 1973). Empiricalresearch designed to refute these theories was scarce and dealt almostexclusively with the attitudes and behaviors of lower-class French familiesand children (Francois, 1976, CRESAS, 1978).

Cultural conflict theories have received less attention as they have beenperceived as too much derived from the American experience to beapplicable to the French situation. Although culturalist analysis ofimmigrants' relation to schooling has flourished in a series of texts on"intercultural education", the general orientation of these texts has beeneither prescriptive, that is they argue for the necessity of taking into accountcultural differences at school as being a good thing per se or entirelydescriptive, that is they present a series of experiences conducted in variousschools or teacher-training centers. The school as an institution isfrequently critized for it. indifference to the specific characteristics ofimmigrants but few detailed analysis of school programs, of parents-teachersor teachers-pupils interaction are provided.

An interesting exception are the research works conducted in thisperspective by Vasquez (1980, 1982) who has analyzed the school behaviorsof Portuguese, Spanish and Latinoamerican adolescents. She has argued thatone of the reasons these children fall behind at school is that they have greatdifficulty in adapting to the school pace because they do not share the sameconception of time dominant in industrial and post-industrial societies.Classroom observations conducted by the author also focus on secondarycultural differences. They show the importance of the social status and themigration project of parents : children whose parents have a higher socialstatus and who are political refugees are more critical of the school pace andtry more to keep the life rhythm of their country of origin at home and atschool than children from immigrant parents. This is so, according toVasquez, because immigrants tend to identify to some extent to the values

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of the dominant group and sometimes to reject their own culture in orderto adapt to the host country. Even those that plan to return to their countryof origin sometimes think that acquiring some of the characteristics of themore developed societies will be a sign a success. Refugees, on the otherhand, have not frequently chosen the host country. Their stay seems tothem a transitory phase even if it lasts their whole life. They live, one couldsay, "in parenthesis" searching less than the other immigrants socialpromotion and economic success through the school and placing a higherprize on the maintenance of their cultural traditions.

Institutionalized discrimination at school

The exploration of secondary cultural differences has led some researchersto focus on discriminatory everyday pratices at school. These are particularlydifficult to trace as teachers have highly interiorized the egalitarian andassimilationist philosophy of French schools which prevents them to makeexplicit references to differences among pupils. This is clearly shown in theresearch conducted by Zirotti (1980) who examined the observations writtenby a large sample of teachers of the Aix-Marseille region on school files ofFrench and immigrant pupils of various nationalities. Asked to provide adetailed appreciation of students' work, most teachers answered withstandardized expressions that did not operate any differences between thetwo greups. It is however important to note that judgements were morecentered on F -hool performance and on individual capacities in the case ofFrench children and on school behavior for immigrant children,particularly for North Africans.

Another research conducted by Zimmerman (1978) invited teachers to judgea sample of 946 children on their physical appeareance, ways of dressing andtalking, politeness and other personal characteristics. Only a minority ofteachers accepted the framework proposed by the researcher that forcedthem to make differences in perception explicit, but the results were highlysignificant : children of immigrant manual workers were consistently theleast considered followed by children of French workers. Children ofmiddle-class and upper-class parents were described as the most attractive bythe great majority of teachers.

Following this same line of interpretation but focusing on verbal interactionbetween teachers and North African pupils, Payet (1985) has shown that

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teacher jiTcrgements are very equently centered -on the verbal and-gestualbehavior of these students who are represented not as linguistically andculturally deprived and not just as linguistically and culturally different butas potentially dangerous to school order. North African students aredescribed as being voluble, curious, secretive, susceptible, proud. The wordinsolence which comes out frequently in teachers' discourse accuratelydescribes this perception which rests on some current stereotypes of arabculture but which also reflects teachers' interpretations of North African'sstudents reaction to their racial stigmatisation. Insolence is in fact a folkconcept that underlines both primary and secondary cultural differencesbetween French and North African children similar to those pointed out byOgbu in his analysis of Black youngsters' attitudes to schooling (Ogbu, 1989).

In a more recent work, Payet (1992) has also explored other forms of schooldiscrimination such as the implicit internal segregation between classes.This is a common (although taboo) practice in secondary French schools thattry to cope in this way with the new constraints imposed by the mass arrivalof lower-class children and the political injunction to maintain them aslong as possible in the school system, and by the progressive abolishment ofthe former hierarchy of educational institutions and of internal formalstreaming. The research conducted in two secondary schools located in poorand ethnic neighborhoods show how through a series of micro-decisionstaken by teachers and administrators, immigrant pupils and particularlyNorth African boys come to be segregated in the 'bad classes". These classesreceive the most recently arrived and the least motivated of teachers, theworst premises and the least prized teaching materials. This work alsoshows how pupils in these classes come to be much more frequentlypunished than pupils in other classes ;..nd to be classified as deviants but itdoes not examine the constitution of school counter-cultures such as somewell-known British and American works (Willis, 1977; Foley, 1989).

Explaining immigrant success : the role of family mobilization

All of the works mentionned up to now, even those which have tried toincorporate an interactionist perpective, have focused on immigrants asvictims of the school system. Compared with the growing litterature onimmigrant school success in the United States and other Europeancountries, the few French works that have dealt with this topic havecentered on family mobilization, that is on the analysis of differences within

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immigrant families concerning sthocil aspirations and school- relatedattitudes and behaviors. The work of Zeroulou (1988) is a good exemple ofthis orientation. The analysis of a sample of 30 Algerian working-classfamilies showing very contrasting school profiles (15 families where at leastone of the children had attended university and 15 families where none ofthe children had reached the second cycle of secondary school) allows theauthor to underline the importance of social factors (degree of professionalstability, level of instruction of parents) and of internal differences betweenimmigrant families (age of mariage of the mother, lenght of time betweenmigration of the father and arrival of the rest of the family) to explainsuccess or failure.

The existence of a clear mobility project is however the most significantfactor related to the presence of school-adaptation patterns very similar tothose described by Gibson (1988) : the instrumental value of schooling isunderlined; the conflicts in values between home and school are notignored but are dealt with in a pragmatic way; school success is set as a normand the family ressources in terms of money, time, competent persons, aremobilized to attain this goal. Sayad's research (1991) suggests, however, thatwhen parents do not have a minimum of intellectual ressources to helptheir children with school tasks and with school choices, theovervalorisation of school success can generate children's apathy or revolt.

Other qualitative works have also shown that some immigrant and Frenchlower-class families are able to develop school strategies that allow theirchildren to succeed. They show that these families differ from other familiesin their internal organization. Unless families where migration seems tohave produced family anomie, these families seems to have reinforced theirinternal cohesion (Bendaoud, 1985). Other works emphasize the impact ofopeness to external influences such as work unions, neighborhoodassociations, political and religious groups, in rendering immigrant familiescapable of managing their children's school careers (Henriot-van Zanten,1990a, Terrail, 1984).

Looking beyond the school : the neighborhood and the workplace

Most of these works however focus exclusively on school processes withouttaking into account their connections with other socializing agencies such asthe neighborhood and the workplace. A multi-level approach that includes

an analysis of these agencies= is h o w e v e r necessary to understand thestructural factors that influence minority school performance (Ogbu, 1981).Residential segregation for instance plays an important role on schoolattitudes and behavior. Although France does not possess ethnic ghettossuch as those that have developped in American cities, the installation ofimmigrant families in urban areas has increased their concentration indegraded social housing and in abandoned neighborhoods and suburbs. Thearrival of immigrant families and especially of North African families inthese areas is seen as a sign of social degradation by the French inhabitantsand leads either to "white flight" or to an increase in neighborhoodconflicts.

Our own work (Henriot-van Zanten, 1990b) shows that this forced co-existence also generates daily "avoidance strategies" which have an impactboth in the neighborhood and in the school. In the neighborhood, desire toavoid social and racial mixing leads to retreat into the family and the home,to a selective use of public places and local institutions and to a lowparticipation in associations. At school, parents keep away from meetingsand social events that involve contact with other parents and developeducational strategies based almost exdusively on individual reinforcementof school learning at home and on individual contacts with teachers.Moreover, a growing number of French (and some immigrant) parents whoare economically better-off and whose children have good grades, choose toleave the neighborhood school. This process leads the school to develop abad reputation which influences in turn the perception of the neighborhoodthus creating a vicious cycle. It also leads parents and inhabitants to associatethe presence of immigrant children with the lowering of school results thusreinforcing racist attitudes and segregative behavior (Leger & Tripier, 1986).

Recent research also underlines the importance of taking into accountchanges that have been introduced in the relationship between schoolingand work for immigrant youth. Their situation is particularly complexbecause of the intersection of various social processes. On the one hand,statistical studies show that although immigrant youngsters are on averagemore qualified than their parents and tend to occupy better-paid jobs, theystill suffer from a "job ceiling" that keeps them behind French youngsters ofsame social class (Marange Sr Lebon, 1982). On the other hand, qualitativestudies show that immigrant youngsters, especially those of North Africandescent have drawn closer to French youngsters in terms of cultural tastes

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and attitudes and-that-they are settlers-and social--innovators (Dubet, 1989). As mentioned earlier, this is one of the reasonsthat explains the considerable frustration of these youngsters whichtranslates itself into delinquent acts or in sporadic revolt mouvements.

Variability of immigrant school performance

Despite the fact that many researchers underline the need to take intoaccount differences between immigrants of different nationalities in schoolattitudes and performance, no systematic efforts have been s accomplishedin this area in France (Camilleri, 1985) especially if compared withAmerican, British, Belgian and Dutch research in this area (Jacob & Jordan,1987, Suarez-Orozco, 1990, Gibson & Ogbu, 1991). Statistics show in any casethat these differences exist and that they are important enough to warrantscholarly attention. A criteria such as the percentage of pupils that stay onthe second cycle of secondary schooling shows for instance that the majornationalities place themselves as follows : Africans (excluding NorthAfricans) (17.2%), Italiens (10%) and Spaniards (9.7%), South East Asians(8.3%), Tunisians (7.2%), Algerians (6.1%), Morrocans (5.8%), Portuguese(4.3%) and Turks (2.3%) (Tripier, 1987).

Another study which takes into account several criteria such as thedistribution of pupils in various "streams" and the drop out rate at differentstages of the school system and which centers on four nationalities showsthe following hierarchy :

Portuguese < Algerians < Italians < Spaniards

The superiority of Spaniards and Italians over the Portuguese and theAlgerians does not come as a surprise. It is globally interpreted as the resultof several convergent factors both cultural and socio-economic : Spaniardsand Italians are among the first immigrants groups to have come to France;their cultures are perceived as "cousin" to French culture; In addition tothis, both immigrants groups are those that include the highestdiversification in S.E.S. and are nowadays relatively small as many of theirmembers have acquired French citizenship. Portuguese and Algerians, onthe other side, come from semi-industralized countries, occupy lowerpositions in the socio-economic structure and constitute the most importantimmigrant communities (Marange & Lebon, 1982).

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This line of interpretation, however, does not allow us to understand thedifferences between members of each of those two categories, especiallybetween Algerian and Portuguese : although the first locate themselveslower in the class structure, are much more distant culturally from theFrench and suffer much more from racial prejudice, their children farebetter than Portuguese in school. Some elements of response are providedby another study conducted under the direction of Malewska-Peyre (1982)which analyzes deviant behavior of immigrant younsters and distinguishestwo major groups, Spaniards and North Africans, and boys from girls.North African girls are those that appear the more invested in their schoolcareers because they apprehend school as a liberating force while Spanishgirls' interest turn around family projects. However, these results alsoinvite us to analyze in more detail the indicators of "success" as other worksshow that Portuguese students who choose vocational training are morelikely to get a certificate and find a job that Algerian youngsters who stay inthe general secondary system but are less likely to get the baccaulaureat or anUniversity degree.

Variability in immigrant school performance cannot however be examinedwithout a comprehensive analysis of the situation of various groups. Dubet(1989) has recently proposed to retain three main parameters to comparevarious groups : the degree of social and economic integration, the degree ofcultural assimilation and the degree of political participation. He constructsa simple model presented below which distinguishes eight theoreticalfigures that can be confronted with what we presently know aboutimmigrant groups :

Table 2 : Patterns of relationship of immigrantsto French society

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8Integration + + + - - + - -Assimilation + + - + - - + -,Participation + - - + + + - -

Source : Dubet (1989).

Figure 1 and figure 8 represent two extreme positions. Immigrants thatcorrespond the best to the first are the small elite of artists or businessmenthat speak several languages, belong to several cultures and have several

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passports and move- smoothly from one country to the other. The lastfigure corresponds to groups that are socially and economicallymarginalized, who remain culturally excluded and who are deprived of anykind of political expression in the host society. This corresponds to theextremely precarious situations of isolated and illegal workers.

Figure 2 corresponds to some ancient immigrations caracterized by strongintegration, strong assimilation and nevertheless a weak politicalidentification with France such as the Spaniards and the Portuguese whichchoose to return to their native country at retirement and do not seeminterested in participation in local elections opened to foreigners. This alsoseems to be the case for a small part of the the Algerian community thatdespite strong integration and assimilation does not request Frenchcitizenship. Figure 5 describes an opposite situation : that of the Harkis(Algerian soldiers loyal to the French during the Algerian IndependanceWar, 1954-1962). This group enjoys French citizenship while being sociallymarginalized and culturally excluded.

Figure 3 corresponds to immigration groups that remain organized on acommunitarian basis, that is they are strongly integrated on an economiclevel thanks particularly to the development of ethnic business but they areweakly assimilated. Sometimes they choose to become French citizensmainly because of the advantage this presents to integration and come closerto Figure 6. The immigrants groups that are the most dose to these twofigures are the Chinese, the South East Asians and also, to a lesser extent, theTurcs.

The most distinctive figure of French immigration remains however figure4 which combines a weak social and economic integration and a strongcultural assimilation and leads to a strong demand for politicalparticipation. As we have already noted, immigrants that correspond best tothis model are second and third generation North African youngters, moreparticularly those of Algerian origin. This group of immigrants comes closerto Ogbu's (1978) "involuntary" or "castelike" minorities or to DeVos andSuarez-Orozco's (1990) "disparaged" minorities because of their colonial-type relationship with the French nation, their persistently low status andnegative perception by the population. However, although some of themare tempted by alternative strategies for social mobility, schooling stillappears at the center of the mobility project of a considerable number of

families and youngters.

This brief overview of some of the major changes in the social reality ofimmigration in France and in policy and research paradigms was intendedto show both the specific aspects of French developments in this area andtheir similarity to parallel social processes in other European countries andin the United States. It dearly shows the need for increased informed cross-cultural comparison that will reduce both the tendency to overestimatenational differences and that of establishing unwarranted generalizations.

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