Ethnic heterogeneity in the school system – its effects on trust, tolerance and test scores

Author(s):

Peter EsaiassonAndrej Kokkonen Mikael Gilljam

Conference:

ECER 2008

Network:

7. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 01, Segregated Schooling

Paper Session

Time:

2008-09-10

09:15-10:45

Room:

B1 113

Chair:

Yvonne Leeman

Contribution

Recent research suggests that ethnic heterogeneity is detrimental to the functioning of society on a national level, as it breeds intolerance, lowers trust and endangers communication between ethnic groups (Alesina et al. 2003; Lijphart 1968; Putnam 2007). This paper sets out to test whether this conflict-hypothesis is supported on a lower level community within a particular national setting, the school system. School systems provide for an interesting test case because it is an arena which perhaps more than all others encourage interactions between ethnic groups and thus constitutes a critical case for the contact-hypothesis, the most important rival to the hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity tend to breed conflict.

Method

We take as our data the 1999 CIVED-dataset (Civic Education Study). Specifically, we analyze the Swedish subset covering 3000 students from 96 Swedish high schools. Our multi-level analysis renders only partial support for the conflict-hypothesis. In accordance with expectations, system performance in terms of students’ achievements, as measured by test scores, on the working of democracy is negatively affected by ethnic heterogeneity. However, social trust is not affected by the ethnic mix of schools. Neither is the majority population’s tolerance toward immigrants’ rights lowered by ethnic heterogeneity. Interestingly, ethnic heterogeneous schools actually work to strengthen the immigrant minority group’s self-confidence in claiming its own rights, and this without lowering trust in the native majority population.

Expected Outcomes

Overall, our findings suggest a more complicated picture than those provided by the classic conflict and contact hypotheses: Ethnic heterogeneity seems to have both positive and negative consequences for the functioning of communities at the sub-national level.

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Author Information

Peter Esaiasson

Gothenburg University

Political Science

Gothenburg

186

Andrej Kokkonen

Gothenburg University, Sweden

Mikael Gilljam