In virtually all educational systems, scholars and policy makers are preoccupied with tackling social inequality in education. In most countries, educational outcomes are not only determined by ability, but also depend upon social background features as ethnicity, socio-economic status, and gender (Breen & Jonsson, 2005).

Based on several theoretical perspectives, including subcultural (Cohen, 1955), anomy (Merton, 1968), and resistance theory (Willis, 1977), scholars expect that students experiencing status deprivation – the feeling that others more easily attain educational goals – are likely to give up schooling (Blomme, 1988; Demanet & Van Houtte, 2014). As students from economically deprived families are likely to experience status deprivation (Cohen, 1955; Willis, 1977), they are at high risk to disengage from schooling. Disengagement is a multidimensional construct (Fredricks et al., 2004). First, it includes a behavioral component, dealing with the behaviors that students display on school premises. The second subdimension is the emotional component, which involves whether students feel contented at school. The third component is cognitive engagement, which concerns students’ motivation to invest time and effort in mastering the subject matter. As disengagement invokes poor academic results, and arguably is the most important precursor to dropout (Lamb et al., 2011), economic deprivation may start a cycle of failure, aggravating social inequality in educational systems. Moreover, students base the perception of their academic success on school features (Marsh, 1987). For instance, students in schools with a lower SES-composition perceive that they are worse off academically. Therefore, we may expect students in lower SES-schools to be more likely to disengage.

While the theoretical base to suppose that economic deprivation is tied to more disengagement is firm, most empirical studies have failed to link deprivation to behavioral (Blomme, 1988), emotional (Ma, 2003) and cognitive disengagement (Kelly, 2008). Moreover, research into the role of SES composition in behavioral disengagement is inconclusive as well (Demanet & Van Houtte, 2014; Johnson et al., 2001), while school-level determinants of emotional and cognitive disengagement are scantly investigated. It is important, however, to point to Halleröd’s (2006) distinction between objective measures of disadvantage – such as social class defined by educational level, occupation, or income – and subjective measures of disadvantage – that is, individuals’ feelings of relative deprivation. The main theories assuming a relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and disengagement – anomy (Merton, 1968), resistance (Willis, 1977) and subcultural theory (Cohen, 1955) – suppose that relative deprivation, rather than an objective situation of disadvantage, leads to disengagement. In other words, students must perceive deprivation before they start to disengage. Most previous research relating socio-economic indices to disengagement, however, uses objective measures (e.g., Blomme, 1988). This also applies to studies investigating effects of the social composition at school (Demanet & Van Houtte, 2014; Stretesky & Hogan, 2005). Therefore, as yet there is little insight into whether subjective socio-economic indices are related to disengagement.

In short, the current study investigates the relationship between objective and subjective indicators of economic deprivation and behavioral, cognitive, and emotional disengagement. We focus on objective and subjective indicators of deprivation at the individual level – more specifically, parental unemployment and the perception of financial problems at home – and the school level – the proportion of students with unemployed parents at school and the culture of economic deprivation, which is a shared feeling among students that their parents have financial problems. While focusing on the Flemish situation, our study is valuable for international audiences, being the only study to date to cover this question on such an extensive data set and elaborate set of outcomes. Hence, this study can provide directions for research in other European and non-European countries.

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