This paper reports results of a study conducted within the framework of a government-funded research project, NOESIS, launched in 2010 to evaluate a highly political Austrian school reform program, the “New Middle School” (NMS). The overall goal of the school reform project is to limit marginalizing processes and to improve transitions and trajectories within an inclusive school setting. The reform discontinues tracking in lower secondary schools with the emphatic policy goal of alleviating the problems of transition to upper secondary and providing better educational opportunities for all. In this context, the authors of the paper take special interest in processes involving a specific group of learners known to be more susceptible to marginalization, namely, migrant students, who are predominantly from low-income and lower level of education families, and whose first language is not German. In fact, children from ethnic minority groups are part of an achievement gap that is ever widening throughout Europe (OECD, 2010).

The paper begins with the premise that reform policy for inclusive schooling for all often relies on idealized expectations and disregards deep-rooted, often invisible or implicit, patterns and structures in highly complex situations. This paper is based on the (post-)structural idea that progressive change requires uncovering and understanding the social, political, economic and socio-psychological organization of the world, which is always mediated by individual selves who are located within the world in specific ways (Shim, 2011). Thus, to resist imposing and measuring superficial transformations from a normalized perspective, and to begin specifying and naming durable forces that constrain our ability to forge something profounder than political correctness and socially desirable claims of valuing diversity and equal educational opportunities for all, we focus our study on the implicit (as opposed to explicit) attitudes of non-immigrant Austrian teachers towards their immigrant students.

Making implicit teachers’ attitudes explicit is one way of uncovering and understanding one of the deep-seated obstacles to culturally sensitive or inclusive schooling. Ladson-Billings (2006) asserts that a major problem in working with diverse groups of students is rooted in the belief that inclusive teaching is about ‘what to do’ when the real problem is rooted in ‘how we think’ (p. 30). Here we ask: ‘how (or what) do teachers implicitly think about their immigrant students?’, ‘how are teachers’ implicit attitudes reflected in explicit teacher expectancies?’ and ‘how are teacher expectancies related to immigrant students’ achievements?’ It has been suggested that teachers may have differing expectations with regard to ethnic minority students as a function of attitudinal differences (van den Bergh, et. al., 2010; Ferguson, 1998; Rist, 1973 and Weinstein et al., 2004; Stiefel et al., 2007). Although schools and teachers explicitly acknowledge the value of ethnic diversity, a growing body of experimental evidence suggests that teachers may hold implicit stereotypes and prejudices that are largely out of their control even in the face of overtly egalitarian attitudes (Weinstein et al., 2008, Dovidio and Gaertner, 1998 and Greenwald et al., 2002).

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