Italy. Four Emerging Traditions in Immigrant Education Studies

This book chapter present the Italian case, within a comparative analysis of 25 national cases included in the Palgrave Handbook. Compared with other national contexts with a longer history of immigration, social scientists in Italy have only recently turned their attention to ethnic inequalities in education. In the past two decades, however, the number of studies has grown substantially in parallel with the increased presence of children with immigrant background in Italian schools. In this chapter, a systematic overview of the empirical literature on ethnicity and educational inequality in Italy is provided. The chapter present a systematic review including over one hundred studies coming from different disciplines (chiefly sociology) that have been published between 1990 and early 2017. The reviewed studies cover almost all educational levels, with the partial exception of tertiary education, where the presence of immigrant-origin students is still limited. These studies have been classified into four research traditions: school inclusion and intercultural practices; political arithmetic; educational outcomes; and interethnic relationships. These traditions reflect the temporal evolution of the empirical studies on the topic in Italy and are characterized by distinct focuses, research designs, data and methods. For each of the four traditions, the main findings are summarized and the substantial contributions to the understanding of ethnic inequalities in education are critically appraised. In the conclusions, we provide a comparative look at the main contributions of each tradition as well as the points of weakness, and we make suggestions regarding how ethnic educational inequality research could be further developed in the country.