The Children of Immigrants at School: A Comparative Look at Integration in the United States and Western Europe

2. Educating the Children of Immigrants in Old and New Amsterdam

39 chapter two Educating the Children of Immigrants in Old and New Amsterdam Maurice Crul, Jennifer Holdaway, Helga A.G. de Valk, Norma Fuentes, and Mayida Zaal Because many migrants to the United States and Europe have limited formal education, school systems are challenged to avoid the reproduction of inequality in the second generation and to enable the children of immigrants to enjoy the opportunities available to their native-born peers. This study assesses how well two school systems meet this challenge by considering the experience of second-generation Moroccans in Amsterdam and Dominicans in New York City (originally known as New Amsterdam)—two groups that differ in terms of ethnicity and religion, but who share a similar socioeconomic position. The parents in both cases are predominantly low-wage labor migrants with modest levels of education, and second-generational educational outcomes are low compared with the children of native-born parents, raising concerns about labor market prospects and social inclusion. This study focuses on two cities. A comparison at the municipal level has certain advantages. It enables us to avoid problems of regional variation, especially problematic in the US context, by limiting ourselves to single school systems. And it means that the populations studied face the same set of constraints and opportunities in terms of education and the labor market, which is not always the case with national studies (Reitz and Zhang 2011). At the same time, because major metropolises tend to share certain characteristics— including a high density of educational institutions offering a diverse range of programs—it also means that the findings may not be generalizable to all areas of the countries concerned. 40 Maurice Crul, Jennifer Holdaway, Helga A.G. de Valk, Norma Fuentes, and Mayida Zaal This study does not focus solely on explaining how two school systems contribute to low educational outcomes for these students, which are to be expected given their parents’ low levels of education and limited family resources. We also explore how patterns of achievement are distributed across the two groups and how those differences can be explained. In particular, we look at the ways in which students are tracked onto different educational pathways that have implications for their future trajectories into higher education and the labor market, and at the resources available to immigrant families in navigating this process. The study draws on both quantitative and qualitative data. We take advantage of two data sets on second-generation attainment in New York and Amsterdam. For the Dominicans, we use the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York (ISGMNY) study. This includes a telephone survey that was carried out in 1998–2000 with 3,415 respondents aged eighteen to thirty-two living in the Greater New York metropolitan area, including second-generation young adults from five different immigrant and three latergeneration groups. The sample includes 428 Dominicans. Since educational attainment is very high among whites who move to the New York region for employment, we consider only those who grew up in the region in our comparative analysis. We use the Dutch data from The Integration of the European Second Generation (TIES) survey conducted in 2007. This study sampled eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old second-generation Moroccan and Turkish as well as Dutch young adults of native parentage in the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In the analyses for this chapter, we include the total sample of five hundred second-generation Moroccans living in Amsterdam or Rotterdam. The chapter presents several main findings. Compared with children of native-born parents, children of low-wage labor migrants in both countries are concentrated in the lower levels of the educational system, but both systems nonetheless allow for some mobility. A considerably higher percentage of students of Moroccan than of Dominican descent are leaving school with no useful credentials, which is not entirely surprising considering their lower starting point in terms of family resources. A more unexpected finding is that second-generation Moroccans are doing comparatively well at the higher end of the educational ladder. Roughly equal percentages of both Moroccans and Dominicans are enrolled for or had attained the equivalent of a bachelor’s or master’s degree, but a considerably higher percentage of second-generation Moroccans are enrolled in a program for or have attained the equivalent of an Educating the Children of Immigrants in Old and New Amsterdam 41 associate degree. Meanwhile, more second-generation Dominicans have only a...