Historias de éxito: Modelos para reducir el abandono escolar de la adolescencia gitana [Success stories: Models to reduce school drop-out in adolescent Gitanos] (review)

There is quite an extensive amount of research available on school failure. Most studies focus on ethnic minorities such as Roma or Gitanos or on socio-economically disadvantaged groups. Efforts are being made to seek a better understanding of the phenomenon and to identify factors that lead to poor performance in order to formulate proposals for improvement. What all studies have in common is that they focus on the problematic side of the story - that is, they are deficit-oriented. This is problematic for Gitanos as it is for other minorities: although a lot of attention is paid to contextual elements (both in the school and at the societal level), many investigations identify familiar and sociocultural characteristics that are responsible for gaps. A risk of stigmatising ethnic groups is therefore never far away despite the benign intentions of the authors of these studies.

On the one hand, the present book subscribes to this tradition. It clearly aims to improve the attainment rate of Spanish Gitanos in the school context. On the other hand, it is very critical toward most of the existing research as it takes success stories rather than failure as a point of departure. There are indeed positive experiences and some Gitanos do succeed in graduating from university courses. Basing his observations on experience acquired through extensive field work over many years, Juan Gamella realises that these success stories are not merely romanticised coincidences but that they can serve as a fruitful source of information upon which to develop models of intervention. The author thus subscribes to a line of research introduced by Abajo and Carrasco (2004). Rather than distinguish causal factors of school failure (which is a classic approach within education sciences and sociology), positive traces that have led to academic success are focused on through an in-depth investigation of purposefully defined school trajectories.

Following a very well-documented historical and demographic description of the Gitanos in Spain, the current state of affairs in relation to schooling is analysed. Gamella does not avoid the complex issues that accompany the subject and he wonders for example whether the compulsory 'Gadjo school' does not in fact contribute to the destruction of Gypsy culture.

The study not only explores ways to reduce school drop-out rate and absences but takes the discussion a step further beyond the familiar discourses on equal opportunities in education. Apart from an impressive amount of quantitative data, space is given to qualitative research and to reports on autobiographic narratives of Gitanos who successfully obtained an academic qualification. The addition of fourteen control cases of Gitanos to the success stories who did not continue their studies after primary school and in some cases did not even complete primary school is a valuable and original contribution to the ongoing discussion. While other researchers often emphasise the need for control groups, this demand has so far rarely been transformed into empirical practice.

Following the theoretical lines developed by anthropologist John Ogbu, a cultural-ecological approach to so-called involuntary minorities is developed in order to establish an explanatory and interventional model with respect to the school enrolment of Gitanos. The proposal to transfer the notions and ideas of Ogbu (who derived his reflections from his study of Afro-Americans in Ohio, United States; see Ogbu 1978) offers opportunities that often seem to be forgotten or are considered to be methodologically too complex to engage with. As the author himself notices, 'the majority of traditional explanations only measures a part of the problem which affects the most excluded minorities. Demographic, economical and family-structure related factors are important, but they should include, in an interactive way, cultural and psychological factors which are sometimes hard to accomplish and operationalize' (p...