Segregated Schools, “Slow Minds” and “Must Be Done Jobs”: Experiences About Formal Education and Labour Market in a Roma Community in Romania

Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study applies the cultural-ecological theory to understand reasons for making and maintaining a segregated school in a Romanian town, and those community forces which track and maintain Roma children there. As findings indicate, creating and sustaining such an institution reflects the flipsides of Romanian national policies, which due to the financing strategies and centralized curricula—involuntarily—block the chances to provide quality education to marginal groups. Tracking and staying of Roma children into such schools is a result of their parents’ ambivalent experiences with formal economic activities and formal education. Experiences with work and schooling shared by this urban group of Roma reveal that parents have clear expectations towards school: transmission of practical knowledge, good treatment and isolation of the school problems from family life, which not always can be fulfilled by the educational units.

Achievement and Expectations of Immigrant, Second Generation, and Non-immigrant Black Students in U.S. Higher Education

Research on academic achievement contrasting Black immigrant, second generation, and non-immigrant students as distinct groups is surprisingly sparse in the higher education literature. This study examined Black immigrant and second generation undergraduates from Africa and the Caribbean and non-immigrant Black American undergraduates, using the contrasting lenses of segmented assimilation theory and cultural ecological theory. Results for academic achievement favored second generation students, consistent with cultural ecological theory, while findings concerning expectations were more consistent with segmented assimilation theory. However, findings were moderated by gender in complex ways. This research indicates the need for more comprehensive theories of immigrant student achievement and motivation that incorporate consideration of the context surrounding both emigration from the home country and immigration to the host country.

How are education and minority status connected: The case of Romanian Roma in Wrocław

This paper aims to discuss the connection between compulsory schooling and minority status, and how they are related to differential performance of minorities in national education systems. After describing the theoretical framework based on the works of John Ogbu, I will attempt to present how his Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance refers to Romanian Roma community in Wrocław, Poland, which is a group systematically excluded from the dominant society. The analysis suggests that systemic forces act against Roma. This is marked by discrimination towards them in schools and in the labour market. On the side of Roma, mistrust in public institutions, fear of loosing cultural identity and seeing escaping the pariah status as unobtainable leads to lack of investment in formal education.