The Otherization of The Descendants of Immigrants

23
Sweden: The Otherization

of the Descendants of Immigrants
Alireza Behtoui, Fredrik Hertzberg, Rickard Jonsson,
René León Rosales, and Anders Neergaard
Introduction
This chapter presents and reviews research on the schooling and educational
inequality of the offspring of immigrants in Sweden and critically examines
how different research traditions explain ethnic inequality. The review covers
research conducted between 1990 and 2016.
A. Behtoui (*)
Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
F. Hertzberg
Department of Education, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
R. Jonsson
Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
R. León Rosales
Mångkulturellt Centrum, Botkyrka, Sweden
A. Neergaard
Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping
University, Norrköping, Sweden
© The Author(s) 2019 999

P. A. J. Stevens, A. G. Dworkin (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Race and Ethnic Inequalities
in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94724-2_23
1000 A. Behtoui et al.
The chapter is organized as follows: in section “National Context” we

describe the key characteristics of the Swedish education system, followed by
an overview of the main migration patterns – which highlight that Sweden
has one of the highest percentages of foreign-born inhabitants in Europe –
and ending with a brief illustration of the children of large immigrant groups.
In section “Methods” we briefly outline the methodology we employed to
find the relevant literature and criteria for inclusion. Section “The Descendants
of Immigrants and Educational Inequality in Sweden”, the main part of the
chapter, is a presentation and discussion of the central research traditions that
engage with issues of educational inequality and ethnic background in
Sweden. Inspired by the previous volume and the overview of different
research traditions (Stevens and Dworkin 2014) we cluster together research
on Sweden based on theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives,
delineating the following themes:
• political arithmetic (quantitative data on the unequal educational achieve-

ments of immigrant children);
• culturalism, discrimination and racism in schools;
• school choice and school segregation;
• language proficiency; and
• cultural and social capital and socio-historical contexts.
The chapter ends with a short conclusion.
National Context
The Education System
In Sweden, all children between the ages of 6 and 15 are required to follow ten
years of compulsory schooling, divided into three stages: Years 0–3 (lågsta-
diet), Years 4–6 (mellanstadiet) and then Years 7–9 (högstadiet). At the same
time, all children are guaranteed a place in a ‘pre-school year’, starting in the
autumn term of the year in which they reach the age of 6. Although this ‘pre-
school year’ (förskoleklass) is not compulsory, almost all children attend it.
Grades are given for students in the last year of mellanstadiet and during
högstadiet (years 6–9). A grade is given each semester at the end of the autumn
and spring terms. In Year 9 a grade is given at the end of the autumn term and
a final grade at the end of the spring term – the basis on which applications
are made for upper-secondary school (gymnasium) (see Table 23.1).
Sweden: The Otherization of the Descendants of Immigrants 1001
Table 23.1 The Swedish education system

Age group School year group or grade Type of education
in years
17–19 Years 10–12 Academic Vocational Introductory
upper-secondary school and programmes
(gymnasium) professional
13–16 Years 7–9 (högstadiet)
10–12 Years 4–6 (mellanstadiet)
7–9 Years 1–3 (lågstadiet)
6 Pre-school year ( förskoleklass)
1–5 Kindergarten
All young people who have completed compulsory school are entitled to a
three-year upper-secondary school education. Upper-secondary school in
Sweden, Years 10–12 (gymnasium), is optional and young people can choose
whether or not to attend it. Only those between 16 and 20 years of age can
attend gymnasium. Those older than 20 have the possibility to complete their
upper-secondary education in ‘adult education’ (Komvux).
There are different, regular, national programs of 3 years’ duration to choose
from, some of which are preparatory for tertiary (academic and professional)
education – with 57.3% of students in the 2015–2016 school year – and oth-
ers which are vocational (about 24.2%). The entrance requirements vary
between programs but all students must accomplish a pass grade in Swedish,
English and mathematics in their final year of compulsory education (Grade 9)
to be able to enter a national upper-secondary program.
Students who do not qualify for a national program instead follow a sepa-
rate, special program – an introductory program. When they have successfully
completed their grades in this complementary/alternative track, they can then
transfer to one of the regular national programs. In the school year 2015–2016
(according to statistics published by the National Agency for Education)
about 18.5% of pupils participated in these introductory programs.
The curriculum for the different levels of education in primary and upper-
secondary schools is uniform and nationwide, even though it is the municipal
authorities who are responsible for pre-school, compulsory and upper-
secondary-school classes.
All education is free and is funded entirely by municipal budgets, derived
from local taxes and the national government’s municipal equalization sys-
tem. However, regional economic differences and priorities, which affect how
much money each municipality can spend per pupil, can vary by as much as
SEK 50,000 (around £4700).
Although the majority of compulsory schools in Sweden are run by the
municipal authorities, there are also private schools known as ‘independent
schools’ (friskola), which are funded by public money (skolpeng) from the local
municipality based on the number of pupils they have enrolled, in the same way
that Swedish public schools are. While non-profit, parental and employee coop-
eratives exist, the majority of these non-public schools are for-profit ones, owned
and run by incorporated companies. Sweden is unique among OECD countries
in allowing for-profit primary and secondary schools (Erixon Arreman and
Holm 2011). During the school year 2015–2016 about 15% of pupils in com-
pulsory school and 26% of students in upper-secondary school attended them.
Education reforms during the post-war period had a strong focus on equal-
ity, thus promoting equality of opportunity and outcome through a system
which delivers education of the same standard to everyone. During the 1990s,
however, the Swedish education system underwent substantial changes when
a number of reforms were carried out. First of all, decentralization – i.e. the
shifting of responsibility for schooling from central government to the munici-
palities. The ideological tenets of neoliberalism and the ideals set out in the
New Public Management (NPM) agenda gained ground in the education
policy and educational reforms of 1992 and 1994 and led to the establish-
ment of many quasi-markets for education at primary and secondary level
(Lundahl 2002; Lundahl et al. 2013). As ‘freedom of choice’ became the over-
riding principle in official discourses on education, the ethos of equality lost
its appeal. Education became a private good, and an instrument for individual
‘human capital’ acquisition, rather than a public good (Englund 1993).
Parents were given the right to decide which school their children should
attend, and a voucher system was introduced, giving parents the right to
choose between public and private schools (Bunar 2008). Reforms in the field
of education, in combination with segregation on the housing market, led to
school segregation becoming an urgent problem. Now Sweden’s urban land-
scapes are marked by overlapping patterns of ethnic and economic segrega-
tion. The poor neighborhoods of large cities are inhabited by a population
whose backgrounds are predominantly in non-Western countries (Östh et al.
2014). The processes leading to this situation have been described as the
racialization of the city (Molina 1997).
igration Patterns and the Children of Immigrants

M
in Sweden
In an historical overview of Swedish migration, post-World War II migration

stands out as a symbolic era in which Sweden went from being a country of
emigration to one of immigration. While emigration essentially dominated
the flows of people prior to WWII, there was also immigration and incorpora-
tion through internal and close by colonialism that, today, is often framed
through national minorities (Svanberg and Tydén 1998). Sweden has today
recognized the Jews, the Roma, the Sami, the Swedish Finns and the
Tornedalers. The national minority languages are Yiddish, Romany Chib,
Sami, Finnish and Meänkieli. For many years these groups were oppressed in
a national state-framed discourse. However, the Jewish and Finnish commu-
nities succeeded in starting a few schools aimed especially at reproducing
knowledge of their respective languages, cultures and religions.
From the end of World War II, Swedish migration was increasingly charac-
terised by immigration. While the first migrants were war survivors and refu-
gees, the bulk of those following this route were labor migrants. With an
intact and growing economy, fuelled through Keynesian economics and
international exports, there was a growing demand for labor. Labor migrants
came individually, on work permits and through bilateral agreements. They
came from the Nordic countries – mainly Finland – and from Southern and
Eastern Europe (particularly from Yugoslavia and Turkey), until labor migra-
tion was almost fully curtailed in 1972. The refugee migration which had
started in the context of WWII and continued as a consequence of coups and
dictatorships in Eastern and Southern Europe (in Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Poland and Greece) was overshadowed by labor migration until the early
1970s. From this time on, refugee migration increasingly shifted from a
European to a global scale, with refugees arriving from Latin America, the
Middle East, Indochina and the Horn of Africa. The dissolution of Yugoslavia
produced the most intense refugee migration flows, up until the refugee and
solidarity crisis of 2015. Labor and refugee migration was often followed by
family reunification migration.
With its extensive immigration after the Second World War, Sweden turned
into a multi-ethnic society with a large proportion of individuals of immi-
grant background. Based on data from Statistics Sweden (SCB 2014), almost
two million of the country’s population or about 21% were either foreign-born
or native-born with two foreign-born parents. The largest foreign-born groups
were immigrants from Finland (64,000), Iraq (128,000), the former Yugoslavia
(126,000), Poland (75,000) and Iran (65,000).
According to statistics published by the National Agency for Education
(Skolverket 2016a), during the school year 2014–2015, about 23% of stu-
dents in their final year of compulsory schooling in Sweden were of immigrant
origin – of whom about 10% were the Swedish-born children of immigrants,
5% the children of immigrants who migrated before their offspring were of
school age and 8% those who migrated after the start of schooling (Tables 23.2
and 23.3, Fig. 23.1).
Table 23.2 Immigrants and their descendants in Sweden, December 2012

Country of origin Number %
Born in Sweden 8,082,637 84.6
Foreign-born 1,473,256 15.4
Born in Sweden with both parents born abroad 501,980 5.3
Subtotal: Foreign-born and born in Sweden with both 1,979,646 20.7
parents born abroad
Total 9,555,893 100.00
Source: SCB (2014)
Table 23.3 Immigrants from different parts of the world and their descendants in
Sweden, December 2012
Born in Sweden with
both parents born
Country of origin Foreign-born persons abroad Total
Men Women Men Women
Nordic countries 110,804 145,352 52,026 49,782 357,964
(excluding Sweden)
EU27 (excluding Nordic 144,198 143,529 37,025 34,557 359,309
countries)
Europe (excluding EU27 115,004 117,434 54,884 51,263 338,585
and Nordic countries)
North America and 20,287 17,811 2904 2786 43,788
Oceania
South America 32,105 34,004 10,189 9571 85,869
Africa 70,480 62,708 26,798 25,670 185,656
Asia 221,806 230,783 74,334 70,191 597,114
Source: SCB (2014)
Individuals, Thousands
250
200
150
100
50
0
The Nordic EU27 excluding Europe North South America Africa Asia
countries the Nordic excluding America
exclusive countries the EU27 and and Oceania
Sweden the Nordic
countries
G1. Men G1. Women G2. Men G2. Women (G2 = descendants)
Fig. 23.1 Immigrants and their descendants in Sweden, different parts of the world
Methods
In sampling the relevant literature for this review, we have restricted our
choice to contributions that studied educational inequality and ethnicity
between 1990 and 2016. Our review focuses only on primary and secondary
education. Consequently other forms of education – such as pre-school and
higher or adult education – are not included.
The literature search was conducted to capture peer-reviewed (Swedish and
English language) texts after 1990 within pedagogy and the social sciences.
The search strings used (in both Swedish and English) were ethnic,* migrant
or minority,* racial* or racism* and school or education and Sweden or
Swedish. Since there is no Swedish database in this field, the texts in Swedish
were taken from Swedish PhD theses and academic journals in this field;
Pedagogisk Forskning (Educational Research), Utbildning och demokrati
(Education and democracy) and Educare. The search strings in English were
applied on two databases – Scopus and ERIC. In addition we also used gov-
ernment and state-authority commissioned research compilations. The litera-
ture search was conducted by the Linköping University Library, Norrköping
Campus. The content of these publications was systematically analyzed to
find further relevant material for this review. Due to the sheer volume of
documents found, not all are referenced in this chapter; however, the relevant
additional material such as theses, books, policy papers and reports was found
and included in the review process. Although educational research is increas-
ingly shifting to writing in English, the majority of texts are still written in
Swedish. Apart from Swedish peer-reviewed journals and the government and
state-authority commissioned research compilations, this also goes for the
majority of the theses. As a consequence, based on a rough estimation, about
four-fifths of the texts were in Swedish. The two major areas with a lower
share in Swedish were quantitative studies and those inspired by mainly UK
and US Critical Race Theory.
The following traditions were distinguished based on the research questions
and methods used. First, the ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, which is based on
quantitative data that describe the current inequalities in the educational
achievements of young people in Sweden, with a focus on their ethnic/migra-
tion backgrounds. Secondly, the research tradition that explores ‘culturalism,
discrimination and racism in schooling’. Third, research focusing on school
segregation as a critical factor affecting the educational outcomes of the chil-
dren of immigrants. Fourth, the ‘language proficiency’ tradition, consisting
mainly of qualitative studies that try to understand the centrality of a knowl-
edge of the Swedish language for school achievements. The final tradition is
studies exploring the inequality of resources (particularly Bourdieu-inspired

publications centering on the importance of economic, cultural and social
capital).
he Descendants of Immigrants and Educational

T
Inequality in Sweden
The Political Arithmetic Tradition
Quantitative sociological research analysing the association between parental

characteristics and educational attainment in Sweden has mainly focused on
class background (measured by the education and occupations of the par-
ents). In Erikson and Jonsson’s (1993) comprehensive report on ‘social origin
and education’, we find only a few pages about the descendants of immi-
grants. As Erikson and Jonsson (1993, p. 118) write, an immigrant back-
ground is associated with ‘socially uneven recruitment to higher education’,
because ‘the majority of young people in this category have a working-class
family background. Consequently they have a poor start even if we disregard
the cultural barrier they encounter in Sweden’. They mention, therefore, the
risk of a ‘social handicap’ that can be transmitted over generations. Following
our own research, Erikson and Jonsson write we have found that few studies
have focused on the educational attainment of the descendants of immigrants,
because (a) the number of individuals in this category has not been sufficient
for a national random sample of young people and (b) this category contains
very heterogeneous groups – ‘from intellectual Czechian and Hungarian refu-
gees to the poor peasants from Turkey and Greece with rudimentary education’
(Erikson and Jonsson 1993, p. 118). According to the authors, the results
from these few studies suggest that, when other relevant variables such as
social background are controlled for, the immigrant background of pupils
does not have a negative impact on their educational attainment.
Studies that follow this tradition in Sweden show that the children of some
immigrant groups do face educational disadvantages compared to the chil-
dren of natives but that this is largely related to their class background. In
other words, the children’s educational disadvantages reflect the social and
economic position of their parents (Arai et al. 2000), although disadvantages
remain for some immigrant groups even after controlling for socio-economic
background. Compared with the children of natives, Similä (1994) shows
that the descendants of immigrants from Nordic countries are less likely to
continue their education after compulsory schooling.
Dryler (2001) researched all students in Sweden who completed their com-
pulsory studies between 1991 and 1997. Considering the ‘final grade’ at the
end of this period as the first outcome variable, her study demonstrated that,
after controlling for relevant variables such as socio-economic background,
gender, etc., Sweden-born pupils with parents from Nordic countries
(Denmark and Norway), Southern European or Latin American countries
had a lower final grade than the children of natives, while those whose paren-
tal background was from Poland or Asian countries had a higher final grade in
comparison to the reference group. The second outcome variable in her study
was the ‘likelihood of attending the academic track’ (versus the vocational or
the school-leaving track). With the exception of the offspring of Nordic
immigrants, all other groups with an immigrant background had a higher
likelihood of following the academic track in comparison with the reference
group (the children of native Swedes). The third outcome variable of Dryler’s
study was the risk of being one of those with the ‘worst educational results’,
that is, those with low/incomplete final grades from compulsory school who
are not eligible for a national program at the upper-secondary-school level.
The results of estimations on this third variable demonstrated that neither
migrant background nor – in some cases – pupils who had parents from
Turkey, Asia or Africa, had any impact on their lack of achievement and that
the risk was lower for the offspring of immigrants compared to the reference
group.
Using register data, Behtoui (2006) studied all individuals born between
1969 and 1973 who had completed secondary school in 1990. The sample in
his study (85,447 individuals) was divided into (a) the reference group – the
children of native-born parents, (b) those born in Sweden with two parents
born outside Sweden and (c) those who migrated to Sweden as a child (before
school age). Among the individuals not included in the reference group were
those who originated from North-Western countries (NW), the global West,
non-North-Western countries (ONW) or the global South. The results of the
(2006) study showed that, after controlling for the socio-economic back-
ground of the parents, there were no significant differences in final grades
from secondary school between the reference group and those born in Sweden
who had an immigrant background. The final grades of young people born
outside Sweden and originating from NW countries were 2% lower than
those of the reference group. For those born outside Sweden and originating
from ONW countries, this difference was about 0.5%. Compared to indi-
viduals in the reference group, those in the immigrant groups largely followed
an academic track (rather than vocationally oriented ones). Following the
same population groups 12 years after their completion of upper-secondary
school, the 2006 study showed that, after control for their socio-economic
background, the total years of education of those originating from NW coun-
tries was slightly lower, while those from ONW countries had higher educa-
tional attainments compared to the reference group.
Jonsson and Rudolphi (2010) studied all Swedish-born students who left
comprehensive school between 1998 and 2003 at the age of 16. According
to their study, compared to the reference group (pupils born in Sweden of
two native-born parents) those with an immigrant background were, to a
great extent, students with non-complete grades at the end of compulsory
schooling. After controlling for the education and class background of the
parents, and for family structure, they found that those with parents from
Nordic countries, the Middle East and the Mixed West were at greater risk of
having non-complete grades compared to the reference group. However, and
quite the reverse, those with parents from the West and from Asian countries
had a lower probability of being in this achievement group compared to the
reference group. The results for other groups (Southern and Eastern Europe,
Africa and South America), did not differ significantly from the reference
group.
Jonsson and Rudolphi’s second indicator of educational performance was
the ‘grade sum’ of students in the last year of compulsory school. After con-
trolling for the relevant variables, the results demonstrated that those with
parents from Nordic countries, South America and the Mixed West had a
lower grade sum than the reference group, while the descendants of immi-
grants from Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia had a
higher grade sum. As the authors (2010, p. 16) wrote, when studying the
performance of the descendants of immigrants, a lower school performance
could be observed but that ‘much of the ethnic disadvantages reflect the social
composition of the immigrant groups’, even though some differences remained
after controlling for parental characteristics.
Behtoui (2013) studied a sample of children, from register data, who were
Swedish-born residents of Stockholm County with two parents from Turkey,
and who were between 18 and 36 years old in 2008. He compared them with
a randomly selected reference group consisting of 20% of all young people in
the same age groups from Stockholm who had two native-born parents. After
controlling for gender and family background, the results of this study dem-
onstrated that the educational achievements of the children of immigrants
from Turkey were comparable to those of young people with native parents of
a similar socio-economic background (see also Westin 2015).
Behtoui and Olsson (2014) examined how early-age immigrants to
Sweden, who arrived in Sweden in the last decades of the 1900s, from Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Chile and Somalia performed in Swedish schools in comparison

with the children of natives. The sample used in this study include young
people aged 20–30 years old who were selected from 2010 Swedish register
data. Descendants of migrants in this study had migrated to Sweden from
their origin countries, before their fifteenth birthday. A randomly selected
group consisting of 10% of all young people born in Sweden with two
Swedish-born parents was also included, to act as the ‘reference group’ in this
study. With no control for background variables, the results show that, com-
pared with the reference group, those from Bosnia had higher educational
attainment levels, while the offspring of immigrants from Somalia and Chile
had fewer years of schooling. When taking the socio-economic position of the
parents and other demographic characteristics into account, the advantage for
Bosnians relative to the offspring of natives was even more pronounced while
the disadvantaged position of the Chileans and Somalis compared to the ref-
erence group decreased significantly.
The NAE (National Agency for Education or Skolverket), as the central
administrative authority for the public school system, regularly publishes offi-
cial statistics in the area of education. In these publications (which have con-
siderable media impact), the NAE offers, inter alia, descriptive statistics on
the educational achievement of young people with a migrant background,
from kindergarten through primary and secondary education and on to
higher education. The NAE mainly uses information from register data
administrated by Statistics Sweden as its main source of information for these
publications, in which individuals with a ‘migrant background’ are defined as
those (born in Sweden or abroad) who have two foreign-born parents.
These NAE reports look very much like other publications in the political
arithmetic (PA) tradition in that, according to Heath (2000, p. 314), they are
‘relatively modest in their theoretical ambition’, and prefer ‘description to
explanation, and hard evidence to theoretical speculation’.
However, following Bourdieu et al. (1991), we could argue that ‘the most
objective “data” are obtained by applying grids’ (e.g. of age or ethnic groups)
and involve some theoretical assumptions. Many times these kinds of descrip-
tive, quantitative data fulfil ‘a deeply conservative function of ratification of
doxa’ (a society’s taken-for-granted, unquestioned truths). In the ‘descriptive
data’ presented in the NAE’s reports, individuals from different immigrant
groups and with diverse social backgrounds are lumped together as ‘students
with immigrant backgrounds’. The NAE state that these reports present ‘hard
statistical evidence’ of how young people in this group lag badly behind those
of ‘Swedish background’ – that is, the children of natives. Whether used con-
sciously or not, such descriptions hide internal variability between and within
Table 23.4 Average total scores and other educational results according to statistics
presented by the Swedish National Agency for Education
Average Pass in No pass, Completed Completed
grade, final English, one or Pass in 3 years 3–5 years
year of maths, more 16 secondary secondary
compulsory Swedish subjects subjects gymnasium gymnasium
Background school (%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
Swedish 216,1 91.0 18.6 85.0 73.0 80.6
Foreign 191,6 74.1 39.3 69.1 49.7 61.5
Of these:
Born in 207,1 85.3 29.6
Sweden
Born abroad, 208,2 84.4 28.8
migrated
before
school
starting age
Born abroad, 159,2 51.9 59.4
migrated
after school
starting age
Source: Authors’ compilation based on data from Skolverket (2011)
ethnic minority groups and indicate the ‘racial inferiority’ or ‘cultural back-
wardness’ of people in the first category.
To give one example, Table 23.4 replicates some of the ‘findings’ in the
recent publication in this series (Skolverket 2011). This statistical report dif-
ferentiates between a Swedish and a foreign background and, sometimes in
the latter category, separates those who were (a) born in Sweden, (b) born
abroad but migrated to Sweden before school starting age and (c) born abroad
and migrated to Sweden after school starting age.
A recent publications in this series, The Importance of Migration for School
Results, from 2016 can be considered as the climax of a particular way of fram-
ing ethnic differences in educational outcomes (Skolverket 2016b, p. 34). This
report explains the poor performance – which is now considerably lower than
the OECD average – of Swedish pupils in the international PISA study, stat-
ing that it is the ‘students with an immigrant background’ who ‘on average
have lower school achievement than students with a Swedish background’.
The report further clarifies that the 25% drop in performance in the natural
sciences and the 22% drop in literacy and mathematics in the PISA tests dur-
ing the period 2006–2012 are associated with an increased number of stu-
dents with immigrant backgrounds.
The report goes on to explain the reason for the increased proportion of
Swedish pupils – up from 10.6% to 14.3% – who failed to obtain the grades
needed to enter upper-secondary school during the same period. Once again,
‘students with an immigrant background’, according to the report, is the main
explanation. About 85% of this fall is caused by students of immigrant origin
who migrated to Sweden after the school starting age and a further 8% is due
to other students with an immigrant background.
As is to be expected, unfortunately, the descriptive statistics in these
reports – widely broadcast in the media – give the reader an image of students
of immigrant background being those who always achieve less in school than
native pupils, thereby putting a strain on Sweden’s educational system (and
international standing). Thus, one additional ‘source of criticism’ is added to
the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, besides the ‘economic burden’ and
‘cultural threat’ which this group represents.
As the above review of the academic literature in this field reveals, such a
homogenous picture is not supported by empirical findings in scholarly
research. These state agencies’ reports tend to consider only one feature of the
polygonal characteristics of a social category (their migrant background) and
to disregard other features (like socio-economic background – the most impor-
tant characteristic in many cases); they consequently provide a somewhat
skewed picture of students with immigrant background in the public sphere.
To sum up, there are two different types of published material in this tradi-
tion; first academic articles and then administrative reports. Publications in
the first group try to be rigorous, to control for different background variables
such as social class, family structure etc., and to differentiate between the
diverse subgroups among them. However, state agencies’ reports, by their
one-dimensional presentation of the educational achievements of young peo-
ple with immigrant backgrounds reproduce the dominant prejudicial image
of this group. Some background factors of these young people (such as the
socioeconomic position of their parents) are crucial explanatory factors in
their educational attainment.
Racism and Discrimination
The study of racism and discrimination in Swedish schools is a fairly new

research field. To the extent that there have been studies of discrimination, the
prejudice perspective has been a point of departure. It was in the mid-1990s
that we first saw studies – such as the national survey Exposure to Threats of
Ethnic and Political Violence and the Dissemination of Racist and Anti-Racist
Propaganda as well as Attitudes to Democracy etc. among Schoolchildren –
describing how power relations in the Swedish school system work out and
the different expressions of racism present in schools (Lange et al. 1997). The
results of this survey showed how pupils with a foreign background experi-
enced violence, racism and discrimination by their peers and teachers. The
same study revealed that a remarkably high percentage of pupils reported that
they were not convinced that the Holocaust really had occurred. In another
survey (Lange and Hedlund 1998), 51.5% of teachers in elementary and
upper-secondary schools reported that racist, anti-Semitic or Nazi propa-
ganda material had been spread around in their schools over the previous five
years. More than 41% of teachers in this survey agreed fully or partly with the
statement that ‘some cultures are so different from the Swedish culture that
people from these other cultures can barely adapt themselves to Swedish
society’.
Reviewing later research in this field, we can distinguish the following
trends; firstly those which continue the prejudice perspective tradition. Here
discrimination and xenophobia are regarded as the irrational behavior of some
deviant individuals. The second approach, culturalization, explains that, due
to their divergent culture, the descendants of migrants and minorities are
treated differently – a situation which could be corrected through an assimila-
tion approach. The last perspective departs from the argument that societies
are structured not only by class and gender but also by race or racialization –
critical race theory. According to this standpoint, the history of the indigenous
peoples in Sweden (the Sami) and other national minorities like the Roma,
Jews, Swedish Finns, Tornedalians and Kven is testimony to how the Swedish
national school system worked during the period of nation-state construction
as a central instrument in processes of coercive assimilation of the country’s
minorities (Catomeris 2004; Lindgren 2002).
In an analysis of school curricula over time, Brantefors (2015) argues that
two dominating values have governed cultural relations – ‘the culture of oth-
ers’ and ‘the cultural heritage’. She goes on to argue that, in spite of different
rationalities and discussions over time, cultural thinking has never progressed
beyond an unarticulated ‘we’ and a well-defined ‘them’. Thus we can conclude
that ‘the Swedish curriculum is a curriculum of othering’ (Brantefors 2015,
p. 302). Other studies examine the role of the curriculum and highlight how
these texts, in different ways, made it easier for the children of natives to iden-
tify with the teaching materials used and the stereotypes reproduced about the
racial, cultural and religious ‘Others’ such as Muslims and black people
(Otterbeck 2006; Tholin 2014).
The role of policy – and especially how policy is used to combat discrimina-
tion and racism and to foster antiracism – has been explored in a number of
studies. Arneback (2012), studying local plans for the equal treatment of all
school pupils, argues that, even though these plans focus on ‘non-violence’
and forbid expressions of racism among students, they pay little attention to
the expressions of racism that occur in the organization of schools. In later
research Arneback (2014) studies the role of moral imaginations as a way in
which teachers can deal with hate speech in education. James’ (2001) study
reveals a paradox between teachers’ stated desires to accommodate the diversi-
ties in culture of their students and their ideology of integration, which indi-
cates a preference for maintaining a culturally homogenous Sweden in order
to avoid the ethical dilemmas, problems and conflicts which this diversity
creates. Dovemark (2013) finds that teachers did not address the everyday
practices in which ethnic discrimination, Swedish privilege and supremacy
were articulated. According to her, discourses about ‘weak immigrant groups’
simply make minority groups aware that they are different in a negative way
in the eyes of others. Consequently, immigrant status is automatically associ-
ated with social disadvantage. Runfors’ research findings (2003, 2004a, b,
2006) reveal the dilemmas that school staff are confronted with when they
work with pupils of migrant origin. On the one hand, they attempt to combat
the exclusionary and subordinating effects of social structures, including
racialized discrimination and segregation. On the other hand, however, in
trying to overcome these inequalities, school staff often tend to reproduce
these same structures through an ethnocentric and unproblematized under-
standing of the meaning of integration.
Grüber (2007) describes complex everyday life in schools where the teach-
ers, despite their good intentions, are working within an institution that is
always (re)creating pupils with an immigrant background as a fundamentally
problematic category. She emphasizes that Swedish schools are now heavily
influenced by the idea of competition (which follows from the establishment
of ‘quasi markets’ in the field of education, cf. above), in which league tables
are important for a school’s reputation. In this context, two pupil categories
stand out as central: ‘Swedish’ and ‘immigrant’ pupils. While the former cat-
egory is regarded as highly desirable and a guarantee of the upkeep of the
school’s good reputation, the latter is regarded as a cause for concern because,
according to the staff, when there are too many ‘immigrant’ pupils in one
school, then ‘Swedish’ (middle-class) pupils are not attracted to it. To account
for pupils’ performances in school, teachers tend to link ‘Swedish’ pupils’ out-
comes to their middle-class background. However, they associate the lower
grades obtained by ‘immigrant pupils’ with their ‘culture’ rather than their
lower socio-economic background. In line with Grüber, Granstedt (2006)
describes how teachers link ‘immigrant students’ with ‘problems’, and portray
them and their families by what they are ‘lacking’. Haglund (2015) – through
narrative analyses of how school officials understand and explain the work
they do in supporting students exposed to domestic violence – shows that,
while the mistreatment of children with Swedish parents was explained
through social and psychological frames of interpretation, they tended to
explain away similar behavior in parents with a migrant background by using
culture and ethnicity as the main frame of interpretation.
Sawyer (2006) concentrates explicitly on studying counselors and ethnic
discrimination. Starting from earlier research (e.g. Knocke and Hertzberg
2000) which emphasized stereotypical understandings of pupils according to
their race/ethnicity, religion and gender, Sawyer found that counselors tended
to accuse the parents of pupils with an immigrant background of, according
to them, having a negative and harmful influence on their children through
their expectations for and promotion of an ‘unrealistic educational plan’ for
their children. According to Sawyer, counselors often work with implicit
understandings of what are the ‘natural’ careers for the various groups in terms
of pupils’ gender, class and ethnic background. They try to ‘bring down’ stu-
dents’ expectations to what they feel to be a ‘realistic level’. This is in defiance
of the results from recently published research (Behtoui 2017), which displays
higher educational expectations of the children of immigrants relative to their
native peers with the same class background.
In his PhD thesis, Bouakaz (2007) presented the results of his research into
how Swedish schools evaluate parents with a migrant background through a
stereotypical lens. He compared the way in which parents of Arabic origin
and teachers view parental involvement in the work of the school. Bouakaz
found that, while the parents identified their lack of knowledge of the Swedish
language and of the school system as something that hindered their involve-
ment, yet showed a great willingness to learn in order to get closer to the
school and help their children, the teachers spoke not only about the parents’
language deficiency but also about other barriers such as cultural and religious
factors. These differences were connected with the parents’ development of an
attitude of resignation with regards to the school – based not on a lack of
interest on their part in getting involved in their children’s education but on
the desire to avoid a feeling of humiliation in their contacts with teachers.
Another body of research has highlighted how racism and ethnic discrimi-
nation are experienced by and affect students with an immigrant background.
Parszyk (1999) describes students’ feelings about what they called ‘invisible
racism’. They articulate their experiences of being discriminated against based
on the attitudes and statements that teachers and other pupils make in rela-
tion to their ethnic background, parents and religion. According to Parszyk,
this ‘invisible racism’ was a source of insecurity in their day-to-day school life
for the descendants of immigrants. This type of racism was more problematic
than ‘open racism’ since the victims could not really defend themselves against
it. Young people perceived to be Muslims (Otterbeck and Bevelander 2006)
and Afro Swedes (Schmauch 2006) were among those who were more often
subjected to racist practices in schools. Kalonaityté et al. (2009) conclude that
racism is expressed through both verbal and physical harassment. As these
young people do not appear to receive support from their teachers or other
adults in schools, they are forced to develop their own strategies of coping,
survival and struggle. Hällgren (2005) illustrates how these young people
from minority groups develop various strategies for dealing with and chal-
lenging everyday racism through silence, laughter or overt confrontation.
To summarize the key findings presented in this section, research has shown
how pupils and parents from ethnic minorities are submitted to processes of
othering in schools at various levels, from curricula and policy to everyday
interactions in schools. Teachers are reported to reproduce an unproblema-
tized ethnocentric understanding of pupils and parents of migrant origin,
even while attempting to counteract the effects of discrimination and segrega-
tion. Minority cultures are perceived by the dominant group in Swedish soci-
ety as a deficit and even as the cause of underachievement. Students and
parents from ethnic religious minorities experience discrimination, often in a
more hidden way, in schools, and develop a variety of ways to challenge every-
day racism. Research exploring racism and discrimination within education is
a relatively new field in Sweden, especially where international publications
are concerned; however, a growing interest is developing and an increase in
publications. To further expand and consolidate this research, there is a need
for conceptual developments, encompassing research programs and theoreti-
cally structured mixed-methods approaches.
School Choice and School Segregation
As mentioned above, education reform during the post-war period in Sweden

had a strong emphasis on equality between children of different class back-
grounds. The guiding principle of this reform was thus the promotion of an
equality of opportunity through a system which delivers education of the
same standard to everyone. However, in the early 1990s, a shift in educational
policy occurred. Several educational reforms changed the organization and
outcomes of primary and secondary education in a fundamental way.
As research in this field suggests, the development of segregation is the
consequence of a complex process. Rising income inequality over the previous
four decades, together with changes in housing policy in the 1990s – which
involved prioritizing private housing over rental apartments – resulted in
housing segregation becoming more widespread.
In such a situation, increasing numbers of quality-of-education-conscious
middle-class parents withdrew their children from schools which they consid-
ered to have deteriorated. With this ‘exit’ of middle-class students, the schools
lost those parents who would have been the most motivated and determined
to put up a fight against the deterioration in strands (Hirschman 2004). The
parents of those who had no choice but to stay lacked the resources – the
time, knowledge, skill and self-confidence – of the former group to have a
‘voice’, to attempt to improve the education context/policies. Consequently,
students in the extremely segregated Swedish school system achieve radically
distinct educational results.
A number of scholars (Östh et al. 2013; Söderström and Uusitalo 2010)
provide empirical data which show that the ethnic segregation of the school
system has also been strengthened, while others emphasize that this trend is
primarily the consequence of an increase in socio-economic segregation (Öhrn
2011). According to Lund (2008), regardless of their background, parents
and students wish to avoid schools located in poor, stigmatized areas, nor-
mally with a high proportion of inhabitants with a migrant background. As
Bunar and Ambrose (2016, p. 45) put it: ‘To parents, a good school is an
arena in which their child will have the opportunity to interact with children
from socially strong and ethnically Swedish families on a daily basis. These
two categories are perceived as providers of strong networks, correct cultural
values, correct Swedish language and a strong internal school culture prioritiz-
ing learning and academic success’; similar motives are found among their
children. However, as Spaiser et al. (2016, pp. 23–24) state, ‘Ethnically mixed
schools are less affected by a downward trend in the proportion of Swedish
students if the (immigrant) students have a rather affluent background or if
the ethnically mixed schools are high performing schools’. Thus the most vul-
nerable young people who suffer from school segregation are children from
economically disadvantaged and immigrant families who have become con-
centrated in schools with poor academic standards (Beach and Sernhede
2011).
As León Rosales (2010) shows, children in 6th grade in a school situated in
a multiethnic, deprived suburb of Stockholm are already aware of the territo-
rial stigmatization of their neighborhood and school. They articulate a view of
themselves as problematic and deficient in relation to ‘Swedish children’ in
other schools. The author shows how these pupils have internalized a norm of
Swedish privilege. The teaching they receive in school, the socio-economic
conditions which they endure and the effects of the segregation that charac-
terizes the urban landscape they live in, all make it harder for them to live up
to the characteristics of the ‘ideal pupil’ as articulated in schools’ official
curricula.
The patterns and divisions that characterize racialized urban segregation in
the Swedish housing market are often reproduced, if not intensified, in school.
Although a free-school choice policy was introduced in Sweden, framed in
notions of fairness and freedom of choice, it has resulted in intensified pat-
terns of segregation in education and in housing (Bunar and Ambrose 2016).
In the most socio-economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, schools have
to deal with the consequences of racialized stigmatization and new forms of
poverty.
Here, Sernhede and Broman (2014) calls attention to the actuality of infor-
mal learning arenas outside the formal educational system (that excludes and
subordinates certain groups of students). He shows, through participation in
these activities, that the marginalized and racialized children of immigrants
develop a positive identity for themselves which differs from the identity pro-
jected on to them by a history of colonialism and dominant discourses on
migrants as social ‘others’.
To conclude, therefore – a number of segregating processes have, according
to recent research, been discernible in the Swedish school system in recent
decades. These processes have been fuelled by increasing residential segregation
and changes in educational policy, and above all by the implementation of a
voucher system and the introduction of school choice. Educational choice
turns out to be something that is most successfully employed by the middle
and upper classes. Economically disadvantaged and immigrant groups have
ended up concentrated in the same schools, primarily within the public sector
in marginalized areas. These schools have been avoided by upper- and middle-
class families since the possibility of choosing became an option.
Language Proficiency Tradition
An important strand of Swedish research on migration and education con-

cerns language proficiency and linguistic practices in multilingual classrooms.
This tradition is related to that of discrimination and racism, outlined above,
but deserves its own discussion – thanks to its focus on exclusionary practises
through linguistic norms and language ideologies. As Blackledge (2005, p. i)
argues, ‘In a world where explicitly racist discourse which describes particular
groups of people in negative terms is no longer permitted, symbolic means of
discrimination will be found’. Languages other than Swedish – and multilin-

gual youngsters’ linguistic practises – may emerge as such symbolic markers of
difference in the classroom.
To understand the status of multilingualism in Swedish schools, a contex-
tual backdrop of Swedish language politics is crucial. A milestone in the
acknowledgement of multilingualism in Sweden was the ratification, in 1968,
of the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education, which
acknowledged immigrants’ right to maintain and develop their home lan-
guages (hemspråk). In practise, this ‘pluralist turn’ (Milani 2008) had its most
palpable outcome in the introduction of state-financed mother-tongue
instruction in 1977. Since then, a rights rhetoric shapes Swedish political dis-
course on multilingualism. This was also made manifest in 2000, through
ratification of the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the
Protection of National Minorities, as well as the European Charter for
Regional or Minority Languages, which included the proclamation of five
‘national minority languages’ – Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Saami and
Yiddish (SOU 1997a, b). The discourse of linguistic rights was further empha-
sized in the language law of 2009, which aimed primarily to clarify the posi-
tion of Swedish and other languages in Swedish society. The law proposal
suggested that it should enshrine ‘everyone’s right to language: Swedish,
mother tongue, and foreign languages’ (SOU 2002, p. 27).
In light of this contextual information, one might conclude that Swedish
language politics acknowledges multilingualism both through legislation and
by providing instruction in home and minority languages through the educa-
tion system. Indeed, the right to multilingualism is enshrined in the language
law, and the state is responsible for ‘providing the individual with access to
language through education’. However, as Hyltenstam and Milani (2012)
state, the view of multilingualism in the Swedish education system is charac-
terized by a paradox: at a policy level, the country has formulated advanced
objectives in its progressive laws and documents. However, the implementa-
tion of these documents ‘does not even come close to the intentions in the
regulations’ (Hyltenstam and Milani 2012, p. 11).
This gap can be understood in terms of the ideology of a Swedish monolin-
gual standard, demonstrated in much ethnographic classroom research –
where the idea of ‘good Swedish’ is treated as a sign par excellence of both a
successful integration and school success. Bunar (2011), for example, has
shown that one of the main reasons – raised by parents and students in mul-
tilingual settings – why they apply to prestigious upper-secondary schools in
Swedish urban centers is the expectation that their children will acquire
‘proper Swedish’. This idea of a good standard of Swedish, spoken by specific
students at particular schools, may be understood as a form of a language ide-

ology, i.e. a normative conception of a good or proper language, as well as
perceptions about whom the speaker of the (non-)standard language is
(Kroskrity 2010). Whilst this ideology of standard Swedish may construct a
fantasy of a common Swedish national identity, speaking one homogenous
language simultaneously both suppresses the existence of a heterogeneous
society and devalues multilingual practises. Moreover, standard Swedish is
often treated as a measurement for integration. As Sjögren (1996) wrote, over
two decades ago now, the requirement of good Swedish can serve as a way to
define what Swedishness is and who is to be included in the category of ‘the
Swede’.
Ethnographic research on education and second-language acquisition dem-
onstrates that such a monolingual ideology is often reproduced by Swedish
school institutions. Haglund’s (2005) ethnographic study in multilingual
suburban schools identifies how young people relate to a standard Swedish
norm articulated in their education, while simultaneously showing an aware-
ness that multilingualism is not ascribed an equal value. Åhlund (2015)
explores a language introduction program for newly arrived refugee youth,
designed to facilitate their integration into the mainstream school system.
However, as the author shows, students are positioned and marked as non-
Swedish through this same education. Paradoxically, the institutional
construction of an inclusive school – which celebrates diversity – simultane-
ously draws on a discourse of ‘otherness’.
Another case where normative Swedishness is being played out through
language ideologies in educational contexts is the linguistic youth style that
has been called Rinkeby Swedish (rinkebysvenska). Rinkeby Swedish is a label
under which academic scholars, the mass media and laypeople alike have
grouped together the very diverse linguistic practises characteristic of young
people’s interactions in multilingual urban environments in Sweden (Boyd
2010; Bijvoet and Fraurud 2010). The existing literature on media representa-
tions surrounding Rinkeby Swedish (Jonsson 2007; Jonsson and Milani 2009;
Stroud 2004, 2013) testifies to a process whereby linguistic practises among
urban youth seem to have turned them into icons of social and educational
problems, and an aggressive and threatening ‘immigrant young man’ stereo-
type. Stroud (2004) therefore argues that negatively laden representations of
Rinkeby Swedish ‘are not about language alone’ (Woolard 1998, p. 3) but con-
stitute a metaphor of broader processes of social categorization in a society like
Sweden where an ‘explicitly racist discourse which describes particular groups
of people in negative terms is no longer permitted’. Milani and Jonsson’s
(2011, 2012) work in multilingual classrooms shows how language ideologies
surrounding so-called Rinkeby Swedish are constantly being reproduced – as

well as contested – in mundane classroom talk. The linguistic style may be a
target for moralizing comments and treated as a sign of the ethnic ‘other’ in
the classroom; however, it may also be employed as a recourse for constructing
identities, ethnicities, masculinities and friendly relations between students.
A Swedish monolingual norm also surrounds other forms of non-normative
linguistic practise. Lindberg (2002) critically discusses the general perception
that bilinguals must keep their languages separate in order to learn them
properly – which has influenced the debate on mother-tongue and second-
language acquisition in Swedish schools. Such a normative view of languages
does not capture the whole complexity of bilingual students’ language skills,
which may involve switching between languages, accents, loanwords and
many other forms of linguistic mixing and effects. While code-switching has
often been regarded as a sign of a lack of language skills, Lindberg argues that
it should be understood as a linguistic resource, highly valuable in
communication.
Overall, much of this research show that multilingual or non-standard lin-
guistic practises in school institutions are treated as icons of ethnic ‘otherness’
and associated with various educational problems to be dealt with – rather
than as valuable linguistic skills. Non-standard styles spoken by youths in
multilingual settings often acquire their meaning through a monolingual
language ideology taught in the classroom. As Doran (2004) states, while this
ideology of the standard may construct a fantasy of a common national iden-
tity and one homogenous language, it simultaneously seeks to suppress the
possibility of a heterogeneous society, devaluing non-normative linguistic
practises and rendering them incomprehensible. This, in turn, is an example
of the symbolic means of discrimination, hidden in language norms, that
Blackledge (2005) talks about.
Cultural and Social Capital and Socio-Historical Contexts
As the above review of quantitative studies in the political arithmetic tradition

shows, the main gap between the educational attainments of the children of
natives and the descendants of immigrants can be explained by the lower
socio-economic background of the latter. In other words, such a gap is pri-
marily due to the unfavorable social and material conditions in which young
people of immigrant background grow up, especially when we consider the
educational attainment of young people from specific immigrant groups.
Obviously, those who immigrated after school starting age (arriving in their
adolescence), have experiences that resemble those of adult migrants. The
time spent in the new country’s education system obviously affects their edu-
cational outcomes. As Rumbaut (2004) states, the earlier one arrives, the
more ‘socialised’ one becomes in the new country’s language and cultural
norms. Consequently, young people of immigrant background arriving in
adolescence should acquire the cultural capital pertinent to the demands of
the education system in Sweden. The process of their incorporation requires
the learning of the language and the acquisition of the behavioral values and
norms of the new society, which is like being born again. They encounter a
complex process of belonging and identity formation in the receiving country,
since they live between two worlds – between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, between
‘here’ and ‘there’ between homes and between languages (Huang et al. 2008,
p. 8). They straddle the new and the old countries but are not full members of
either (Zhou 1997).
According to Jonsson (2001), the habit of reading books can be an impor-
tant indicator of cultural capital. He used three questions to operationalize the
‘reading tradition’ in a family – (a) their access to books and encyclopædias,
(b) the number of books in the young person’s home, (c) the reading habits of
the informants and their parents and (d) how often the informants’ parents go
to the theatre, to concerts, to museums and/or to exhibitions. The results
showed that the children of parents with lower-class positions or with
foreign-born parents have access to cultural capital (an index which combines
all these indicators) to a lesser extent than other family groups. Johansson and
Olofsson (2011), using a narrative-sociological approach, describe how four
young people of immigrant background recounted in their interviews their
attempts to ‘raise their cultural capital’ through disidentifying themselves
‘with a subordinated migrant position’ and with the socially degraded posi-
tion of the parents (unemployed or working-class), through finding friends
with a Swedish background, moving to more affluent Swedish areas, becom-
ing more Swedish and staying ‘inside’ Swedish society. According to the
authors, these young people have ‘considerable cultural capital in their fami-
lies, but it seems difficult to transform this capital into a suitable career in
Sweden’ (ibid. p. 197), because of the difficulties which their parents encoun-
tered in reproducing the same social positions that they had in their home-
land; therefore, with their present ‘stigmatized positions’, they are living in
stigmatized urban spaces.
Considering the friendship networks of young people of immigrant back-
ground as part of their social capital, Edling and Rydgren (2012, p. 8) found
that ‘friendship among Stockholm 9th-graders in the early 2000s was highly
homogeneous’ with respect to ethnicity – i.e. that young people who said that
a majority of their friends had an immigrant background ‘were themselves
mainly of non-Swedish origin’. As Behtoui (2015) writes about the results of
a survey, an overwhelming majority of the best friends of young people with
native parents were themselves the children of natives. The majority of the
best friends of the descendants of immigrants from Turkey, on the other hand,
were the children of immigrants from non-Western countries. At best, only
25% of young people from the latter group had native-Swedish friends.
In recent years, some Swedish studies in the field of education have inves-
tigated the relationship between differential access to social capital, educa-
tional attainment and migration background. These studies are inspired by
Bourdieu’s (1986) conceptualization of social capital (the social stratification
perspective) and Coleman’s (1988) definition of the concept, emphasizing the
role of the family.
Jonsson (2001) examined the impact of social capital by using some of the
indicators suggested by Coleman (1988) – such as family structure and paren-
tal involvement in children’s studies (help with homework and making time
for the child). The results of his study showed that access to more social capital
(measured according to the study’s variables) was positively correlated with
greater educational success. Concerning migrant background, the results
showed that foreign-born parents did provide ‘help with homework’ to a
lesser extent than the native-born, but this shortage was compensated for by
their other children (siblings).
In a study by Behtoui and Neergaard (2016) ‘immigrant background’
includes individuals with two foreign-born parents from countries outside
North-Western Europe and North America (ONW). Young people born in
Sweden with parents born in ONW countries are labeled as ONW2 (second-
generation immigrants from the Global South), and those who were born
abroad but emigrated at an early age to Sweden with parents from ONW
countries are labeled as ONW1 (first-generation immigrants from the Global
South). According to the results of this study, within-family social capital
(structure of the family and some aspects of the interactions between parents
and adolescents regarding their education) has a positive association with stu-
dents’ school performance. Moreover access to three types of extra-familial
social capital (social capital generated by parental networks, active member-
ship in social organizations, and attitudes of best friends towards education)
all contributed to an improvement in the educational attainments of students.
An interesting finding of this study is that, after controlling for class back-
ground, the children of racialized immigrants from ONW countries in Sweden
had access to more extra-familial social capital which, in turn, improved their
educational results. This advantage is quite contrary to their place in the hier-
archy. Therefore, their access to greater levels of social capital has a ‘counter-
stratification’ effect (Stanton-Salazar 2001).
Behtoui’s (2017) study examines the impact of the different types of social
capital (both within-family and extra-familial), on the educational expecta-
tions of these young people. Immigrant background, in his study, is sorted
into the following regional categories, either based on the country of birth of
the respondent (first generation) or country of birth of the parents (second
generation): (1) North-West European countries (the EU 15), North America
and Australia (NW), (2) other European countries, (3) Asia, (4) Africa and
(5) Latin America.
The findings in this study demonstrate that class and/or migrant back-
ground, health problems and gender can explain some of the variance in the
educational expectations of young people. The bulk of young people of immi-
grant background reported higher educational expectations than those of
native background. Within-family social capital in general, and parents’
expectations about educational attainment in particular, had a positive impact
on young people’s educational aims. The results regarding school-based social
capital demonstrated that teachers’ support (i.e. how they treat their pupils)
and, more importantly, their expectations for the educational achievements of
the students, had a significant impact on forming the future educational plans
of these young people – boys and several groups of pupils of immigrant back-
ground reported less support from and fair judgment by their teachers.
All three dimensions of extra-familial social capital (having a resource-rich
family social network, friends with a positive attitude towards education and
participation in social activities in mainstream society organizations), showed
a positive impact on the educational expectations of young people. Even in
this study, after controlling for class background, several groups of young
people of immigrant background reported higher rates of participation in
certain leisure activities and therefore more access to these types of extra-
familial social capital, compared to the offspring of natives.
As Behtoui and Olsson (2014) write, hitherto the socio-economic position
of the parents, family structure and other demographic characteristics of indi-
viduals explained some of the differences between the descendants of natives
and young immigrants. They suggest that we should examine the impact of
the socio-historical contexts into which these immigrant children arrive and
settle, and of the processes of migration on young immigrants’ educational
performance.
To do this, they studied how early-age immigrants to Sweden from Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Chile and Somalia performed in Swedish schools in comparison
with the children of natives. What they found was that the ‘in-between’ gen-
eration who migrated from these countries to Sweden was not a homogenous
category. Quite the reverse, at both the individual and the institutional levels
(context of migration), they had different resources which generated diverse
outcomes. The context of migration in their study was defined as (a) the gov-
ernment’s policy towards the different immigrant groups, (b) the reaction of
civil society and public opinion towards immigrants and (c) immigrants’
resources in their co-national social network, expressed as the ‘diasporic’
community.
The results demonstrated that Bosnians were more highly educated than
the children of natives. The immigrants from Chile and Somalia, on the other
hand, carried a ‘gross’ disadvantage. Controlling for the class background and
demographic characteristics of the respondents shrank the gap between
groups. The inclusion of ‘context of migration’ variables demonstrated that
they had a significant impact on the school performance of early-age migrants.
As is evident from the studies presented above, this tradition is a rich one
regarding the elucidation of the educational attainments of descendants of
immigrants in Sweden. An important finding of these studies is the counter-
stratification effect of social capital, which means that, by providing more pos-
sibilities for young people from less-privileged families and the children of
immigrants to have access to this kind of capital (through their leisure activities
or closer relationships with adults in the schools, they can be embedded
within social networks with resourceful relationships, and connect them to
informal mentors and pro-academic friends. Further research in this field
should demonstrate how access to these alternative resources may help these
young individuals.
Conclusions and Discussion

Studies on the education and educational inequality of immigrants and their
children in Sweden became a major area of research from the beginning of the
1990s onwards. In our review we have distinguished between five clusters of
research:
• political arithmetic tradition;

• racism and discrimination;
• language proficiency tradition;
• school choice and school segregation; and
• cultural and social capital and socio-historical contexts.
The ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, which starts mainly from a positivistic

approach and employs large-scale, quantitative research strategies, has focused
on the individual and demographic characteristics of pupils. The impact of
family background (parents’ education and position in the labor market, and
family structure), and the gender and immigrant background of young people
are the main focus of these studies, which seek to explain the inequality in the
educational attainment of young people. This line of research mainly explains
the lower educational achievements of immigrant and racialized students,
with reference to their social class. However, how shifts in educational policy
(macro-level factors) or social relations with other individuals in the sur-
rounding environment (meso-level factors) affect the educational outcomes of
these young people are seldom addressed in these studies. One reason is pos-
sibly the difficulty of conducting empirical inquiries on subjects like social
relations based on data from large register databases. In recent years, however,
other topics such as ‘school effect’ and ‘neighborhood effect’ have added to
these kinds of inquiry, but there are very few studies of this type to date
(Bygren and Szulkin 2010). The main assumption of these studies is that the
contextual effect can also have an impact beyond the individual factors. Thus,
the ‘concentration of disadvantaged families in neighborhoods and schools
will have negative consequences for children’s school achievement’ (Szulkin
and Jonsson 2007, p. 2) and restricted interaction with other individuals from
the same ethnic group in a neighborhood can negatively affect the educational
aspirations and study habits of young people of immigrant background
(Hällsten and Szulkin 2009). Neighborhood or school effects in these studies
are measured as, for instance, the extent to which inhabitants of the neighbor-
hood participate in the labor market, the concentration of individuals from
the same ethnic group in an area or the density in the number of children of
immigrants in a school.
One serious problem in the ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, as mentioned
above, is the non-nuanced ‘statistics’ provided by government agency reports
about the ‘educational underachievement’ of the descendants of immigrants
in Sweden. In these reports, all immigrant offspring are lumped together as
one homogenous group and labelled as ‘students of foreign background’. As
our review shows, according to scientific publications, the offspring of immi-
grants in Sweden are a very heterogeneous population in terms of, among
other things, country of origin, class background, age at arrival, length of resi-
dence in Sweden, the treatment of public opinion and the authorities, the
scale of their exposure to racism and the resources that their communities
make available to them. Without considering these factors, government agency
reports convey an image of the group as a ‘problem’ and a ‘great burden’
for Sweden’s education system. As Jenkins (2004, p. 47) correctly states: ‘The
classification of populations as a practice of state and other agencies is power-
fully constitutive, both of institutions and the interactional experiences of
individuals’. In this case, stigmatization and the negative labelling of young
people of immigrant background by state agencies have serious consequences
for these young people.
The main assumption of the other research clusters is that there are impor-
tant contextual circumstances (beyond individual factors) which decisively
affect racialized students’ educational achievements. While often dominated
by qualitative approaches, these types of research do sometimes include quan-
titatively designed studies. These research traditions argue that, in addition to
the individual characteristics of immigrants and their children, the impor-
tance of paying attention to the meso- and macro-level factors in studying the
educational attainments of these groups is vital. These types of research are
influenced by various theoretical perspectives (from social constructivism to
phenomenology) and data-collection methods (from ethnographic classroom
research to interviews and discourse analysis, and a few with quantitative and
mixed-methods approaches).
These clusters have particularly contributed knowledge in different forms.
One is the importance of recognising that the discrimination against and
subordination of immigrant students in the Swedish education system is and
has been an important contributory cause of the lower educational outcomes
of these young people. However, as the results of many enquiries demon-
strate, there is sometimes a paradox in this process; despite the good inten-
tions of many teachers, their ethnocentric and unproblematized understanding
of the meaning of integration can turn into ‘symbolic violence’ and force
these young people to see themselves as part of a defective problematic cate-
gory. In other situations, stereotypical understandings by school staff of the
‘natural’ educational careers and future position of these young people on the
labor market can generate a seriously harmful influence on their pupils. The
findings from these studies, moreover, demonstrate both how the descendants
of immigrants experience discrimination and the ways in which they adopt
strategies to cope with racism in schools.
What has been emphasized by the ‘language proficiency tradition’ is pri-
marily the ambition of an educational system that, as a rule, strives to ‘equal-
ize things’ in relation to the language learning and speaking ability of these
young people. When teachers treat non-standard linguistic practises in schools
as indications of ‘otherness’ associated with various educational problems –
rather than regarding multilingualism and other linguistic practises among
urban youth as valuable linguistic skills –they then create a further deficit
which should be managed and prevented.
Some internationally well-known research issues in the field of education
and the descendants of immigrants and minority groups are under-developed
in Sweden. Future Swedish research would benefit from employing a broader
range of inter-related subjects such as the identification problem (i.e. how
ethnic minority students, experiencing varying degrees of discrimination and
racism, orient themselves towards and identify with Swedish society) and how
such an identification can have an impact on their educational success or fail-
ure. Another under-developed issue is the leisure activities and extra-curricu-
lar involvement of these young people within and outside school. How the
characteristics of the different immigrant communities can help young people
from minority groups is another less-explored subject that future research
needs to focus on more.
A final major issue highlighted by recent research was the impact of severe
policy changes in Sweden from the beginning of the 1990s. These changes,
largely driven by neoliberal ideas, seriously affected educational policies. This
transition ushered in a heightened degree of segregation by which the children
of families from vulnerable groups (economically disadvantaged and immi-
grant groups in marginalized neighborhoods) were increasingly concentrated
in schools with limited resources. As the research results demonstrated, the
social degradation working in these segregated schools, rather than promoting
equal opportunities or social mobility, actually reproduced students’ social
position at the same level as that of their parents, undercut the unity of the
country and froze and expanded the existing hierarchies of power and privi-
lege rather than challenged them. This is because, as Kahlenberg (2001,
pp. 5–6) notes, segregated schools are ‘the fountainhead of countless discrete
inequalities’ and adds ‘In determining school quality, the people in the school
community are more important than average expenditure for each pupil or
physical facilities’. According to Kahlenberg, classmates act as a ‘hidden cur-
riculum’ which can provide lower-class children with richer vocabularies,
greater knowledge and higher educational ambition; highly educated native-
born parents have a greater ability to put pressure on administrators to recruit
experienced teachers and ensure adequate funding. There is a serious need for
more research on the consequences of recent school segregation in Sweden in
order to provide a deep understanding of how this macro-level education sys-
tem formation influences ethnic and/or racial inequalities.
As we can see, there are considerable differences between the ‘political
arithmetic’ tradition and other traditions in this field, especially regarding
forms of data collection and theoretical analysis. Sometimes different forms of
research take place in a parallel way in these different traditions and there is
an apparent absence of communication between them. More interaction
between the various traditions in answering research questions and a greater
integration of different methods for data collection in research projects are
necessary in order to strengthen the power of knowledge in this field. As an
example we can mention studies which explore whether and how school social
and ethnic composition (mainly an effect of macro-level factors of educa-
tional policy), and interpersonal relationships between students, their families
and adults in the schools (the meso-level factors of school-based social capital)
may predict the various academic achievements of students with different
backgrounds (class, gender, ethnicity and learning difficulties).
Following the ‘refugee’ or ‘solidarity crisis’ of 2015, Sweden received more
asylum-seekers per capita than any other country of the Global North.
Consequently, the education of the children of immigrants in Sweden is likely
to become a central topic for upcoming research in the field of education.
There are at least three central issues that need to be integrated in this research.
One concerns the particularities of migration as a transition process. A second
concerns issues of integration and discrimination, not the least in a context of
rising nationalism, xenophobia and racism. The third concerns our under-
standing of the effects of educational policies, and how other policy areas can
affect (positively/negatively) the incorporation of these young people. While
studies centered on the individual do provide important knowledge, we
envisage the need for more contextually focused research – using both qualita-
tive and quantitative approaches – which takes on these huge challenges of
societal importance.
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The chapter is organized as follows: in section “National Context” we

• political arithmetic (quantitative data on the unequal educational achieve-

The chapter ends with a short conclusion.

Table 23.1 The Swedish education system

 igration Patterns and the Children of Immigrants

In an historical overview of Swedish migration, post-World War II migration

Table 23.2 Immigrants and their descendants in Sweden, December 2012

studies exploring the inequality of resources (particularly Bourdieu-inspired

 he Descendants of Immigrants and Educational

Quantitative sociological research analysing the association between parental

Herzegovina, Chile and Somalia performed in Swedish schools in comparison

Racism and Discrimination

The study of racism and discrimination in Swedish schools is a fairly new

School Choice and School Segregation

As mentioned above, education reform during the post-war period in Sweden

Language Proficiency Tradition

An important strand of Swedish research on migration and education con-

discrimination will be found’. Languages other than Swedish – and multilin-

students at particular schools, may be understood as a form of a language ide-

surrounding so-called Rinkeby Swedish are constantly being reproduced – as

Cultural and Social Capital and Socio-Historical Contexts

As the above review of quantitative studies in the political arithmetic tradition

Conclusions and Discussion

• political arithmetic tradition;

The ‘political arithmetic’ tradition, which starts mainly from a positivistic

Haglund, C. (2005). Social Interaction and Identification Among Adolescents in

Otterbeck, J., & Bevelander, P. (2006). Islamofobi: en studie av begreppet, ungdomars

SOU. (1997b). Statens offentliga utredningar 1997:193. Steg mot en minoritetspolitik.

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igration Patterns and the Children of Immigrants

he Descendants of Immigrants and Educational

Racism and Discrimination

School Choice and School Segregation

Language Proficiency Tradition

Cultural and Social Capital and Socio-Historical Contexts

Conclusions and Discussion