Achieving ethnic minority students’ inclusion: A Flemish school’s discursive practices countering the quasi-market pressure to exclude

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to identify how ethnically diverse schools can discursively maintain a good reputation. Reputation allows attracting the mixed student population necessary to achieve inclusion, or closing the gap between the attainment of ethnic majority and minority students. In semi-market educational systems where students are free to attend the school of their choice yet education has no market price, the share of ethnic minority students functions as one of the main indicators of a school’s educational quality. Ethnically diverse schools are thus perceived as offering lower quality education. Based on the case of a highly ethnically diverse, inclusive secondary school in the exclusive Flemish secondary educational semi-market, we found that a positive reputation could be achieved through three related discursive practices: affirming the high-quality education of the school, redefining the relation between students’ ethnic diversity and educational quality, and reconstructing ethnic diversity as an educational resource.