Limited access Past event

Social Exclusion and Ethnic Segregation in Schools: The Role of Teacher's Ethnic Prejudice

This will be a Teams Live event. Please join the session on the date and time specified using this Microsoft Teams link: https://bit.ly/2FeYiJq

Speaker: Professor Sule Alan, European University Institute

Paper abstract: "Using uniquely detailed data on primary school children and their teachers, we show that teachers who hold prejudicial attitudes towards an ethnic group create socially segregated classrooms. We identify this relationship by exploiting a natural experiment where newly arrived refugee children are randomly assigned to teachers. We elicit children's social networks to construct multiple measures of social exclusion and ethnic segregation in classrooms. We find that teachers' ethnic prejudice significantly lowers the prevalence of social ties between host and refugee children, increases homophily amongst host children, and puts refugee children at a higher risk of bullying victimization. Our results suggest that teachers' ethnic prejudice may be a significant barrier against building cohesive schools in ethnically diverse communities."