The Effects of Neighborhood and Parental Educational Expectations on Teacher Judgments of Children in the Fifth and Sixth Grades of Primary School

Abstract

Research has studied less the embeddedness of the relationship between parental educational expectations and teacher judgments in the neighborhood. We use data that were collected in a longitudinal study conducted in Belgium, which focused on children in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school. We found that the effect of neighborhood on teacher judgments is mediated by the nonnative background of students. The effect of neighborhood seems to be mainly one of selecting pupils in the school. Teachers have—under control of deductive ability and previous teacher judgments—a lower judgment of students with an immigrant background.