Choosing the right track. Educational decisions and inequalities within the Italian educational system

Italian students move from a comprehensive to a stratified secondary education when they are about 13 y.o. Research shows that, within a ‘free choice’ regime, track decisions are heavily conditioned by students’ family background. School performance considered, lower class and immigrant-origin students tend to opt for vocational education leaving academically oriented secondary schools to their upper-class colleagues. The channeling of underprivileged students within devalued educational tracks is highly debated within the sociological literature. Issues of socially biased filtering mechanisms and processes of self-exclusion have been outlined. Based on an ethnographic research carried out in the city of Milan, the chapter will focus on two relevant dimensions that need to be taken into account to explain unequal upper secondary track choices within the Italian context. First, it will show the role of ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about academic education on students’ aspirations and their embeddedness within familial biographies. Second, it will point out the role of teachers’ socially biased guidance advices and how they contribute to shaping the educational decisions of underprivileged background students