Ambivalence: Minority parents positioning when facing school choices

Minority parents’ attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors vis-à-vis their children’s education reflect the intricacies of the relations between minority and majority groups. Parental expectations of schools and of schooling are a pivotal factor within the complex relations between families and their children’s schools. This chapter intends to add to present knowledge on minority parents’ views and expectations of schools. We analyze qualitative data derived from in depth interviews with Palestinian parents who send their children to a very atypical school setting in the Israeli educational system: the bilingual bi-national integrated Palestinian Jewish schools. The rich data gathered suggests a complex picture which we try to partially disentangle in our concluding remarks while pointing at the need to invest much more efforts in the study of minority- majority relations as these get organized around educational discourses.