This article aims to deepen our understanding of the dynamic interaction between language policies, school characteristics and teachers' beliefs about monolingualism. The study takes place in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterized by educational policies which are based on a stringent monolingual ideology. Based on a survey of 775 teachers from across 48 secondary schools, we examined how these policies affected teachers' beliefs, whether and how teacher beliefs vary between schools, and what the consequences of these beliefs are. The results of our multilevel analysis indicate that teachers strongly adhere to monolingual policies, while there are also significant differences across schools, which are related to the ethnic composition of those schools. Furthermore, a stronger adherence to monolingualism was found to trigger teachers to have lower expectations about their students but not about their ability to teach. Finally, implications for policymakers are discussed.

Although a number of studies in many countries have investigated the impact of the ethnic and socio-economic composition of schools on academic performance, few studies have analyzed in detail how and why compositional features matter. This article presents an examination of whether pupils' sense of futility and schools' futility culture account for the impact of ethnic and socio-economic status (SES) composition of schools on the academic achievement of their pupils. Multilevel analyses of data based on a survey of 2,845 pupils (aged 10-12 years) in 68 Flemish primary schools revealed that higher proportions of immigrant and working-class pupils in a school is associated with lower levels of math achievement in both immigrant and native Belgian pupils. However, by analyzing at a deeper level, by taking control variables into account, our study found that the ethnic composition of the school no longer had a significant effect on pupils' achievement, while the SES composition still did. Most importantly, our results indicated that the remaining impact of SES composition can be explained by pupils' sense of futility and schools' futility culture. The implications of these findings for educational policy are discussed.

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The bulk of scholarship on multicultural education continues to focus exclusively on U.S. education. Previous studies published in this field also have focused largely on topics that are considered relevant for the United States, whereas little attention has been paid to topics that are less problematized in the United States. In this mixed-method study, we explore teachers’ understanding of multicultural education in Flanders (Belgium), and we examine whether teacher and school characteristics correlate with the degree to which teachers integrate multicultural content. Survey results with 706 in-service teachers from 68 schools and in-depth interviews with 26 teachers from 5 schools are used. The results point out that teachers focus mainly on religious diversity when they were asked about their understanding of multicultural education. However, their understanding was largely limited to the “contributions approach” and “additive approach” to multicultural education. Multilevel analysis revealed that ethnic minority teachers reported higher levels of multicultural content integration than native-White teachers, and teachers working in schools with higher share of ethnic minorities and public (State) schools incorporated more multicultural education than teachers working in elite-White schools and Catholic schools. Implications for both the literature on multicultural education and educational policymakers are discussed.