School Segregation and the Achievement Gap between Immigrant and Native Students (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
There is evidence of the impact of school segregation on students’ academic achievement, but it is debated whether the extent of this impact is dependent on students’ socioeconomic status, or on their native or non-native condition. This research addresses the problem in Spain, seeking to determine how immigrant and socioeconomic segregation affect the academic achievement of native and non-native students. With this aim, the PISA study database was specially exploited by means of two-tier Multilevel Models, estimating school segregation through the Hutchens Square Root Index. Specifically, the study estimates the influence of school segregation on students’ academic achievement in the subjects of Mathematics, Language and Science. The results confirm that school socioeconomical and immigrant segregation affect students’ academic achievement differently. Whereas socioeconomic segregation negatively affects both groups in all three subjects, immigrant segregation affects non-native s...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
This paper documents the change in educational achievement differences between native and foreign background students between the ages of 10 and 15, as they progress from primary to secondary education. We examine three cohorts of students in a number of Western European and traditional English-speaking immigration countries using combinations of PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA survey data. While the performance of students with mixed parents is not markedly different from native students', foreign background children-both first-and second-generation-exhibit a large achievement gap at age 10 in continental Europe, even when accounting for observable differences in socioeconomic characteristics. The gap tends to narrow down by age 15 in reading, but no catching up is observed in mathematics. By contrast, we do not find significant differences between the academic achievements of immigrant children and their native-born peers in traditional immigration countries.
The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school-composition and track-level on the educational achievement of 15-years-old students. We specifically focus on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and to what extent these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track or educational system these students are in. In doing so, we examine the 'sorting' mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified and comprehensive education systems. We use data from the 2006 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) wave. Compared to previous research in this area the main contribution of this paper is that we explicitly include track-level and school-level as separate units of analyses, which leads to less biased results of the effects of characteristics of the educational system. The results highlight the importance of including track-level and school-level factors in the debate of educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis uses only a country and a student level and ignores the track-and school-level characteristics. Moreover the inclusion of the track-level is necessary to avoid overestimation of the school-composition effect, especially in stratified educational systems. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational system are not uniformly 'good' or 'bad', but they have different consequences for different groups. Some groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while other groups are better off in moderately or highly stratified systems.
A quantitative synthesis of the immigrant achievement gap across OECD countries
Large-scale Assessments in Education, 2014
Background: While existing evidence strongly suggests that immigrant students underperform relative to their native counterparts on measures of mathematics, science, and reading, country-level analyses assessing the homogeneity of the immigrant achievement gap across different factors have not been systematically conducted. Beyond finding a statistically significant average achievement gap, existing findings show considerable variation. The goal of this quantitative synthesis was to analyze effect sizes which compared immigrants to natives on international mathematics, reading, and science examinations. Methods: We used data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). We investigated whether the achievement gap is larger in some content areas than others (among mathematics, science, and reading), across the different types of tests (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS), across academic grades and age, and whether it has changed across time. Standardized mean differences between immigrant and native students were obtained using data from 2000 to 2009 for current Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Results: Statistically significant weighted mean effect sizes favored native test takers in mathematics d à math ¼ 0:38 à reading ¼ 0:38 à science ¼ 0:43 À Á. Effects of moderators differed across content areas. Conclusions: Our analyses have the potential to contribute to the literature about how variation in the immigrant achievement gap relates to different national-level factors.
International Journal of Sociology of Education
Using data from the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study for 45 countries, we examined the size of socioeconomic, gender, and immigrant status related gaps, and their relationships with education system characteristics, such as differentiation, standardization, and proportion of governmental spending on education. We find that higher socioeconomic status is positively and significantly associated with higher math and science achievement; immigrant students lag behind their native peers in both math and science, with first generation students faring worse than second generation; and girls show lower math performance than boys. A higher degree of differentiation makes socioeconomic gaps larger in both math and science achievement, whereas higher governmental spending reduces socioeconomic achievement gaps.
2012
Immigration is a rapidly-growing global phenomenon. Although many countries devote significant resources to investigate the outcomes of adult immigrants, both governments and researchers have given much less attention to the outcomes of younger immigrants. With this study, I aim to increase our understanding of immigrant student achievement, first through a synthesis of the existing evidence in the form of an extensive literature review, and second, through a quantitative analysis of the so-called 'immigrant achievement gap'. I examine the gap for fourth graders utilizing two cross-national assessments, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) via a cross-sectional multilevel analysis with students nested within schools nested within countries. First, I ask whether or not a gap exists for fourth graders as it has been largely found for older students. Second, I assess whether or not existing literature provides a good guide to explain variability in the gap. Third, I delve deeper into the gap by examining subgroups of students in order to better understand the achievement of young immigrant students. Finally, I highlight cross-national trends that emerge from the findings, as previous literature has done. I find evidence of an immigrant achievement gap for both mathematics and reading, and that existing literature provides a good skeleton by which to examine the gap. Contrary to some of the existing literature, I find that the gap is larger in mathematics than in reading. Next, I find that student characteristics are strongly associated with student scores in both mathematics and reading. Findings corroborate research based on adolescent populations which suggests that, in general, students who are native, with native parents, who speak the language of testing, have better educated parents, and are of higher socioeconomic status, outperform their counterparts on these standardized academic assessments. Further, I find that the immigrant achievement gap is smaller or non-existent between the highest-achieving immigrant and native students, that there is no gender gap between immigrant boys and girls, that 2 nd generation immigrants outperform 1 st generation immigrants, and that students who immigrated between the ages of 1-5 outperform their younger and older counterparts in mathematics, suggesting some evidence for the 'vulnerable age hypothesis'. I also find evidence which suggests that immigrant students attend lower quality schools, that the immigrant achievement gap is largest between the most xii advantaged immigrant and native students, and that there is no difference in scores among immigrant students when the gap is analyzed by the language students speak at home. Concerning the multilevel analyses, I find few school-and country-level variables predict the immigrant achievement gap significantly. Other than peer effects (including percent economically disadvantaged and percent non-native-speaking students in schools), no school variables predicted either outcome. Corroborating extant evidence, findings suggest that attending high-achieving schools predicts both outcomes positively and significantly. Concerning the country-level, results indicate that countries with exclusionary policies, nontraditional settlement countries, and countries that attract low-skilled immigrants tend to have larger immigrant achievement gaps. However, only exclusionary/inclusionary policy as a variable was significantly predictive of the outcome and only for the mathematics model. Gross Domestic Product was significant in both models although the coefficient in both instances was zero. This study contributes to the current understanding of young immigrant students' achievement by providing a synthesis of the extant literature as well as by comparing their mathematics and reading outcomes to those of their native counterparts. Although the variables utilized in this study are not all-encompassing of the extensive factors that have an effect on immigrant student achievement, they do provide a well-defined picture of what is associated with mathematics and reading outcomes. This study illuminates the current understanding of a number of dimensions for young immigrants-incoming resources, race/ethnicity, gender, student attitudes, and host culture variables (e.g., institutional-and school-related variations). It corroborates many of the findings from literature based on adolescent populations, suggesting cross-national trends that span a wide age range. However, dissimilar results also suggest that fourth-grade immigrants' academic success is associated with influences that are different than those of adolescent immigrants on several dimensions. Many limitations of this study spur from the focused definition of who is an immigrant, which is only based on country of birth, and as such limits the generalizability of the conclusions. Further, the use of secondary data limits the range of variables that can be tested in the model and therefore excludes many factors that may be considered essential to include in statistical models predicting student achievement.
The Effect of Integration on Immigrants' School Performance: A Multilevel Estimate
Journal of European Social Policy, 2011
Through the analysis of 22 European countries and Canada, this article seeks to investigate the assumption that political macro level variables such as welfare state systems and immigration regimes shape the conditions encountered by young immigrants and thus have an impact on their school performance. The results show that native students benefit from social-democratic welfare states and immigration-friendly integration regimes, whereas immigrant students underperform under these types of regimes. Thus, while the finding for native students supports the argument found in the body of literature, claiming that social-democratic welfare states lead to a reduction in inequality and to less stratification, the findings for immigrant students suggest that positive discrimination may under some circumstances lead to a counterproductive result. The argument is tested with a multilevel modelling procedure on three levels (student, school and country) based on different data sources.
The Effect of Immigrant Communities on Foreign-Born Student Achievement1
International Migration Review, 2011
This paper explores the effect of the human capital characteristics of co-ethnic immigrant communities on foreign-born students' math achievement. We use data on New York City public school foreignborn students from 39 countries merged with census data on the characteristics of the immigrant household heads in the city from each nation of origin and estimate regressions of student achievement on co-ethnic immigrant community characteristics, controlling for student and school attributes. We find that the income and size of the co-ethnic immigrant community has no effect on immigrant student achievement, while the percent of college graduates may have a small positive effect. In addition, children in highly English proficient immigrant communities test slightly lower than children from less proficient communities. The results suggest that there may be some protective factors associated with immigrant community members' education levels and use of native languages.