Immigration and student achievement in Spain: evidence from PISA

Abstract

This paper provides the first evidence on the dynamics of immigrant students' achievement following their migration to Spain. Using the data from 2003, 2006 and 2009 wave of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we show that immigrant students tend to perform significantly worse than native students, but that their performance improves with time spent in Spain. Among immigrants, Latin Americans enjoy an initial linguistic advantage, which, however, does not help them to catch up faster. The rate of improvement is such that students who stay almost all their lives in Spain still perform worse than natives in all domains analyzed by PISA. To better understand this achievement gap, we decompose it into parts attributable to school quality and to family characteristics. We observe that most of the gap is explained by individual and family characteristics and that less than 15 % We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions received from Victor Aguirregabiria (editor), the anonymous reviewer, Manuel Bagues, Michele Boldrin, Antonio Cabrales, Jose Ignacio García, Sergi Jiménez, and participants at the European Economic Association (EEA) Congress, the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) conference, the Spanish Economic Association (SAE) Congress, and the FEDEA workshop on the economic effects of immigration. We also acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Project ECO2008-06395-C05-05. of it can be attributed to differential school attendance. Overall, the evidence suggests that policies that do not target the learning environment in disadvantaged families are likely to have a limited impact on the native-immigrant achievement gap.

Latino Immigrant Students in Spain: Potential Poly-Victims and School Underachievers

“…3 below). This considerable gap in performance between the immigrant and the native-born students, particularly, Latinos, in some provinces of Spain broadens more than 50% of the standard deviations of the scores (Etxeberría & Elosegui, 2010;Fernández-Enguita, Mena & Riviere, 2010;Vaquera & Kao, 2012;Zinovyeva et al, 2008). In line with these findings another study indicated that in Spain as in most countries of the OECD, schools with large concentrations of immigrants have the worst performance, suggesting that in these schools the whole student body gets affected (Cebolla-Boado & Garrido-Medina, 2008).…”

“…Given the constant flow of immigrant students into most developed countries, accompanied by a pervasive academic underachievement (Cebolla-Boado & Garrido-Medina, 2008;Vaquera & Kao, 2012;Zinovyeva, Felgueroso, & Vázquez, 2008), it is substantive the identification of risk factors that compromise students' cognition and school performance.…”

When the Second Generation do not Lag behind: Evidence on the Academic Performance of Children of Immigrants in Andalusia

“…5 Pese a que PISA no mide el rendimiento de los alumnos en sí mismo, sino la capacidad académica demostrada en una serie de pruebas estandarizadas, la correlación entre los resultados de esta prueba y los que los alumnos obtienen en sus respectivos centros es elevada, puesto que lo que mide son competencias por las que el alumnado también es evaluado. De sus datos de 2006 pueden encontrarse evidencias de la desventaja de los estudiantes de origen inmigrante en España en Cebolla (2009), Salinas y Santín (2012, y en Zinovyeva et al (2013), entre otros. 6 Véase, por ejemplo, Salinas y Santín (2012) y Zinovyeva et al (2013).…”

“…De sus datos de 2006 pueden encontrarse evidencias de la desventaja de los estudiantes de origen inmigrante en España en Cebolla (2009), Salinas y Santín (2012, y en Zinovyeva et al (2013), entre otros. 6 Véase, por ejemplo, Salinas y Santín (2012) y Zinovyeva et al (2013). 7 Véase, por ejemplo, OECD (2009: 281).…”

“…Entre los trabajos más concluyentes a nivel nacional encontramos el de Zinovyeva et al (2013), que, explotando datos de PISA, encuentran que las diferencias en el contexto socioeconómico y sociocultural de las familias explicarían aproximadamente la mitad de la brecha educativa que hay entre los estudiantes inmigrantes y los nativos. Las variables asociadas a los centros de enseñanza explican un porcentaje muy pequeño, mientras que el análisis de otro tipo de factores -especialmente, aquellos vinculados al origen nacional o étnico de estos jóvenes-apenas se encuentra explorado por falta de datos adecuados.…”