School composition and academic achievement: The case of Russian-medium and Polish-medium schools in Lithuania

Abstract

After Lithuania re-gained its independence, linguistic and cultural minority groups residing in the country had the right to be educated in non-Lithuanian-medium schools. Yet, the education of linguistic minority children has been a contentious topic in Lithuania for many years, and there is no conclusive evidence on how minority-language-medium schools in Lithuania perform academically, with national assessment suggesting that they perform worse than Lithuanian-speaking schools, and international assessment showing mixed results. Our research focuses on Russian- and Polish-medium schools and analyses the difference in academic performance among children attending Lithuanian-medium school and minority-language schools, as well as its reasons and social implications. Using the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, we find that minority-language children perform better when attending a school in which the language of instruction is the same as their home language.