School Segregation and the Achievement Gap between Immigrant and Native Students

Abstract

Our comparison of performance gaps in mathematics between native and immigrant students across 18 countries shows considerable cross-national variation in the size of performance differences between native and immigrant students. We hypothesize that countries with higher levels of school segregation by family socioeconomic status (SES) and immigrant status should display stronger effects of immigrant status. In countries with high levels of school segregation, immigrant students should be more likely to be sorted into schools that are poorer and/or have higher concentration of immigrant students, which may in turn negatively affect immigrant students’ achievement. Two-level hierarchical linear models show that countries’ native-immigrant gaps are systematically related with levels of school segregation by family SES but not with levels of school segregation by immigrant status. The finding implies that redistributing key educational resources to disadvantaged schools to moderate the negative consequences of attending low SES schools may facilitate educational integration of immigrant students.