Migrant achievement penalties in Western Europe. What role for educational systems?

This paper presents a comparative examination of educational underachievement of second-generation immigrants in Western Europe, based on the 2006-2009 waves of PISA survey on mathematics literacy of 15-year-old students. We propose a new measure for migrant educational penalty revealing the relative position of migrant children within the achievement distribution of natives with the same socio-economic background. We analyze how this measure varies across countries and find it negatively related to the effect of socio-economic background on natives’ achievement. Hence, migrant penalties and socio-economic penalties come forth as two distinct dimensions of educational inequalities. By means of regression trees, we explore whether features of educational systems account for cross-country differences in migrant-specific penalties. We find that institutional dimensions theoretically related to educational careers of children of immigrants – entry age into (pre)school and degree of marginalization in low-performing schools –matter, in spite of the more or less comprehensive character of secondary schooling.