Tracking, schools’ entrance requirements and the educational performance of migrant students

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relation between tracking and migrant students’ performance (and parental background), taking into account school selection policies, and to compare the results across natives, first and second generation migrants. We combine two insights: the need to take into account school level variables when estimating the relation between education system and student performance and the need for including region of origin to correctly estimate models for migrant students. We use PISA 2009, selecting 31 countries with school features, of which 15 countries with information on the region of origin of the migrant students. We run separate analyses for native and first and second generation migrants, without and with origin dummies. We find that migrant students in education systems with many tracks which are themselves in schools in which the principal always considers prior performance in accepting students to the school have equal or higher scores than students in systems with only one track. However, in the full sample the influence of education systems for first generation students is absent: their performance is nearly only based on individual and school characteristics, while the performance of second generation migrant students is also influenced by tracks or prior performance. Still, the influence of the combination of tracks and entrance selection is weaker than that for native students.