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 near the end of compulsory schooling, based on the 2006-2009 waves of the PISA survey. We propose a 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 find that migrant specific disadvantage is severe in most Western European countries. We then 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 recursive partitioning methods, 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 the secondary school systems.