MIGRANT ACHIEVEMENT PENALTIES IN WESTERN EUROPE. WHAT ROLE FOR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS?

Internal and external migrations are a phenomenon of growing magnitude within the European continent. Most importantly, the last decades have once and for all destroyed the illusion of the transience of immigration settlement, raising concerns on the lack of integration of long term immigrants in host societies. In particular, migrant educational disadvantage is a serious issue in most European countries, as shown by international assessments on students’ competencies. In the last years, public debates have called attention to the need of identifying institutional features able to endow children of migrants with equal chances to succeed in school compared to their native peers. However, empirical evidence on the role of educational systems in worsening or mitigating migrant learning disadvantage is still inconclusive. In this dissertation, I conduct a systematic investigation of whether and why second-generation immigrants experience different achievement penalties in 17 Western European countries. The research design is based on a two-step, mixed methods approach. In the first step I provide a comparative assessment of migrant-specific penalties in educational achievement. The cross-country variability of migrant achievement penalties becomes the explanandum in the second step of analysis, when I assess the role of theoretically relevant characteristics of educational systems as potential explanantes. At each step of the analysis, I rely on methodological triangulation — by using variable-oriented and diversity-oriented methods — in order to improve the overall robustness of the empirical findings. By using the 2006 and 2009 waves of the PISA survey, I analyze the relative disadvantage of 15-year-old students of immigrant vs. native origin in the literacy domains of mathematics, science, and reading. With a novel measure of migrant-specific penalty — revealing the relative of immigrant students within the achievement distribution of comparable natives — I show that second-generation immigrants dramatically lag behind their native peers, despite having been fully exposed to the same educational system. This underachievement can only be partially explained by traditional mechanisms of stratification by social class broadly defined. On the contrary, migrant-specific penalties and socio-economic penalties come forth as two distinct dimensions of educational inequalities. Even if all Western European countries experience some degree of migrant penalties, sharp cross-country differences exist in their intensity. Moreover, as shown with additional analyses on Turkish second-generation immigrants, such cross-country differences cannot be reduced to the different origin compositions of immigrant populations. Moving from four theoretical dimensions (school duration, stratification, standardization, and resources allocation), I identify as potentially relevant characteristics of the educational system: (i) the entry age in the (pre)school system; (ii) the age at which students are tracked into differentiated curricula; (iii) the degree to which second-generation immigrants are marginalized in low-quality schools. After investigating the relevance of these factors with several statistical and set-theoretic methods, I apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs-QCA) in order to systematically assess which kinds of educational systems — conceived as configurations of institutional elements embedded in national contexts — bring about severe migrant achievement penalties, and which do not. My findings indicate that several combinations of conditions can alternatively lead to equally severe penalties. In post-war immigration countries, early tracking into differentiated curricula produces severe penalties only when it marginalizes second-generation immigrants in second-tier tracks, and consequently low-quality schools. On the contrary, in new-immigration countries tracking by itself is sufficient to bring about severe penalties, while in Scandinavian countries — where most immigrants speak a language that is very distant from the national one — the decisive detrimental factor is the delayed entry of pupils into (pre)school. In order to avoid severe penalties, educational systems must be designed in a way to include children at a relatively young age. In post-war immigration countries where linguistic distance is low, this element is sufficient to avoid severe achievement penalties, but new immigration societies have more complex institutional pathways, since they combine a not-late entry in the (pre)school system with a late tracking into differentiated curricula and a low degree of marginalization of second-generation immigrants.