Abstract
In this chapter, we will estimate the effects on language skills of two characteristics of school populations: average/share and diversity, on both the ethnic and the sociocultural dimensions. We will use the cross-national Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 data for native students and students with an immigrant background, in which both cohorts are 15 years old. A greater ethnic diversity of school populations in secondary education hampers the educational performance of students with an immigrant background but does not significantly affect that of native students. The sociocultural diversity of schools has no effect on educational performance. However, the level of the curriculum attended by the students and the average parental sociocultural status of schools are important variables that explain the educational performance of children. A higher share of students of non-Islamic Asian origin in a school increases the educational performance of both native and immigrant students of other origins in that school. Students from non-Islamic Asian countries in schools with higher shares of students of non-Islamic Asian origin perform better than do comparable students originating from other regions. Students originating from Islamic countries have substantially lower language scores than do equivalent students with an immigrant background from other regions. This cannot be explained by individual socioeconomic backgrounds, school characteristics, or educational systems.
This chapter is an improved version of the inaugural lecture of the first author as professor of international comparative research on educational performance and social inequality at Maastricht University, held on June 17, 2010 (Dronkers, 2010b). The improvements are based on the introduction of a more valid measurement of schools and curriculum (Dronkers et al. 2011).
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Notes
- 1.
An exception is Van Houtte and Stevens (2009), but they used interethnic friendships and feeling at home in school as dependent variables.
- 2.
The parental social class is measured using the index of economic, social, and cultural status of the parents (ESCS). This is a composite index in the PISA dataset based on the occupational status of the parents measured with the ISEI scale (Ganzeboom et al. 1992), the educational level of the parents measured with the ISCED classification (UNESCO 2006), and the presence of any material or cultural resources at the students’ homes.
- 3.
- 4.
Putnam (2007) has shown that greater ethnic diversity in neighborhoods may lead to a lower general feeling of trust in neighborhood and neighbors. Lancee and Dronkers (2011) found the same negative relationship between ethnic neighborhood diversity and trust for the Netherlands. It seems reasonable to assume that the same phenomenon occurs in schools as well.
- 5.
The results for mathematics and physics basically are not different, but in the case of language skills, they are more pronounced for students with an immigrant background (for obvious reasons).
- 6.
The relevant question was not asked in a similar way in all countries. The question was to indicate a limited number of countries of birth, based on the main immigrant groups in the country concerned (e.g., in the German questionnaires, possible countries of birth were: Russia, the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Turkey, while the Scottish questionnaire listed the options as China, India, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe).
- 7.
The measure consists of the presence of a desk, a private room, a quiet place to study, a computer, educational software, Internet access, literature or poetry, art, books that may be of use when doing schoolwork, a dictionary, a dishwasher, and the presence of more than 100 books in the house.
- 8.
The Herfindahl index of ethnic diversity was calculated as follows: 1−[(percentage of ethnic group 1) 2 + (percentage of ethnic group 2) 2 +···+ (percentage of ethnic group n) 2].
- 9.
The groups are defined as follows: 1) Less than 10 %: ESCS ≤ −1.1; 2) 10–30 %: −1.0 < ESCS ≤ −0.4; 3) 30–70 %: −0.3 < ESCS ≤ 0.6; 4) 70–90 %: 0.7 < ESCS ≤ 1.2; 5) more than 90 %: ESCS ≥1.3.
- 10.
The Herfindahl index of sociocultural diversity was calculated as follows: 1−[(percentage of parents from ESCS group 1) 2 + (percentage of parents from ESCS group 2) 2 + ··· + (percentage of parents from ESCS group 5) 2].
- 11.
We also run models with the interaction between stratification level of educational system and ESCS diversity. The parameters of these interactions were never significant. Given the emphasis of this chapter, we did not include them in the equation of Model 7.
- 12.
Compared with students from Western OECD countries.
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Dronkers, J., van der Velden, R. (2013). Positive but also Negative Effects of Ethnic Diversity in Schools on Educational Performance? An Empirical Test Using PISA Data. In: Windzio, M. (eds) Integration and Inequality in Educational Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6119-3_4
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