ERIC Number: EJ969654
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012
Pages: 34
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1474-9041
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Why Are Migrant Students Better off in Certain Types of Educational Systems or Schools than in Others?
Dronkers, Jaap; van der Velden, Rolf; Dunne, Allison
European Educational Research Journal, v11 n1 p11-44 2012
The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and the extent to which these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track, or educational system in which these students are enrolled. In doing so, they examine the "sorting" mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified, and comprehensive education systems. They use data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) wave. Compared with previous research in this area, the article's main contribution is in explicitly including the tracks-within-school level as a separate unit of analysis, which leads to less biased results concerning the effects of educational system characteristics. The results highlight the importance of including factors of track level and school composition in the debate surrounding educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that analyses of the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis only uses a country level and a student level and ignores the tracks-within-school-level characteristics. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational systems are neither uniformly "good" nor uniformly "bad", but they can result in different consequences for different migrant groups. Some migrant groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while others are better off in moderately stratified systems. (Contains 10 tables and 17 notes.)
Descriptors: Equal Education, Academic Achievement, Migrants, Educational Methods, Systems Analysis, Racial Composition, Migrant Children, Socioeconomic Influences, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Background, Institutional Characteristics, Grouping (Instructional Purposes), Performance Factors, Data Analysis, Predictor Variables, Effective Schools Research, Adolescents, Educational Research, Achievement Gap
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Middle Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Program for International Student Assessment
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A