Untapped Skills
Realising the Potential of Immigrant Students
This report reviews recent trends in international migration, describing the size of current foreign-born populations across countries and analysing factors associated to the size and nature of these populations, reviews a set of important differences and similarities across educational systems and gives a brief description of population sizes across countries.
It also provides an overview of the evidence emerging from PISA 2009 on the performance and socio-economic background of children of immigrants. Who are the children of immigrants? What do they know and what can they do? How do they differ from other students? Do they approach school and learning in a different way? It examines more closely the issue of assessment language proficiency among immigrant students and its possible impact on cognitive outcomes in PISA. It explores the effect of age at arrival on the performance of immigrant students in the PISA tests of literacy.
Selective migration policies of certain countries and the attractiveness of these countries generally to highly educated migrants is also explored.
It also discusses the future educational and professional career of the children of immigrant related to their performance in PISA. Does the skill and knowledge disadvantage at age 15 translate into a disadvantage in later educational outcomes? For example, are those children of immigrants less likely to access a post-secondary educational institution?
Parental Education, Immigrant Concentration and PISA Outcomes
Part of the underperformance of immigrant students in PISA can be linked to the fact that they tend to be concentrated in disadvantaged schools. Indeed, the latter is a stronger predictor of immigrant outcomes than either the concentration of immigrants in schools per se or even who mostly speak another language at home. Attendance in a disadvantaged school has a strong adverse impact on reading performance, whatever the origin of the student. In addition, immigrant students with highly educated mothers are more likely to attend disadvantaged schools than are non-immigrant students with mothers of similar education. So their performance suffers as well. These results highlight the fact that educational and social policies interact to limit opportunities for school success among immigrant students.