published in: German Economic Review, 2005, 6(3), 355-376
The purpose of this article is to evaluate the importance of social class, migration background
and command of national languages for the PISA school performance of teenagers living in
European countries (France, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Sweden) and
traditional countries of immigration (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US).
Econometric results show that the influence of the socioeconomic background of parents
differs strongly across nations, with the highest impact found for Germany, the UK and US,
whereas social mobility is more likely in Scandinavian countries and in Canada. Moreover, for
all countries our estimations imply that for students with a migration background a key for
catching up is the language spoken at home. We conclude that educational policy should
focus on integration of immigrant children in schools and preschools, with particular
emphasis on language skills at the early stage of childhood.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.