The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment that measures the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading and science. Eighty-one countries and economies took part in the 2022 PISA assessment.
In my last two posts (here and here), I compared the PISA scores of immigrants and non-immigrants in various developed countries. In several of these countries, non-immigrants outperformed immigrants. Part of this performance gap can be explained by socio-economic and language factors, e.g., poverty and lack of fluency in the language used on the tests. However, I expected second-generation immigrants - born in a country to at least one foreign-born parent - to do better on the PISA than immigrants born elsewhere, because they wouldn’t face the same challenges.
And that’s essentially what I found when comparing the PISA math and reading scores in various developed countries. Second-generation immigrants did do better than immigrants in general. But they didn’t do that much better and in most of the countries they still performed much worse than non-immigrants. This was especially the case in France, Austria, Germany, Sweden and Finland, where almost twice as many second-generation immigrants as non-immigrants scored below the minimum level of proficiency that all students should acquire by the end of secondary education: 40% vs 21% in mathematics and 35% vs 19% in reading (averaged across the five countries).
Why does this matter? Because longitudinal studies have found that students who performed worse in PISA at age 15 are less likely to attain higher levels of education by the age of 25, and are more likely to be out of the labor market entirely, ie, not in education, employment or training. For many, a lifetime of economic hardship and reliance on public services follows.
To make matters worse, the poor educational and economic performance of some immigrant groups feeds the flame of anti-immigrant sentiment, as is well documented in both experimental studies and surveys (see references below). Helping immigrant children thrive in school would go a long way to weaken that sentiment.
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References:
Abdelaaty, L., & Steele, L. G. (2022). Explaining Attitudes Toward Refugees and Immigrants in Europe. Political Studies, 70(1), 110-130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720950217
Hainueller, J & Hiscox MJ, . Attitudes toward Highly Skilled and Low-skilled Immigration: Evidence from a Survey Experiment. American Political Science Review. 2010;104(1):61-84. doi:10.1017/S0003055409990372
Highlights of U.S. PISA 2022 Results Web Report (NCES 2023-115 and 2024-113). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Available at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2022/
Marc Helbling, Hanspeter Kriesi, Why Citizens Prefer High- Over Low-Skilled Immigrants. Labor Market Competition, Welfare State, and Deservingness, European Sociological Review, Volume 30, Issue 5, October 2014, Pages 595–614, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcu061
PISA, 2022 Executive Summary (Snapshot tables): https://stat.link/s8a9ry
Yotam, M. "Economic insecurity and the causes of populism, reconsidered." Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2019): 152-170. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.33.4.152