Positieve maar ook negatieve effecten van etnische diversiteit in scholen op onderwijsprestaties? Een empirische toets met internationale PISA-data

The effect of two characteristics of school populations on reading skills will be estimated in this paper: share and diversity, both on the ethnic and the social-cultural dimension. We use the cross-national PISA-data 2006, both for the 15 years old native pupils and the pupils with a migrant background. A larger ethnic diversity of schools in secondary education hampers the educational achievement of both pupils with a migrant background and native pupils, but the negative effect is smaller in educational systems with little differentiation and strongest in highly differentiated educational systems. The social-cultural diversity of schools do not effect educational achievement, but these effects are positive in strongly differentiated educational systems and negative in hardly differentiated systems. However, the average parental educational level of schools is very important for the educational achievement of children, and this hardly differs between educational systems. A higher share of pupils with a migrant background at a school hampers educational achievement, but if these pupils have the same origin region (Islam countries; non-Islam Asian countries), a higher share of pupils with a migrant background at that school improves the educational achievement. Pupils originating from Islam countries have substantial lower reading scores in comparison with equivalent pupils with a migrant background from other origin regions, which can not be explained by the individual social-economic background, the school characteristics or the educational systems.