Immigration and students' achievement in Spain

Resumen

In this paper we assess the differences between immigrant and native pupils' educational performance in Spain using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that immigrant pupils perform substantially worse than native pupils in all domains analyzed by PISA. Around half of this gap can be attributed to the differences in observable parental socio-economic characteristics. Between 4 and 20% of the gap can be explained by schools' fixed effects, which capture mainly the existence of differences in the average parental education of peers across schools. Immigrants tend to perform relatively worse in those areas where segregation is higher. Finally, we observe that immigrants' performance tends to improve the longer they stay in Spain.