Tracking, Schools’ Entrance Requirements and the Educational Performance of Migrant students

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between tracking and migrant student performance and compare the results of native-born people, and first and second generation migrants. We combine two insights: the need to take into account school level variables when estimating the strength of the relationship between education systems and student performance and the need to include country of origin to correctly estimate models for migrant students. We use pisa 2009 data for 15 oecd countries, running analyses for native-born students, first and second generation migrants. We find that both first and second generation migrant students in educational systems with many tracks have equal or higher scores than students in systems with only one track. In an extended sample, the influence of the educational system on migrant students is absent, while for native-born students the influence remains substantial.