Abstract:

In this work we study the relationship between socio-economic inequality and the changes in compulsory educational achievement over time across native born and immigrant students in Europe. We build our empirical model on premises of the cumulative (dis-)advantage theory (CDT) (Merton 1988; DiPrete and Eirich 2006). The cumulative process functions in a way that even small differences accumulated over time make it difficult for a group or an individual lagging behind, e.g. in educational development, to catch up.

Ultimately, we are interested in answering two questions:
1) Is the educational attainment gap suffered by foreign-born students increasing over time?
2) How do socio-economic inequalities and achievement gap evolve among immigrant children between stratified and comprehensive school systems?

We take advantage of the availability of two cross-section surveys -- PIRLS 2006 and PISA 2009 and study 12 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden

Keywords:

Educational inequalities, pseudo-panel, stratified and comprehensive school systems, Europe.