Study: Ethnic diversity at school has a negative effect on learning

This flies in the face of Western government policies which often go to significant lengths to increase ethnic diversity in schools

"Study: Ethnic diversity at school has a negative effect on learning

Fifteen-year-old pupils from schools with high ethnic diversity perform worse than comparable pupils from schools with homogenous student populations. This applies not just to the immigrant children, but also to the pupils from the country in question. For the latter group, the negative effect is strongest in school systems with a hierarchy of school types, such as the Dutch and German systems.

What’s more, the number and origin of the immigrant pupils also plays an important role. Having a higher proportion of pupils from Islamic countries at a given school negatively influences the performance of all pupils at that school. But in contrast, a higher share of pupils from South and East Asia has a positive effect. This is just one of Jaap Dronkers’s conclusions from his empirical research using international PISA data, which he discusses in his inaugural lecture.

The educational performance of immigrant pupils gets a boost from having a higher proportion of such pupils at a particular school – but only when the fellow immigrant pupils come from the same region. This applies particularly to immigrant children from Islamic countries and from South and East Asia. This positive effect of ethnic homogeneity in schools might explain the attraction of Islamic schools, for example, or white or Jewish schools."

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