Does schooling equalize achievement disparities among students with and without a migrant background? This question remains largely unanswered in sociology. We hypothesized that children of migrants would benefit more from schooling, thereby making schools engines of educational integration. Our study tests this hypothesis in the context of German primary schooling using data from the National Educational Panel Study. We compared the achievements of students from native families and those with Western, non-Western (including Turkey), and former Soviet Union migrant backgrounds. Using the differential exposure approach, we decomposed learning into two causally distinct components: learning due to school exposure and learning due to being older at the time of testing. Our findings do not support the notion that schooling equalizes migrant–native achievement gaps. Instead, our results suggest that school exposure may widen the gap between the two largest groups of migrants in Germany, with students from the former Soviet Union disproportionally benefiting from school compared to other non-Western students. We conclude that German primary schools are not functioning as engines of educational integration because schooling does not reduce the migrant–native achievement gap and migrant groups with the greatest educational disadvantage benefit the least from schooling.

中文翻译：

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学校教育在平衡移民背景成绩差距中的作用


学校教育是否平等了有和没有移民背景的学生之间的成绩差距？这个问题在社会学中基本上仍未得到解答。我们假设移民的子女会从学校教育中受益更多，从而使学校成为教育融合的引擎。我们的研究使用来自全国教育小组研究的数据，在德国小学教育的背景下检验了这一假设。我们比较了来自本地家庭的学生与具有西方、非西方（包括土耳其）和前苏联移民背景的学生的成就。使用差异暴露方法，我们将学习分解为两个因果不同的部分：由于学校暴露而学习的学习和由于测试时年龄较大的学习。我们的研究结果并不支持学校教育使移民与本地人成就差距相等的观点。相反，我们的结果表明，学校接触可能会扩大德国两个最大的移民群体之间的差距，与其他非西方学生相比，来自前苏联的学生从学校中受益不成比例。我们得出的结论是，德国小学没有发挥教育融合的引擎的作用，因为学校教育并没有缩小移民与本地人的成就差距，而教育劣势最大的移民群体从学校教育中受益最少。