The Immigrant-native Student Educational Achievement Gap in Greece using PISA 2012

Abstract

Starting in the 1970s Greece, a traditional emigration country, experienced an immigration boom, with the majority of immigrants being Albanians and co-ethnic Greeks from the ex-Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries; by 2012 the share of students in Greek schools with immigrant background exceeded 10%, having tripled over a decade. While in most countries immigrant students perform worse than natives in international assessments, there is considerable between-country heterogeneity. Using PISA 2012 for Mathematics and Reading achievement and a multilevel analysis, I find that Greece belongs to a small group of countries in which there is no evidence of an immigrant disadvantage for either first- or secondgeneration immigrants. The differences in achievement found in the raw data can be easily be accounted for by differences in socioeconomic background, school track, as well as differences in between-school quality.