Education systems and ethnic educational inequality: Harmonization of contextual data from international school assessment studies for the analysis of effects of education systems on immigrant achievement gaps

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Integrating growing immigrant populations is a challenge for receiving countries. A key to societal integration is the successful educational attainment of immigrants. According to previous research, the educational success of immigrants differs substantially across receiving societies. As education systems and their characteristics shape learning opportunities, one can assume that differences between education systems account for some of the disparities in immigrant’s educational success across countries. Since education systems are malleable and can be adapted to the needs of immigrant students, it is of particular interest to understand how these systems and institutions impact on education inequalities. The proposed project has two objectives: (1) It will use causal analytical methods to investigate the extent to which institutional characteristics of educational systems influence achievement gaps between students with and without a migration background on an international comparative basis for the period from 1995 to 2018. (2) It will harmonize and cumulate data from the most important international school achievement studies (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS) and make available the necessary routines to the scientific community for replication and further research. So far, there are few reliable findings on how education systems contribute to the emergence of competence inequality between pupils with and without a migration background. Among other things, there is a lack of a theoretically sound operationalization of the characteristics of educational systems with regard to competence development. In addition, previous work has focused predominantly on characteristics of secondary education and has not examined the interaction of different characteristics of the education system and levels (education systems and school-level). Above all, however, previous studies’ design and methods do not allow for causal inferences about the relationship between education systems and competence inequality. The harmonization and cumulation of 22 large scale school assessments from different survey periods provides the opportunity to use methods that focus on causal inferences. This database allows to substantively enhance our knowledge about the impact of education systems on achievement gaps. By documenting and providing the routines for processing and harmonizing the data, the project not only enables the replication of the research results, but also prepares the ground for the analysis of a number of other educational, economic and sociological issues.