The Impact of Immigrant Concentration in Spanish Schools: School, Class, and Composition Effects

The existence of a negative correlation between the concentration of immigrants in certain schools and the school attainment of its students is a well-documented empirical conclusion in the American and European sociology of education, yet sociologists of education are still debating why the migrant (and ethnic) composition of schools has such an impact on results above and beyond individual characteristics. Using a Spanish survey study (INECSE, Evaluacion de la Educacion Primaria 2003, Madrid, 2005), this article intends to confirm and measure the poorer results of students in schools where immigrants are more highly represented. It also seeks to identify potential explanations to account for variation in attainment due to the concentration of immigrant origin students in some schools. In the literature, the empirical analyses that seek to explain this empirical regularity are far less frequent, despite the fact that the list of its potential causes includes several mediating mechanisms. We deal with three main groups of causes that could be responsible for this regularity: (i) micro-interactions or peer group effects; (ii) compositional effects-the pupil population is not randomly distributed on the school map but according to important features that determine their future school attainment (such as socio-economic status); and (iii) school/classroom effects-given their contextual characteristics, the quantity and quality of their human and material resources, some schools offer a less stimulating learning environment.