Thursday, September 25, 2008

Migrants and Education

This article attempts to debunk a few myths about migrants and education. When adjusted for socio-economic status, migrants tend to do as well as and better than host country students in many cases. Where they do not do better or preform worse, tends to be in the school systems that 'track' them out of the higher achievement classes.
"That suggests that any country that figures out how to let incomers shine will reap big benefits. Immigrants, however poor, are a self-selected bunch of ambitious, hard-working people, and their children usually know that, lacking the informal networks that let locals get ahead, they must study hard to succeed. Their varying fates—helped to the top in some places, consigned to the scrapheap in others—show that although what happens outside the school gates is important, what happens in classrooms is too."

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