Immigrant status and teenagers’ school achievements: the possible interaction of family background and education policy

Education policies can work as integration policies for children with immigrant origins. The literature on that matter is rich for settlement countries and for the European countries that have a long tradition of immigration. The lack in the availability of data in many EU has made dicult to carry out comparative analysis of the integration process in those countries, particularly for the second-generation. This work lls this gap, analysing the role of the socio-economic background in the educational outcome of immigrants. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the eect is more or less pronounced due to dierent integration and education systems adopted by each country. We concentrate on second-generation adolescents and compare their performances with that of native and that of rst-generation students. The results, show a less pronounced impact of the socio-economic background on the immigrant adolescents' school performance in those countries where the integration policies concern disadvantaged children since an early age.