Introduction

The low educational achievement level of migrant students in most Western countries is a growing concern for policy makers. High educational achievement is a prerequisite for successful integration into society and thus the best strategy to combat societal exclusion and discrimination of minority groups. Many studies (for example, Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; OECD, 2012) have shown that the low educational achievement of migrant students is partly explained by their lower socioeconomic status, but even controlling for this, research still suggests a wide gap between native and migrant students in educational achievement. What is interesting from a policy perspective is that there is substantial variation among migrant students themselves. This variation is linked to, for instance, individual characteristics such as the student's destination language, whether the student is a first- or second-generation migrant, age of migration, and having one or two non-native parents (Chiswick and Miller, 1996, 2002).

This study focuses on the effects of certain education system characteristics on migrant student performance. A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2007) showed that the more differentiated a country's education system, the more native students outperform migrant students, even after taking into account social background characteristics. Ammermuller (2005), who used a more restricted measurement of differentiation (number of school types available), reached another conclusion: the more types of school from which migrant students can choose in secondary education, the better they perform on average. Such a school system, however, with choices between different school types, enhances the negative effect of speaking the language of the country of origin at home.

Although these studies examine the effects of education systems on migrants, this is not the main focus of their analysis. They also lack a suitable design to study the effects of a migrant's country of origin and destination, and these are related to their educational achievement. This chapter builds on the work of Levels et al (2008) and Dronkers et al (2014), who focused on the influence of both societal and education system characteristics of a migrant's country of origin and destination on their educational achievement. These studies use the cross-classified multi-level design first introduced by van Tubergen et al (2004). Instead of relying on observations of multiple-origin groups in a single destination, or a single-origin group in multiple destinations, the authors proposed a combined method that allows the comparison of multiple origins in multiple destinations.