Immigration Lowers Educational Achievement, Survey finds

When academia, aided and abetted by international agencies, tell you something isn’t happening, there is a very good chance that it is. Take, for example, the assertion by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that immigration has no effect on education.

“Only when combined with research methods that can separate causation from correlation are international test scores useful for analyzing education policy outcomes,” the London-based Centre for the Study of Market Reform of Education (CMRE) avers. “For example, PISA would have policy makers believe that immigration has no impact on education outcomes and therefore should not be a consideration in policy terms.”

“But our work studying Sweden shows that immigration actually accounts for almost a third of the average decline between 2000 and 2012: 19 percent in mathematical literacy, 28 percent in reading literacy, and 41 percent in scientific literacy. The effect is especially pronounced in recent years, coinciding with accelerating refugee immigration.”

“This is just one example.”

Indeed, Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Statistics (CIS) in Washington, D. C., notes that “Just because a language other than English is spoken at home does not mean the students struggle with English. Most of these students were born in the United States. But providing appropriate language instruction for the millions of students for whom English is not their first language is a significant expense for many school districts. This fact, coupled with the much larger size of immigrant households and their lower than average incomes means that school budgets often will be strained by the arrival of large numbers of immigrant families in their school district.”

Related Topics