No abstract

Ethnic or racial segregation in schools and neighborhoods remains a persistent reality in most major cities in Western countries. Although extensively theorized, determining the exact mechanisms that produce such patterns has proven difficult. In this article, we investigate one of the potential causes of ethnic segregation in schools; native flight motivated by parents’ school preferences. Both observational and experimental evidence suggests that native or White parents have a strong preference for racially or ethnically homogeneous schools. If this is the case, this may strongly contribute to school segregation. In contexts where school enrollment is determined primarily by geographic proximity to schools, such preferences may prompt White or native parents to move away from schools with high racial or ethnic minority shares among students, thus contributing to both residential and school segregation. Drawing on extremely detailed, population-wide, geo-coded register data on families and school catchment areas for elementary schools in Oslo, the capital of Norway, we investigate whether native parents move away from schools with higher shares students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. We employ a Geographic Regression Discontinuity (GRD) design by exploiting the fact that within neighborhoods, the characteristics of schools differ discontinuously along school catchment area borders. The results indicate that native origin families systematically move away from schools with high shares of students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. This process likely contributes to both school segregation and residential segregation.

There is currently a mismatch between the theoretical expectations of peer effects held by many scholars and the quantitative empirical literature. This paper contributes to the understanding of peer effects by highlighting the oft-overlooked conceptual distinction between social influences and a well-defined causal effect; peers may influence one another via several potentially contradicting mechanisms that result in small overall causal peer effects on educational outcomes. We exploit the idiosyncratic variation in gender composition across cohorts within schools to study offsetting mechanisms. Using population-wide Norwegian register and survey data, we find two distinct ways in which the share of girls in lower secondary schools (grades 8–10) affects academic outcomes. First, more girl peers improve the learning environment at school. Simultaneously, however, more girl peers reduce the students’ motivation for schoolwork. Such results suggest that peer effects stem from a complex process where various mechanisms are at odds with one another, and where the influence of peers on academic outcomes is a composite of different mechanisms. Overall, we find that more girl peers lower students’ school grades and reduce students’ likelihood of attending an academic track in upper secondary school (which qualifies for higher education). Supplementary analyses suggest that the achievement level of girls is the main reason for the gender peer effects found in our study.

Immigrant inflows to Europe have changed student compositions in and across schools. Despite the strong intuition that peers matter for student outcomes, a comprehensive literature finds nil or moderate effects of immigrant peers. This study explores three reasons for this mismatch. First, it uses quantile regressions to reveal whether estimates on the average of the outcome mask differential effects across the outcome distribution. Second, it estimates the effect of attending schools with different immigrant shares, which is a composite of peer effects and the effects of school traits. Third, it compares the effects on teacher-assigned grades and objective standardized tests to explore whether the effects of immigrant share are influenced by teachers’ grading practices. The results show that high achievers in schools with higher immigrant shares get better grades from their teachers, likely because they are assessed relative to peers with lower academic and socioeconomic levels. However, they show no sign of improved test scores. In contrast, low achievers obtain better test scores when having immigrant peers and this academic improvement is not explained by the general academic and socioeconomic level among peers. The findings demonstrate that effects on the mean outcome mask differential effects across outcome distributions.

This paper investigates the effect of attending immigrant-dense schools on student outcomes, which consists of the joint effect of immigrant peers and school context. The sorting of students into schools is not random, and a large immigrant peer effect literature uses school fixed effects to eliminate selection bias. However, keeping schools fixed also eliminates the effect of the school context and is accordingly unsuited to estimate the total effect of attending immigrant-dense schools. By using both a value-added approach and by drawing on application data to manage selection bias, this paper demonstrates that attending immigrant-dense upper secondary schools in Norway increases student dropout, even though a school fixed effects model indicates no detectable immigrant peer effects. These findings suggest that immigrant-dense schools affect students in other ways than through mere peer exposure, and that research on the consequences of school segregation should take into account the effect of both school context and peers.