Exposure to foreign-born students and the academic performance of U.S.-born students

Following on from yesterday's post about international programmes in the Netherlands (which was really about exposure to foreign students rather than international programmes per se), earlier this week the Economics Discussion Group at Waikato discussed this NBER Working Paper by David Figlio (Northwestern University) and co-authors. Figlio et al. looked at the effect of foreign-born high school students on the academic performance of U.S. born students. As with the paper by Wang et al. I wrote about yesterday, there is a selection problem and you can't simply compare U.S.-born students in schools with more foreign-born students with U.S.-born students in schools with more foreign-born students. As Figlio et al. explain:

First, immigrant students are not randomly assigned to schools, and are more likely to enroll in schools educating students from disadvantaged backgrounds... Second, US-born students, especially those from comparatively affluent families, may decide to leave when a large share of immigrant students move into their school district. Indeed, evidence shows that in the US, following an influx of disadvantaged students and immigrants, affluent, especially White, students move to private schools or districts with higher socio-economic status (SES) families, a phenomenon which has been labeled “white flight”... Both of these factors imply that immigrant exposure is negatively correlated with the SES of US-born students. Therefore, research that does not address the non-random selection of US-born students is likely to estimate a correlation between immigrant exposure and US-born student outcomes that is more negative than the true relationship.

Figlio et al. have access to very detailed data from the Florida Department of Education, which they link to birth records. This allows them to compare siblings, which is a smart way of dealing with the selection problem. Since both siblings tend to go to the same school, comparing siblings deals with the first selection issue above, since school-specific effects will be the same for both siblings. And because parents would likely move both siblings to a new school if they move one of them, then that deals with the second issue. Importantly, because each sibling is in a different grade, and the number of foreign-born students is changing over time, that provides variation between the siblings in their exposure to foreign-born students, and it is that variation that Figlio et al. test, for its association with academic performance.

Their dataset contains information on all K-12 students in Florida from 2003-03 to 2011-12. The most restrictive analysis (of siblings) has a sample size of more than 1.3 million (out of a total sample of over 6.3 million U.S.-born students who speak English at home). The key outcome variables are student performance on standardised reading and mathematics tests, which they standardise (so all results are measured in terms of standard deviations). Comparing foreign-born (which they label 'immigrant') students with U.S. born students in terms of test results, they find that:

Immigrant students’ performance in math (-0.097) and reading (-0.206) is lower than the one of US-born students (0.044 and 0.052).

Not too surprising then. In their main analysis, they find that:

...once selection is accounted for with family fixed effects, the correlation between cumulative immigrant exposure and academic achievement of US-born students is positive and significant. Moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile in the distribution of cumulative exposure (1% and 13%, respectively) increases the score in mathematics and reading by 2.8% and 1.7% of a standard deviation, respectively. The effect is double in size for disadvantaged students (Black and FRPL [free-or-reduced-price-lunch] eligible students). For affluent students the effect is very small, suggesting that immigrant students do not negatively affect US-born students, even when immigrants’ academic achievement is lower than the US-born schoolmates.

As with the Wang et al. paper from yesterday's post though, these results do not definitively demonstrate causality. However, Figlio et al. do a bit more digging, and find:

...suggestive evidence that the effect on US-born students is larger when the immigrants systematically outperform US-born students. Overall, these results suggest that immigrant students do not affect negatively US-born students, even when the immigrants’ academic achievement is lower than the US-born students, and may have a positive impact on US-born students when immigrants outperform them.

These are important results, and clearly run counter to the narrative that underlies the phenomenon of 'white flight' - that immigrant students make domestic-born students worse off academically. Although more research is needed to identify whether these results are causal, and to further explore the mechanisms that drive them, it is clear that diversity is better than (or at least not as bad as) many people expect.

[HT: Marginal Revolution]