PISA: native students score 39 points more than immigrants in Science

PISA: the education gap that immigration does not explain

In Spain, native students score 488 points in Science while students of immigrant origin score 449. In Maths the gap runs from 479 to 429, and in Reading from 453 to 427. The gap exists, it is real, and it is measured in dozens of PISA points. The problem appears when the data is broken down by socioeconomic level: the steepest drop is concentrated in the schools and families where there is least immigration.

What PISA says about the gap between natives and immigrants in Spain

Once the socioeconomic and cultural index is factored in, the difference shrinks to about 20 points in favour of natives. That is below the OECD and European Union averages, which puts the Spanish case far from the disaster suggested by lurid headlines. The share of students of immigrant origin is no anomaly either: 20.3% of 15-year-old students, compared with 16.7% in the OECD and 16.3% in the EU.

The European pattern is uneven. There is no single cause. Each country carries its own language, labour market and admission policy, and conclusions drawn from one do not travel well to the next.

The top quartile falls harder than the bottom one

Here lies the paradox that unsettles anyone expecting a simple explanation. In Reading, the top socioeconomic quartile loses 33 points while the bottom one loses 15.1. In Maths, 24.2 versus 10.5. In Science, 12.6 versus 4.5. Those who fall hardest are not the children of immigration: they are those from wealthier families. Any narrative pointing only at the diverse classroom falls short by definition.

Sweden, Germany and Finland: language as a barrier

In the Swedish case, the argument goes that the difficulty is not purely academic. One thesis circulating is that expecting a newly arrived adult to speak the local language without an accent is an unrealistic goal, and that the Nordic environment resists foreign accents even when the grammar is correct. In other words, according to that thesis, the problem would not be the language, but who speaks it.

Some point out that something similar happens in Germany and Finland: countries with difficult languages where learning the language itself acts as a bottleneck. About Sweden, mention is also made of specific profiles arriving from the Horn of Africa, an attribution that cannot be generalised to an entire group and is made without supporting data.

Family income matters more than the passport

The strongest correlation that emerges when cross-referencing the data is not nationality: it is the family's economic capacity. Children from higher-income households tend to reproduce their parents' educational level; those from poorer households start out with a structural disadvantage. Some reply that the poor, hard-working kid ends up standing out above their surroundings, and it is acknowledged that these are exceptions, not the rule.

Underneath it all lies the question of how investment is distributed: how much weight the publicly funded private schools (concertada) should carry, how much is subsidised with public money, and what room is left for university for those who cannot pay for it. That is where the discussion becomes truly political.

How much of the Spanish decline is immigration, and how much is the rest of society? With the numbers on the table, the comfortable answer does not add up.