How do school regimes tackle ethnic segregation: Some insights supported in PISA 2006

The basic purpose of this chapter is to analyze and understand the effect of certain articulations of the educational systems and policies on school ethnic segregation. On the grounds of the well-known effects of school ethnic composition on student outcomes, we explore the impacts of distinct components of what we are calling school regimes on school ethnic segregation measures across countries and regions. Our analysis considers data for 30 OECD educational systems. Most of them correspond to national units (24 countries), whilst a few of them capture sub-national school features (6 regions). Certain school regimes' characteristics are assessed: level of differentiation or stratification existing in the educational career; the presence of private schools in compulsory education; the level of school autonomy as regards the process of student admission; models and criteria defining the public regulation of parental choice processes. As basic measure of ethnic segregation, we use the ratio between the proportion of immigrant students attending with a more disadvantaged socio-economic intake and the proportion of native students enrolled at these same schools. The PISA 2006 database has been used as the main source of information for such measures. The results of the interactions and regression analyses suggest that school regimes modelled, which are more stratified and market-oriented, tend to increase school ethnic segregation, whilst those others characterized as more comprehensive and publicly regulated tend to reduce it. Keywords School choice, School markets, School regimes, Ethnic segregation. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.