Teachers’ immigration attitudes and students’ performance

To ensure harmonious intergroup relations, schools must foster the academic integration of immigrant students. School diversity climates play a central role in shaping immigrant students' performance; however, most studies rely on students' perceptions of these climates. Because such perceptions are shaped by subjective experiences, they limit our understanding of how institutions can nurture inclusion. Measuring school diversity climates with an exogenous indicator, teachers' immigration attitudes in a school, offers a rigorous test of how those relate to students’ academic achievement. This study investigates whether school diversity climates, measured through teachers' immigration attitudes, are associated with immigrant students’ academic performance. We analyzed the 2018 PISA data from OECD countries that administered the teacher questionnaire. Our analytical sample included 46,740 students from 1544 schools and 35,452 teachers across seven countries. We estimated country fixed-effects regression models with standard errors clustered at the school level to examine the interaction between students' migration status and school-aggregated teachers' explicit immigration attitudes on students’ performance in science, mathematics, and reading. Across subjects, the achievement gap between native-born and first-generation immigrant students was smaller in schools where teachers expressed more inclusionary immigration attitudes. Inclusionary school diversity climates, reflected in teachers’ pro-immigration attitudes, appear to promote the academic integration of first-generation immigrant students, helping to narrow achievement disparities between immigrant and non-immigrant students. The difference in performance for first-generation students between more exclusionary and inclusionary school diversity climates corresponds on average to one year schooling. • Performance gaps are smaller in more inclusionary school climates. • Immigrant students' performance is higher in more inclusionary school climates. • Immigrant students' improvement is equivalent to one year of schooling. • Climate is measured with school-aggregated teachers' immigration attitudes. • The effects were similar for the three measures of performance in PISA.