Bilingual school choice and socio-economic segregation: an analysis for Spain based on PISA 2015

ABSTRACT

In the academic year of 2004–2005, the Spanish region of Madrid began to implement a bilingual educational programme (MBP hereinafter) in state schools. One of the objectives of this programme was to make the study of a foreign language (English) accessible to students from economically disadvantaged families who cannot afford private foreign language classes. Our study aims to evaluate whether students from a disadvantaged socio-economic background really do have the same probability of participating in the MBP as their more privileged peers. The analysis use the PISA 2015 database which corresponds to the representative sample of the Community of Madrid in Spain, with added administrative information supplied by the Madrid Regional Ministry of Education concerning the identification of bilingual and non-bilingual schools. Using these data, we estimate a logit model directed at identifying which factors explain the choice by students of whether to attend a bilingual state school. The results obtained reveal that the probability of attending a bilingual school is higher for students belonging to socio-economically and culturally better-off households. This suggests that the MBP could be fostering segregation within the state education sector in Madrid.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• school choice
• socio-economic segregation
• PISA 2015
• Spain

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support given by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project EDU2016-76414-R). Mauro Mediavilla is grateful for the financial support given by the Regional Government of Valencian Community (Conselleria d’Hisenda i Model Econòmic; project HIECPU/2019/2). María-Jesús Mancebón and José-María Gómez-Sancho are grateful for the financial support given by the Regional Government of Aragón under Grant S23_20R

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are various interpretations of the term bilingual educational in the literature (Admiraal, Westhoff, and De Bot 2006; Nikula and Marsh 1998). One of these approaches considers bilingual education to be that in which children belonging to linguistic minorities receive their education (or part of it) in their mother tongue (L1), which differs from the official language of the country (L2). By contrast, another interpretation considers bilingualism to be those educational programmes in which some of the subjects of the school curriculum are taught in a foreign language (L2). This educational model (CLIL) is that which has been implemented in Spain and in various European countries in the last fifteen years.

2. The bulk of the research surrounding school choice has explored achievement effects (Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt 2006; Zimmer et al. 2009), but there is also an significant research examining the family attributes that influence the choice between school types (private vs public) and it is this literature that has special value for our study (Teske and Schneider 2000; Lankford and Wyckoff 2001; Bifulco and Ladd 2006; Lauen 2007; Butler et al. 2013, among others).

3. The cost for a standard intensive English course (20 hours/week) is 145 euros per week (https://www.olelanguages.com/ole-schools-prices.html). This could explain the results obtained in Azzolini, Campregher, and Madia (2022), where parental education and parental socioeconomic status are strongly associated with students’ English language competence, especially in countries, with languages very different from English. The authors state that in such countries, family resources are very important because English competences are more difficult to acquire elsewhere.

4. Parents of all economic backgrounds often exercise school choice as a way to send their children to schools where they can be educated alongside other students who share their family backgrounds.

5. In 2017, eleven of the seventeen Spanish Autonomous Communities offered bilingual education programmes (Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile and León, Extremadura, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre, La Rioja). The calendar for implementation has been different in each territory, beginning in 2004 in Extremadura, Madrid and Murcia and finalising in 2017, when Ceuta and Melilla were incorporated into this trend (see http://www.ebspain.es/index.php/observatorio-eb-2).

6. Most of the MBP students in primary schools continue with the program in secondary bilingual schools.

7. Official data provided by the Regional Ministry of Education and Youth, Madrid: https://www.comunidad.madrid/sites/default/files/doc/educacion/sgea_datosycifras_2020–21.pdf.

8. 5958/2010 Regional Act regulates the primary education in bilingual state schools and 972/2017 Regional Act regulates the secondary education in bilingual state schools.

9. Infant and primary teachers (who provide over 15 teaching hours weekly) receive 131.13 euros monthly and secondary teachers (who provide over 10 teaching hours weekly) receive 167.84 euros monthly, approximately 5–6% of their annual salary.

10. Research on the influence of family background on academic achievement (measured by standardised test scores of basic skills) has a long history. The most representative study on family background and academic achievement was conducted by the American sociologist James Coleman. Coleman et al. (1966) found that the two most important factors producing differences in students’ academic performance were intelligence and family background. Since then, scholars around the world have continued to conduct numerous studies on this subject. All of them concluding that the family is one of the most important learning environments that affect students’ academic achievement. The relationship is strong and positive; on average, the higher a student’s SES, the stronger his or her educational outcomes tend to be (see the meta-analysis carried out by Sirin 2005).

11. Of the sixteen monolingual schools, seven had begun to apply the programme recently and, consequently, the policy did not affect their students in the database.

12. PISA 2015 asked students to report whether they ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ with the following statements: ‘I often worry that it will be difficult for me to take a test’; ‘I worry I will get poor grades at school’; ‘I feel very anxious even if I am well prepared for a test’; ‘I get very tense when I study for a test’; and ‘I get nervous when I do not know how to solve a task at school’. The PISA questions thus cover students test-related anxiety. Students’ responses were used to construct the index of schoolwork-related anxiety, standardised to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 across OECD countries (OECD 2017).

13. For the first time, PISA 2015 asked students to report whether they ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ with the following statements: ‘I want top grades in most or all of my courses’; ‘I want to be able to select from among the best opportunities available when I graduate’; ‘I want to be the best, whatever I do’; ‘I see myself as an ambitious person’; and ‘I want to be one of the best students in my class’. Student responses to these five questions were used to construct the index of achievement motivation, which has a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 across OECD countries (OECD 2017).

14. The official data of the percentage of bilingual state secondary schools in the MBP in the academic year 2014–2015 was 32.7%, close to the 39.0% of the PISA sample. This indicates that the PISA sample, even though it did not take into account the bilingual characteristics of the schools, was very accurate. Official Data from the Regional Ministry of Education and Youth, Madrid: https://www.comunidad.madrid/sites/default/files/doc/educacion/datos_y_cifras_2014–15.pdf.

15. We checked whether our model was affected by a multicollinearity problem by computing the Variation Inflation Factor (VIF) and the condition index. The results led us to rule out the existence of this problem in the specification of our models. The results of this analysis are available upon request.

16. Two excellent reviews of the causes of school dropout are those by Rumberger and Lim (2008).

17. Several papers have attempted to identify the effects of peers on student outcomes. Although this problem has many methodological difficulties, some studies have shown, in an especially convincing way, that peers indeed matter and that higher achieving schoolmates can improve others, but these effects are likely to be reciprocal, since less able students may be a hindrance to their less academic peers. These results lead Horn (2013) to conclude that a system that selects students into homogeneous groups could result in peer effects increasing differences between schools, and thus increase inequalities of outcome.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Gobierno de Aragón [S23_20R]; Regional Government of Aragón [S23_20R]; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [(project EDU2016-76414-R).]; Conselleria d’Hisenda i Model Econòmic [project HIECPU/2019/2].

Notes on contributors

Mauro Mediavilla

Mauro Mediavilla is an Associate professor in the Department of Applied Economics, University of Valencia. PhD in Economy (2011). Award for the best doctoral thesis in Economics of Education (Association of Education Economics). Has been advisor at the UNESCO, the Prometeo program of the Equator government (2014-2015) and the Spending Review Program of European Commission for Spain (2018-2019). Finally, he has more than 70 publications in indexed journals, books and book chapters

María-Jesús Mancebón

María-Jesús Mancebón is Professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Her main research interests are in the field of Economics of Education; in particular the assessment of school efficiency, the effects of school choice on the equity of the educational system, the assessment of educational policies with quasi-experimental methods and, more currently, the causes and effects of financial literacy. He has more than 50 articles in indexed journals, books and book chapters.

Luis Pires

Luis Pires is an Associate professor at the University Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid. He was Deputy Director General of Evaluation and Analysis in the Department of Education of the Community of Madrid. His research interests include education policy, bilingual education, national and international educational evaluation, school bullying, and migrations.

José-María Gómez-Sancho

Jose-Maria Gomez-Sancho is lecturer in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Her main research interests are in the field of Economics of Education; in particular the assessment of university efficiency, school efficiency and the measuring the impact of research. Award for the best doctoral thesis in Economics of Education (Association of Education Economics). He has more than a dozen of articles in indexed journals.