Reading Literacy and Students with a Foreign Background

English summary of Report 227 - Further analyses from the PISA 2000 results

When the first results from PISA 2000 were presented in December 2001, it was revealed that Swedish 15-year-old students performed above the OECD-average in all three surveyed domains; Reading literacy, Mathematical literacy and Scientific literacy. Possibly more importantly, it was found that the Swedish school system achieves a high level of equity compared to many other OECD-countries. According to the PISA2000 results, the total variation in student performance is relatively small in Sweden. Furthermore, the variation between schools is very low from an international perspective. Finally, the impact of socio-economic background on student performance is less pronounced in Sweden than in many other countries. Together,these three indicators suggest that the Swedish school system achieves an equitable distribution of learning outcomes. A fourth indicator of equity could be to what extent the performance differs between "native" students and students with a foreign background. In this respect, the PISA results show that there is a considerable performance gap in Sweden as well as in many other OECD-countries. The performance gap in Sweden between native students and foreign background students is not significantly larger than the OECD-average,but taking into account the other three "equity indicators" and the fact that Sweden traditionally has belonged to one of the countries with the highest ambitions with respect to an equitable distribution of learning outcomes, the result is far from satisfactory. It is therefore important for politicians and policymakers to know whether this outcome is due to a poorly functioning school system in terms of accommodating and integrating students with a foreign background or whether there are other reasonable explanations to this phenomenon.