Despite some improvement in the educational situation of migrants, ethnic disparities remain a challenge in many western countries (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2012). Building on Boudon’s (1974) framework to explain social disparities in education, recent micro-level approaches model ethnic attainment differentials as a two-component process that additionally takes into account the existence of migration-specific conditions that affect the educational outcomes of immigrant students net of social origin (Heath and Brinbaum 2007). In analogy to stratification effects, these conditions have been labeled primary and secondary effects of ethnic origin, and include dimensions such as majority language skills, features of the social network and immigrant students’ acculturation strategies (Berry 1997; Gogolin 2009; Nauck 2011). Institutional aspects such as teacher assessments have been identified as a further dimension to potentially trigger lower educational outcomes among the migrant population net of primary and secondary effects and are, in line with Boudon’s terminology, sometimes referred to as tertiary effects (Gresch 2012).

The extension of traditional models to explicitly consider the existence of migration-specific conditions indeed provides a clear starting point for the systematic explanation for ethnic disparities. Yet, little research is available on the precise mechanisms that may reinforce or reduce the performance and attainment gap between native and immigrant students. This lack of knowledge concerns the identification of ethnic effects, the question whether migration-specific circumstances influence students’ educational outcomes at the level of primary, secondary or tertiary effects as well as the question of the interplay between the diverse influences that are discussed in the current literature. Following that empirical research in these areas is a prerequisite for the development of educational practices to reduce the attainment gap, the symposium aims to obtain deeper insight into the multi-faceted processes that generate ethnic disparities covering the levels of primary, secondary and tertiary effects. A focus is set on language-related aspects and their direct or mediated influence on students’ educational outcomes as well as on the interplay between different influences and across the different levels at which ethnic disparities are assumed to be generated.

The first presentation is focused on the relationship between acculturation strategies of immigrant students, their psychosocial adaptation and their school success, including reading competence in the second language. The second presentation investigates the association between students’ academic majority language skills and their educational aspirations and expectations, and specifically addresses the question to what extent this association can be interpreted as social or ethnic effects. The third contribution takes on an institutional perspective and challenges the deficit perspective by discussing teacher beliefs on multilingualism as a possible reason for the neglected consideration of students’ home languages in school. The fourth contribution additionally picks up the question how educational processes of globalized insertion of multilingual repertoires are politicized and experienced by teachers and students in the educational space. At a methodological level, the studies contribute to the discussion on the applicability of traditional models and measures, including students’ acculturation orientations and subjective data in the form of respondent-reported aspirations and expectations to predict eventual attainment outcomes. At a practical level, the contributions focus on the knowledge base they provide for educational policy and practice. The symposium takes on an international perspective and provides research from Germany, Switzerland and Belgium.