Talking the same language: how does education in the mother tongue affect the pupils' scholastic achievement in the parallel school systems?

Since Gordon’s classical theory of assimilation many scholars have researched the integration of immigrants (and their children) in terms of their educational and labour market performance. However, mostly due to the lack of suitable data, cross-national research on the integration of autochthonous minority pupils is still scarce. By using the PISA 2003 data, I aim to assess the quality of the parallel school systems through comparing the scholastic achievement of 15-year-old students within the Finnish, Slovakian and Italian context. Compared to the immigrant-native gap, the results demonstrate rather minor "gaps" between the parallel school systems where Swedish speakers do slightly worse than Finnish, there is no noteworthy difference between Hungarian and Slovak school students, while Germans tend to outperform Italians.