SUMMARY Huddled classes How migrants fare in school, and what schools can learn from them If teachers are not satisfied with a course of their lesson, they tend to put the blame on less intelligent students who are increasingly likely to come from foreign countries. It is not easy to decide whose fault this really is. To find out the true cause, the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) measures how teenagers from all over the world fare in different subjects and how schools deal with migrant kids. In general, newcomers tend to achieve lower results than locals but there are remarkable differences in how different nationalities fare in different countries. In Western Europe students are put into ability groups in their early schooling years. As migrant kids often come from impoverished backgrounds and are not familiar with the local language upon their arrival at the host country, they often end up in a low performing group. In a country where students are not able to change tracks this may mean they will never receive instruction which would later enable them to study at university. In Hong Kong, students are tracked too but they are allowed to proceed to a higher group when they reach the level of desired knowledge. Chinese students are believed to be thriving on this system but they perform remarkably well in Australia too. Here their success is attributed not only to their brains and hard work but also to the great Australian school system. The role of the host country school system together with the age of the migrant kids and their ambition to succeed represent another important research areas investigated. Here the PISA perhaps unsurprisingly concludes that younger kids are able to adapt to different schooling systems more easily than their older colleagues and the level of instruction tends to vary enormously across the globe. As far as the motivation levels of students are concerned, migrant kids usually display high levels of motivation and ambition. To sum up, migrant kids are not responsible for low national results in the PISA tests. If offered good study conditions, they actually tend to become high achievers very fast. Every country which will understand this and act accordingly, is bound to reap huge benefits in the future. Advanced English Style, Appropriacy of Vocabulary Organization and Cohesion, Word Count Content Accuracy Grammar Total number of points 5 points 0-5 points 0-5 points 0-5 points max. 20 points 5 5 4.5 4.5 19/A Assessment scale A 20-19 B 18-17 C 16-15 D 14-13 E 12 F 11-0