The concentration of foreign children in middle school classes.

Summary Ethnic and social diversity is at the heart of the debate on the French school system. This article first summarizes international studies on the effects of the presence of children of foreign origin in the classroom. It then presents how this question can be examined using the 2007 panel of secondary school students compiled by the DEPP. The latter contains several measures of school performance, information on the national origin and socio-economic characteristics of students, and on the number of foreign students in secondary school classes. The gross negative correlation between the concentration of foreign children in classes and the scores of students in these classes on cognitive tests taken in the sixth and third grades is greatly reduced, or even cancelled out, by introducing control variables or fixed effects.