Peer Effects of Refugee Students: Evidence from Burmese Refugees in Texas Public Schools

• In Event: Identifying Peer Effects: Evidence from Classrooms, Friendships, and Families

Abstract

As global forced displacement continues to rise, U.S. public schools increasingly serve students from refugee backgrounds, and K–12 schools play a central role in refugee integration. This paper estimates how refugee students affect peer academic achievement by exploiting variation in the share of Burmese students across cohorts within Texas public schools. Refugees are forcibly displaced rather than positively selected economic migrants and often arrive with interrupted schooling and low English proficiency, so evidence on immigrant or English Learner peers may not generalize to them. Because most Burmese immigrants arrive as refugees, home language serves as a strong proxy for refugee status, which is rarely observed in administrative data. Using restricted student-level data from the Texas Education Research Center for grades 3–8 from 2003 to 2018, I compare adjacent cohorts within the same school and grade to isolate cohort-to-cohort fluctuations in refugee inflows. Preliminary results suggest that although Burmese refugee students score about 0.5 standard deviations below similar immigrant students in reading, a one percentage point increase in their share is associated with a 0.009 standard deviation increase in classmates’ reading scores (0.012 among native students), with smaller, insignificant effects on math. These gains are concentrated in the year Burmese students arrive and persist in later years. In contrast, other immigrant peers are associated with slightly lower reading scores, and the difference is statistically significant. Nepali- and Somali-speaking classmates, two other groups with many refugees, also show positive effects. These findings suggest that refugee peer effects can differ from immigrant peer effects, with implications for refugee placement policy and English Learner support.

Author

• Kaythari Maw, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author