Peer Discrimination in the Classroom and Academic Achievement

Abstract

Perceived peer discrimination in the classroom reduces school performance. Considering the context of rural migrants in urban China, we find that migrant students’ test scores are lower when local classmates report more anti-migrant discrimination. Our empirical strategy relies on isolating exogenous variation in locals’ discriminatory attitudes toward rural migrants across randomly assigned classrooms in the same school. We use whether locals had migrant friends outside school in their first year of middle school to instrument for discrimination in the classroom. The negative effects of perceived discrimination are largest for migrant students with less educated parents, lower ability, and lower self-confidence.