Excerpt:
I am currently working as a school psychologist, and below I will try to decipher the latest school report on immigrant students in Denmark. In Denmark, we use "bilingual" as a word for immigrant student -- and according to the report, by far most of these students are Turks, Pakistanis, Arabs and Serbs/Croatians. While Serbs and Croatians perform normally, the Muslim students perform very poorly. Below the chart are some of the salient facts.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an OECD programme that assesses the intellectual capacity of 15-year-old students in industrialised countries: "Every three years, it assesses knowledge and skills essential for full participation in society in students near the end of compulsory education." In Denmark, we make an additional analysis of the PISA data called PISA Ethnic (the performance of immigrant students).
The 2005 PISA Ethnic report (page 5) showed that 64 percent of students with an Arab background in Denmark are "functionally illiterate" -- meaning that their reading and writing capabilities are so poor that they will not be able to complete even a simple education. The same specific analysis of Arab immigrants was not made in the 2009 report, but Pisa Ethnic 2009 (published in 2011) (not online, summary here) still contains very interesting information about the foreigners that our politicians and the EU keep telling us will keep our high-tech work market running and pay our pensions.