DO YOU SPEAK MY LANGUAGE? THE EFFECTS OF TEACHER NATIVE LANGUAGE ON STUDENT EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES.

Abstract

Socioeconomic factors such as gender and ethnicity are often shown to have an impact on student educational outcomes. Yet, the effect of an individual’s native language is given little attention in the existing literature. This paper presents novel evidence on the effects of teacher native language on student test scores and teacher perceptions of a student using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study in the United States. Using a fixed effects approach, this study finds that teacher native language has no significant impact on the aforementioned measures of educational outcomes.