DO TEACHERS WHO SPEAK THE NATIVE LANGUAGE ENHANCE NON-NATIVE SPEAKING STUDENTS' ACHIEVEMENTS? A STUDENT FIXED EFFECTS ANALYSIS

Abstract

Many papers have focused on finding what types of student-teacher matching improves students’ educational achievement. One notable type of student-teacher match discusses the impact of matching non-native speaking teachers with native and non-native speaking students. However, these papers have a tendency to classify non-native speaking students as a group. This paper is the first to dwell deeper by investigating the effect of having a native speaking teacher on different non-native student language groups using a publicly released dataset which consists of a representative sample of 8th graders in the United States. The effect on native Spanish, Korean, and French-speaking students will be studied individually using a student fixed effects approach. The results show that, contrary to popular belief, native speaking teachers do not improve students’ education achievement for many non-native speakers. In fact, in some cases, having such teachers actually deteriorate students’ educational achievement.