THE IMPACT OF STUDENT-TEACHER LANGUAGE MATCHING ON HISPANIC STUDENTS IN THE US

Abstract

This thesis explores how teacher demographics affect students’ academic performance, specifically the relationship between teachers’ race and native language matching with English-speaking Hispanic students in the United States. The thesis aims to illustrate the mechanism of how demographic matching affects academic performance through native language. Variation in a student’s native language matching with two different subject teachers, within-student, is used to estimate the impact of assigning a student to a teacher with matching native language. I find that for all subjects in the dataset, there is no evidence that assigning English-speaking Hispanic students to English-speaking teachers has an impact on academic performance, with or without teacher race controls. If an English-speaking Hispanic student is assigned to a Hispanic teacher that is not English-speaking instead, there is no impact on the student’s academic performance either.