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Immigrant English Proficiency, Children’s Educational Performance, and Parental Involvement

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A Correction to this article was published on 28 November 2022

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Abstract

Using the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) and the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), this paper estimates the effect of immigrants’ English proficiency on the educational performance of their children as well as measures of parental involvement in school. Together, the data allow us to examine children ranging from preschool to high school age. Given the confounding factors associated with English knowledge, we employ an instrumental variables two-stage least squares strategy that exploits parents’ age at arrival and whether their country of origin is English speaking. For the younger cohort, which we access through the NIS sample, our results suggest that children of immigrant parents with higher English language ability score higher on reading assessments as well as some math-related assessments. For the older students, which we assess through the CILS sample, we see a positive effect on reading scores as a result of parental English proficiency. When examining parental involvement, we find that English proficiency results in a higher likelihood of being part of a parent-teacher organization as well as a higher probability of parent-teacher interaction. Our results are robust to various specifications and alternative instrumental variables.

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Notes

  1. https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/immigrant-children/.

  2. To further address the issue of missing data we also impute values for the missing data for a few specifications. Tables A7, A12, B7, and B12 present these results.

  3. In the Appendix, Table C2 we present the countries considered to be English speaking in our analysis.

  4. In these cases, we replace country of origin indicators from equation (3) with a dummy variable for whether the parent is from a non-English speaking country.

  5. The algorithm is developed by Bakker et al. (2009). Isphording and Otten (2013) provide a detailed explanation of the ASJP dataset and the linguistic distance measure.

  6. We do not focus on this measure as it may be less appropriate in our context because it is based on the language scores from adult English-speaking Americans learning another language. This construction assumes symmetry in the difficulty between English-speaking natives learning another language and an immigrant speaking that language learning English. It also assumes that the only reason for differences between test scores is the difficulty of learning a language when motivating factors like differential economic or social returns across languages likely also play a role.

  7. We are unable to perform a causal mediation analysis in instrumental variables as proposed in Dippel et al. (2019) due to our IV being too weak in the mediator first stage. A strong instrument for this stage requires an F-statistic of 30. See Dippel, Ferrara and Heblich (2020) for a concise explanation and instructions on how to implement this estimator.

  8. Termed Long-term Orientation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Alberto Ortega

  2. Department of Economics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Tyler Ludwig

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  1. Alberto Ortega
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  2. Tyler Ludwig
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Correspondence to Alberto Ortega.

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Ortega, A., Ludwig, T. Immigrant English Proficiency, Children’s Educational Performance, and Parental Involvement. Rev Econ Household 21, 693–719 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-022-09628-4

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