Gender and Race Heterogeneity: The Impact of Students with Limited English on Native Students' Performance

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that exposure to a larger share of Limited English (LE) students is associated with a slight decline in performance for students at the top of the achievement distribution. In this paper we explore whether LE peer effects differ by gender and race. Utilizing school-by-year fixed effect methods that allow us to address possible endogeneity with respect to the schools students attend, we find evidence of heterogeneous peer effects of LE students on natives. Specifically, we find no LE student peer effects on females' achievement in math and reading but significant negative effects on males and black students.

Classmate characteristics, class composition and children’s perceived classroom climate

“…Likewise, a recent study demonstrated that ethnic diversity is significantly associated with a messy and disorderly classroom climate (Veerman 2015 ). Potential reasons may include language differences, which may be perceived as worse for a non-immigrant child, if attending a class with more immigrant children, than for an immigrant child, as elaborated in a study by Diette and Uwaifo Oyelere ( 2014 ). Immigrant children might also have experienced a range of traumatic events (i.e., assaults, serious accidents, abuse), which can have a negative impact on their functioning in the classroom (Kataoka et al 2012 ) and may result in a class with more immigrant children being perceived as messier and more disorderly if children are not immigrants themselves.…”

Does stricter immigration policy affect college enrollment and public-private school choice of natives?

“…In the face of these trends, there are concerns that the influx of foreign-born students may adversely impact the educational outcomes of US-born students as well as inducing them to move to private schools where there are fewer immigrant students. Prior studies have reported that foreign-born students "crowd out" natives from colleges and graduate programs (Hoxby 1998;Borjas 2004), while the presence of students with limited English proficiency presents a barrier to other students' learning in US schools (Chin et al 2013;Diette and Uwaifo Oyelere 2014).…”

“…Although a positive relationship between immigration and USborn students' tendency to move into private schools has been found in the literature, the mechanism driving this native flight is not entirely clear; however, there are a few potential explanations. Recent works have documented that an influx of foreign-born students with limited English proficiency adversely affects native students' performance in math and reading test scores (Chin et al 2013;Diette and Uwaifo Oyelere 2014). Due to this potential effect, native households may respond to the inflow of foreign-born students by enrolling their children in private school.…”

Disruptive school peers and student outcomes

“…Recent evidence suggests that inclusion of disadvantaged children in mainstream classrooms exert negative effects on the other learners (e.g. Figlio, 2007;Carrell and Hoekstra, 2010;Cho, 2012;Kristoffersen, 2013;and Diette and Uwaifo Oyelere, 2014).…”

“…Secondly, the availability of unique population wide individual level panel data allows us to improve upon the estimation strategy compared to much previous work. Like for instance Fletcher (2009) for children with emotional problems and Cho (2012) and Diette and Uwaifo Oyelere (2014) for English Language Learners (ELL), we employ a value added model which implies that our disruptiveness measure is only required to be exogenous with regards to changes in test scores, not with regards to levels of test scores. However, our strategy does not rely on variation in disruptive classmates within school-grade or within individual.…”