Is Spanish-only schooling responsible for the Puerto Rican language gap?
Section snippets
Background
After 400 years as a Spanish colony, Puerto Rico became an American possession in 1898 as a result of the Treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War. The U.S. took an active role in the island's administration, particularly in education.5 One American goal was to expand the public school system. Under Spanish rule, educational opportunities had, for the
Data and descriptive statistics
The empirical analysis pools individual-level data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census long forms in Puerto Rico and on the mainland.14
Difference-in-differences estimates
Simple differences-in-differences-type estimates suggest that those who received English-intensive instruction were significantly more likely to speak English. This can be seen in Panel A of Table 2, which reports ordinary least squares estimates of Eq. (1) using the sample born 1924–1943.18
Conclusions
Changes in Puerto Rican language of instruction policies, culminating in the 1949 language reform eliminating English instruction, provide a unique opportunity to assess the long-run consequences of English-intensive instruction for the English-language skills of a Spanish-speaking population. Perhaps surprisingly, our results suggest that the change from English to Spanish as the medium of instruction in public schools had little effect on Puerto Rican English proficiency, at least as far as
Acknowledgements
We thank Eli Berman, Chinhui Juhn and participants in the 2003 Texas Econometrics Camp, Fall 2005 NBER Education meetings and Spring 2006 SOLE meetings for helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors.
References (25)
- et al.
The effect of a change in language of instruction on the returns to schooling in Morocco
Journal of Labor Economics
(1997) - Angrist, Joshua, Chin, Aimee, Godoy, Ricardo, 2006. Is Spanish-only Schooling Responsible for the Puerto Rican Language...
- et al.
Effectiveness of Bilingual Education: A Review of the Literature
(1981) Language, Elites and the State: Nationalism in Puerto Rico and Quebec
(1998)- et al.
The Politics of Language: The Dilemma of Bilingual Education for Puerto Ricans
(1981) A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Bilingual Education
(1998)Oral History Interview with Philleo Nash, Transcript of a Tape-Recorded Interview, October 18, 1966
(1966)- INRA (Europe), 2001. Europeans and Languages, Eurobarometer 54 Special,...
How good is ‘how well’? An examination of the census English-speaking ability question
American Statistical Association Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section
(1989)- Matsudaira, Jordan D., 2004. Sinking or Swimming? Evaluating the Impact of English Immersion versus Bilingual Education...
A History of Education in Puerto Rico
Cited by (30)
The effect of the language of instruction on academic performance
2022, Labour EconomicsCitation Excerpt :They find a significant decline in French writing skills, as well as of earnings. Angrist et al. (2008) find instead no effect in English proficiency due to a policy change moving the language of instruction in Puerto Rico from English to Spanish. Ivlevs and King (2014) exploit a reform in Latvia in 2004, where the language of the Russian minority schools switched from 100% Russian to 60% Latvian and 40% Russian and show that results in the centralised exam - in Latvian, but with the option to reply in Russian - significantly deteriorated across the board.
Bilingual schooling and earnings: Evidence from a language-in-education reform
2018, Economics of Education ReviewCitation Excerpt :They develop a DiD estimator across levels of education and birth cohorts and conclude that returns to schooling were substantially lowered for individuals exposed to the reform, a likely consequence of the loss of skills in French induced by ‘Arabization’. A similar strategy is used by Angrist et al. (2008), who evaluated the effect of English-intensive instruction on English skills in Puerto Rico, exploiting the reform that in 1949 substituted English with Spanish as the language of instruction in all grades irrespective of year of birth, finding no effect on English skills. In both cases, the policy effect is captured by the differential return to each additional year of schooling (in terms of either wages or language skills) between individuals that were differently exposed to the reforms.
Estimating the impact of language of instruction in South African primary schools: A fixed effects approach
2016, Economics of Education ReviewCitation Excerpt :They find a decline in French writing skills in individuals exposed to the policy introducing Arabic as language of instruction in the place of French.7 Contrary to this finding, Angrist, Chin, and Godoy (2008) make use of a triple-difference approach in Puerto Rico, and find that greater exposure to English instruction in primary school seemed to have no impact on the English proficiency of children later in life. Most recently, Ivlevs and King (2014) use the change in language policy8 in Latvia to estimate the impact of native language instruction on the academic performance9 of learners in secondary schools.
English language premium: Evidence from a policy experiment in India
2016, Economics of Education Review