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.
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