Schooling Inequality among the Indigenous : A Problem of Resources or Language Barriers ? by Susan

Schooling inequality among the indigenous : a problem of resources or language barriers / The views and interpretations in this document are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank, or to any individual acting on its behalf. The Research Department (RES) produces the Latin American Economic Policies Newsletter, as well as working papers and books, on diverse economic issues. To obtain a complete list of RES publications, and read or download them please visit our web site at: Abstract * This paper analyzes an important determinant of social exclusion of the indigenous in Mexico, that of educational attainment. Using large household data sets from rural Mexican communities, where a majority of indigenous people live, we analyze the potential explanatory factors for low educational attainment of indigenous children. We find that, overall, indigenous children fare worse than their non-indigenous classmates. Nevertheless, there is important heterogeneity within the indigenous group. In particular, monolingual indigenous children (those who speak only an indigenous language) perform much worse in school than bilingual indigenous children who speak Spanish as a second language. Using community effects and instrumental variable models that control for the possible endogeneity of languages spoken within the indigenous population, we are able to shed some light on the reasons for this poor performance. While controlling for parental characteristics, household wealth and community variables reduces the overall negative effect of speaking only a native language, these effects remain significant. We interpret these results as evidence that while family resources and school quality are clearly important, they cannot explain all of the differences in educational attainment between bilingual and monolingual indigenous children. Rather, language barriers and cultural factors represent an important aspect of barriers that indigenous children face in school and thus an important determinant of their future social exclusion. In order to better understand the extent to which these language barriers affect indigenous children's schooling outcomes and how they may differ from other cultural unobserved factors, we exploit the fact that the Mexican public educational system carries out two parallel programs. Indigenous children, depending on their place of residence, have access to either traditional or bilingual primary schools. We thus examine the possible role of bilingual education in improving the educational performance of indigenous children. Using a difference-indifference estimation that sweeps out most of the cultural unobserved heterogeneity across indigenous groups, our results demonstrate that bilingual primary …