Is Spanish-Only Schooling Responsible for the Puerto Rican Language Gap?

Joshua Angrist, Aimee Chin and Ricardo Godoy

No 12005, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Between 1898 and 1948, English was the language of instruction for most post-primary grades in Puerto Rican public schools. Since 1949, the language of instruction in all grades has been Spanish. We use this policy change to estimate the effect of English-intensive instruction on the English-language skills of Puerto Ricans. Although naive estimates suggest that English instruction increased English-speaking ability among Puerto Rican natives, estimates that allow for education-specific cohort trends show no effect. This result is surprising in light of the strong presumption by American policymakers at the time that instruction in English was the best way to raise English proficiency. This has implications for medium of instruction policy in former colonies as well as U.S. education policy toward immigrant children.

JEL-codes: I28 J15 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: CH ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Angrist, Joshua, Aimee Chin, and Ricardo Godoy. “Is Spanish-only Schooling Responsible for the Puerto Rican Language Gap?” Journal of Development Economics 85 (February 2008): 105-128.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12005.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is Spanish-only schooling responsible for the Puerto Rican language gap? (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12005

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().