Bilingual Education and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Indigenous Children in Mexico

Susan Parker, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
Graciela M. Teruel, Universidad Iberoamericana

This paper has two principle objectives. First, we provide an empirical estimation of the impact of language barriers (failure to speak the dominant language-in this case Spanish) in determining school achievement among indigenous children in rural Mexico. Second, we evaluate two social programs which may potentially reduce the effect of these language barriers. These programs are 1) Progresa, a now well-known and widespread conditional transfer program which provides monetary benefits in exchange for children regularly attending school and 2) bilingual education, a program which half of all indigenous children have access to in rural Mexico. We compare the extent to which each of these programs can reduce the important gap in educational attainment between indigenous children who speak Spanish and those who do not. Measuring language barriers in school performance and understanding the role of potential policies for reducing their effects is crucial for the design of anti poverty policy, particularly in Mexico and other countries with a large indigenous population. While indigenous children overall have on average lower levels of educational attainment, monolingual indigenous children fair far worse than bilingual indigenous children, attaining on average only half as many years of education. If the poor school performance of indigenous children is mainly driven by their economic situation, then programs directed to improve household resources should be largely sufficient to reduce the education gap between indigenous and non-indigenous children. However, if the poor schooling outcomes are partly the result of language and other cultural barriers, then social programs aiming only at improving the economic conditions of indigenous communities will not be sufficient. Our paper begins by analyzing the determinants of education achievement among indigenous and non-indigenous children. Controlling for family resources and school quality, we find that language (speaking Spanish) represents an important barrier in education attainment for indigenous schoolchildren. Controlling for the endogeneity of Spanish language ability, we find that monolingual indigenous children are ten percent less likely to be enrolled in school than their bilingual counterparts of similar economic characteristics, suggesting the importance of language barriers to educational achievement. By the age of eighteen, monolingual indigenous children have only half as many years of completed schooling as their bilingual counterparts. We then turn to the role two important programs in Mexico may play in reducing these language barriers. Progresa was implemented in 1997 in Mexico and provides cash benefits linked to children’s school attendance and to regular health clinic attendance, as well as in-kind health benefits and nutritional supplements. The program has grown rapidly and now covers more than 2.6 million families in extreme poverty in rural areas, as well as over a million families in urban areas. Evaluations have shown large increases in enrollment as a result of Progresa, nevertheless there has been no study of the effects of Progresa among the indigenous. The second policy we examine is that of bilingual education. The Secretary of Public Education offers indigenous primary schools which include bilingual teachers as well as textbooks in native languages. Our analysis uses unique data which come from the Evaluation Survey of Progresa (ENCEL). The ENCEL was designed for the purposes of evaluating the program and includes a base line survey (before program implementation) as well as follow-up surveys every six months. This rich data base follows a sample of poor communities in rural areas randomly assigned to a treatment group receiving benefits and a control group and contains a total sample of 24,000 households. We have one base line data set and five follow up rounds of analysis. Our data includes information on children’s schooling, household income and expenditures, children’s school attendance and household wealth, as well as individual level measures on whether each individual in the household speaks an indigenous language and whether Spanish is also spoken. To this data, we merge information from the Secretary of Public Education on the availability of bilingual schools in the communities in the sample. For both policies, we examine the effect each has on reducing the gap in education attainment between monolingual and bilingual children. To evaluate the effect of bilingual education, we use double difference estimators with community fixed effects to address endogenous program placement of bilingual schools. For the case of Progresa we take advantage of the control group to identify the impacts of Progresa in narrowing the gap in educational attainment. Our preliminary results show that bilingual schools are effective at reducing the educational gap between indigenous bilingual and monolingual children. Progresa does not, however, appear to have any effect at reducing this gap, and in fact, may even increase this gap. This evidence may suggest that bilingual education is worthy of expansion in Mexico. Nevertheless, one area of possible concern is the impact of bilingual education on indigenous children’s learning of Spanish. Positive impacts of bilingual education could be undermined if bilingual education reduces the probability of indigenous children learning Spanish and thus may reduce their level of productivity as adults.