Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers and their effect on students’ language skills

Höckel, Lisa Sofie Article — Published Version Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers and their effect on students’ language skills Journal of Population Economics Provided in Cooperation with: Springer Nature Suggested Citation: Höckel, Lisa Sofie (2024) : Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers and their effect on students’ language skills, Journal of Population Economics, ISSN 1432-1475, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, Vol. 37, Iss. 2, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01019-6 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/313837 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01019-6 ORIGINAL PAPER Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers and their effect on students’ language skills Lisa Sofie Höckel1 Received: 17 April 2023 / Accepted: 21 February 2024 / Published online: 15 April 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract International migration increases classroom diversity around the world, but little is known about the effect of foreign-origin teachers on students’ academic achievement. This study investigates whether foreign-origin teachers causally affect their students’ academic performance. Exploiting within-student variation in assignment to teachers in Germany, I find that teachers who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants significantly increase the reading comprehension of their students in secondary school, but do not affect their math skills. This study is the first to investigate bilingualism as a potential mechanism and shows that the effect on reading comprehension is driven by bilingual foreign-origin teachers. Given their own experience in language learning, they seem exceptionally well-equipped to teach languages. This study contributes to the scant evidence on the causal relationship between teachers’ foreign origin and students’ academic achievement in light of a large and persistent achievement gap between native and foreign-origin students. Keywords Bilingualism ·Education ·Language skills ·Migration ·Role model effect ·Teacher bias 1 Introduction International migration does not only affect the labor force, it also affects its training ground—the classroom. In OECD countries, more than 25% of 15–34-year-olds reportaforeignorigin,andtheshareofforeign-originstudentscontinuestorise(OECD 2018). Large and persistent achievement gaps between native and foreign-origin students, meaning students who are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants, Responsible editor: Milena Nikolova BLisa Sofie Höckel [email protected] 1RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Hohenzollernstrasse 1-3, 45128 Essen, Germany 123 Journal of Population Economics (2024) 37:45 L.S. Höckel prevail inmostcountries(e.g.,Schnepf2007;Alganetal.2010;Giannelliand Rapallini 2016; Ruhose and Schwerdt 2016; Alieva et al. 2018; OECD 2018), and the literature has identified language as the single most important determinant associated with the educational achievement gap (e.g., Dustmann et al. 2010,2012; Geay et al. 2013; Danzer et al. 2022). While the share of foreign-origin students continues to increase, foreign-origin teachers remain severely underrepresented in many OECD countries. This underrepresentationis especially highin countries witha relativelylarge migrant population. In the US, under 10% of all teachers are Hispanic although Hispanic students make up about one-quarter of all K-12 students (Urban Institute 2017). In Germany, 33% of under-15-year-old students have a foreign origin, but this is only true of 8% of primary and secondary school teachers (Statistisches Bundesamt 2012,2018).Theshareof foreign-origin teachers is also less than half that of the student population in countries such as the UK, Italy, or Denmark (European Commission 2016). The European Commission recommends its member states adopt policies to increase teacher diversity (European Commission 2016), but there is little empirical evidence on the effect of foreign-origin teachers on students’ academic achievements. Are foreign-origin teachers better equipped to help foreign-origin children overcome potentiallanguagebarriers and socio-economicdisadvantages?Andhow do theyaffect the achievement of native students? For the US, the literature shows that minority students benefit from same-race teachers (e.g., Dee 2004; Fairlie et al. 2014; Gershenson et al. 2016), but it is unclear if these findings can be transferred to the context of migration. In this paper, I investigate whether having a foreign-origin teacher causally affects students’ reading comprehension scores in lower-secondary school, holding constant both observed and unobserved factors related to academic outcomes. I define foreignorigin teachers as foreign-born teachers, teachers with at least one foreign-born parent, or teachers who report a mother tongue other than German. Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) with unique information on teacher characteristics and exploiting within-student variation in assignment to teachers over time, I find that foreign-origin teachers increase objective reading comprehension scores of their students but do not affect their students’ math test scores. Importantly, the positive effect on language skills is driven by foreign-origin teachers who report a mother tongue other than German. Ruling out alternative explanations, I argue that bilingual teachers are particularly well-equipped in transmitting language skills. This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it adds to the scant evidence on the causal relationship between teachers’ foreign origin and students’ academic achievement. Given that second-generation immigrant students are on average the fastest-growing group across OECD countries (OECD 2018), it is of particular policy relevance to study what role foreign-origin teachers can play in their school integration. Second, this study is the first to investigate teachers’ language skills due to bilingualism as a potentially migration-related channel. While the economic literature has focused mainly on matching effects through role model and teacher bias effects, this paper not only introduces a different mechanism but also tests for all three channels in the same setting. Third, the panel data employed allows for investigating student attainment within the same subject over time. Following the teacher value123 45 Page 2 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers added literature, I can estimate the gain in student achievement after being taught by a foreign-origin teacher using variation in teacher assignment over time. This strategy adds to previous studies (e.g., Seah 2018,2021), which have largely relied on the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS) and used variation in teacher assignment across subjects. Theoretically, there are three reasons why foreign-origin teachers can affect students’ academic achievement differently than native teachers. First, foreign-origin teachers can have different language skills compared to native teachers. On the one hand, they can be less proficient in the language of instruction. Foreign-born teachers are more likely to have accents that hamper students’ understanding and thus make the course content less accessible. On the other hand, they can use their own experience in language learning to teach their students. According to the “conscious competence” learning model, foreign-origin teachers who have consciously learned a language could be better at explaining it in comparison to native teachers who use the language largely instinctively (Robinson 1974). Second, student-teacher matching can influence students’ academic achievement. Matching effects comprise two complementary channels that can make demographic matching of students and teachers particularly advantageous for matched students. A role model effect describes a positive reaction of foreign-origin students to foreignorigin teachers. Triggered by the teacher’s presence, rather than an explicit behavior, foreign-origin students’ beliefs about their educational possibilities can improve, making them more confident and engaged in class. A teacher bias effect describes teachers’ behavior. Foreign-origin teachers could actively or unconsciously allocate more class time to interacting with students of the same origin or they can be less likely to discriminate against foreign-origin students in their grading (Dee 2007). A teacher bias effect could also emerge from different teaching cultures (Fleisher et al. 2002)ora lack of host-country-specific human capital of foreign-origin teachers due to cultural differences. Foreign-origin teachers could then be less able to provide culturally relevant examples for native students but serve as better communicators to foreign-origin students. Third, foreign-origin and native teachers could vary in the effort and time they allocate towards their teaching activities. If they systematically differ in terms of their intrinsic motivation or cultural values regarding their profession, one of the groups could, for example, work longer hours or put more effort into their teaching activities (e.g., spend more time mentoring their students). Given these mechanisms, the effect of having a foreign-origin teacher on students’ academic achievement is theoretically ambiguous. To investigate a foreign-origin teacher effect, this study builds upon different literature strands. A small but growing strand of the literature discusses the language skills of teachers. Early studies analyze the effect of foreign teaching assistants on the academic achievements of undergraduate students in university (Borjas 2000; Asano 2008). The contradictory effects found by these studies can be explained by the nonrandom assignment of teaching assistants to students. In the study most closely related to this paper, Seah (2021) examines the effect of having a linguistically similar teacher on the academic achievements of secondary school students in the United States. Using data from the NELS, he exploits within-student variation in test scores and the native 123 Page3of32 45 L.S. Höckel language of teachers across two subjects. He finds no effect of being assigned to a linguistically similar teacher once the teacher’s ethnicity is controlled for. A larger literature strand studies matching effects with respect to demographic characteristics, mostly gender and race (e.g., Dee 2004; Bettinger and Long 2005; Hoffmann and Oreopoulos 2009; van Ewijk 2011;Cho2012; Fairlie et al. 2014; Antecol et al. 2015; Griffith and Main 2021). Dee (2004) examines test scores from the Project STAR class-size experiment, which randomly matches students and teachers within participating schools. He shows that assignment to own-race teachers significantly increases Math and reading achievement of both black and white students. Fairlie et al. (2014) and Egalite et al. (2015) confirm ethnicity and race-matching effects using large administrative data for US high schools and community colleges. More recently, Seah (2018) investigates the effect of immigrant teachers on 8th graders in the US and finds no adverse effect of immigrant teachers on the achievement of (native) students. Lastly, the paper builds upon the literature showing that immigrants and natives differ in terms of hours worked (Hamermesh and Trejo 2013;Vargas2016; Fertig 2010). Studies by Hamermesh and Trejo (2013) and Coniglio et al. (2021) show that foreign-born individuals invest more time in educational activities. The remainder of the study is organized as follows. Section2gives a short institutional overview of the German school system and the role of immigrant teachers in it. Section3discusses the data, Section 4introduces the empirical strategy, and Section 5 presents the findings. Section6concludes. 2 Institutional background A key feature of the German education system is that students are typically tracked after 4 years of elementary schooling.1Students are sorted based on their academic ability and assigned to one of three secondary school tracks: lower-secondary track (Hauptschule), middle-secondary track (Realschule), and upper-secondary track (Gymnasium).2Hauptschule provides practical education and prepares students for vocational education (until grade 9); Realschule has a broader range of emphasis for intermediate students (until grade 10); and Gymnasium qualifies students for higher education (until grade 12 or 13).3Depending on the federal state, the track is determined by parental choice or a binding teacher recommendation based on the students’ academic achievement and ability to work independently. Schooling is compulsory for 9 or 10 years, depending on the federal state. Students usually finish the track they have been assigned to, but switching tracks is possible and became more common in recent years.4 1In the federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg, students are tracked after 6 years of schooling. 2Additionally, there are comprehensive schools (Gesamtschulen) that combine all education types and amount to 12% of all German secondary schools (Malecki et al. 2014). 3See Fig. A1 for an illustration of the German education system. 4School changes within the same track only account for approximately 14% of school changes in Germany (Kliche and Täubig 2019). 123 45 Page 4 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers A second relevant feature of the German education system is that teaching is organized in classes rather than courses. More specifically, a class refers to a group of up to 30 students who are allocated by their school’s headmaster to the same classroom upon entry into secondary school. All students in one class share the same teacher for a given subject. In contrast to the US, students do not take different courses in the same subject based on their proficiency.5Instead, class composition may change when students choose different electoral courses in grade 7 or 9. Teachers do not specialize in teaching a particular grade but the school’s headmaster assigns them to classes on a yearly basis. Most German teachers are graduates of a formal teaching education program (Lehramtstudium). Conditional on having earned a degree that qualifies for tertiary education, teacher training for secondary education comprises two components. First, teacher candidates complete 4 to 6 years of university courses covering the two subjects they later want to teach in combination with pedagogical training. At the end of the first phase, the candidates take exams on pedagogic and theoretical knowledge of the subjects studied. In addition to the grades earned at the university, these exams comprise the first state examination grade. Second, candidates participate for 18–24 months in a practical program of teaching seminars (Referendariat) at a teaching training school. During this phase, candidates have teaching positions, complete a thesis, and deliver demonstration lessons rated by head teachers. The combination of assessments of the demonstration lessons, the thesis grade, and exams sum up to the second state examination. Thesecond state examinationiscompulsory for entry into civilservice.6Ultimately, the grade of the second state examination, in combination with the local demand for teachers, determines the school a teacher is assigned to. Federal states can hire teaching candidates without the second state examination on regular salaried positions without awarding them civil servant status. For subjects with teacher scarcity, even teachers without a formal teacher training are eligible (Quereinsteiger). Immigrant teachers or candidates who have studied abroad do not have to reside in Germany for a certain period before becoming teachers but they have to exhibit a comparable teaching degree or obtain the second state examination in Germany to become civil servants. While the recognition of foreign degrees is easier for candidates from within the European Union, immigrant teachers typically face significant obstacles during the recognition process. According to GEW (2021), only about 15% of foreign teaching degrees are successfully granted without further requirements. Around 68% of recognition requests are granted conditional on additional training and thus imply high costs for immigrant candidates. The conditioning is mainly due to the fact that the German teaching degree consists of two different subjects while in most countries one subject is sufficient. Another hurdle to becoming a civil servant in Germany is the high German language standard required. While the actual prerequisites differ by federal state, immigrants typically have to speak German at C1 level irrespective of the subject studied. In comparison to other occupations, the recognition process to 5German language and Math classes are compulsory in German schools. Students are obliged to take them and cannot choose courses based on their preferences for teachers. 6In most federal states, teachers become civil servants. Nevertheless, approximately one in four teachers is hired as an employee rather than a civil servant. 123 Page5of32 45 L.S. Höckel becoming a teacher therefore leads to a rather positively selected group of immigrant teachers who actually end up working in their job. 3 Data and descriptive statistics This study uses data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) (NEPS Network 2021). The NEPS has a multi-cohort design and draws from a representative sampling frame of students from six starting cohorts. The NEPS follows students as they move through the education system and contains extensive questionnaires answered by persons in the students’ personal environment, such as parents, teachers, and headmasters. For the empirical analysis, I employ data from starting cohort 3 (SC3) as it provides unique information on teachers’ origin for German and Math teachers. SC3 follows students from grades 5 to 9, an age cohort that is particular suitable for the research question, as the first nine years of education are compulsory and crucial for lifelong education outcomes (Angrist and Krueger 1991). The sampling population of SC3 contains all German fifth graders in schools offering lower-secondary education in the school year 2010/2011. First, schools are randomly drawn from the population of public schools to be representative by school type.7Second, classes are randomly selected within each school (see Steinhauer and Zinn 2016for sampling design). Participation is voluntary and implies that students complete competency tests and answer a socioeconomic questionnaire. Overall, the participation rate of students is very high with 94.5% in the first wave. The teacher questionnaire contains information on teachers’ demographics and aspects of their career choice and studies. I disregard interview data on parents and headmasters to minimize sample attrition. Inordertodeterminethestudents’foreignorigin,Icombinethreevariablesprovided by the NEPS data set. (a) Students report which citizenship they hold. If they mention any (additional) nationality other than German, I code them as foreign origin. (b) Interviewers record students’ country of origin. I code non-German origins as foreign origin. (c) Students are asked if they have a Russian or Turkish migration background. If they mention one of the two migration backgrounds, I code them as foreign origin.8 To determine German language teachers’ foreign origin, I use two variables. (a) Teachers are asked about their migration background, namely if they are foreign born or if they have at least one foreign-born parent. (b) Teachers report their mother tongue, meaning the language they learned as a child in the family. If they mention a mother tongue additional to German, or other than German, I code them as foreign origin. If teachers do not report a migration background or mother tongue, I code them as native Germans. Besides containing unique information on teacher origin, the NEPS has the advantage of providing objective and unidimensional competence scores for students’ performance in different subjects conducted by NEPS interviewers. This feature is 7Students from schools with a predominant foreign teaching language and students who are not able to participate in the normal testing procedure are excluded. 8This question does not bias the sample towards students of Russian and Turkish background. It only identifies an additional 6% of foreign-origin students. 123 45 Page 6 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers crucial in a setting where teacher bias effects might be at work as German language teachers cannot manipulate the NEPS competence scores. For the empirical analysis, I focuson reading comprehensionas the mainoutcome variable.Thescoreis designed to measure the ability to understand and use written texts, which are important preconditions to develop personal skills and participate in social life and the labor force (Gehrer et al. 2012). Reading comprehension is assessed by multiple-choice questionnaires, which test the understanding of five text functions and associated text types, namely informational, commenting, instructional, advertising, and literary texts. The reading competence test lasts 28min per text function and fits the thematic orientation, lexical, semantic, and grammatical properties of the specific age cohort (Gehrer et al. 2012). The answers to the multiple choice questions are aggregated by a weighted maximum likelihood estimation and constrained to having a mean of zero in the first wave. This standardization ensures that scores are comparable across different survey waves. As promoting reading comprehension is one of the key objectives of German language classes, I can attribute this skill to the domain of the German language teacher. Overall, reading comprehension skills can serve as a suitable proxy for language skills (e.g., in particular with respect to written language) as a substantial connection between reading comprehension and both receptive and expressive vocabulary has been established in the literature (Berendes et al. 2013). I impose several restrictions on the data. From the initially 6527 students, I observe 6485 in the years when the tests take place. Of those, I drop 358 students because they do not participate in the competence test. I can link 5758 students to their German language teacher, and I have context data for 718 German language teachers of 4724 students. This might lead to a small bias towards better (organized) schools. Further, the data do not allow for consistent tracking of students who change classes and schools—a practice which is rare in the German school system.9I also cannot link students if schools withdrew their participation from the NEPS, and if teachers or students do not answer the questionnaire.10 Of the 4724 students in my sample, one-third of students are only observed once. Toillustratethedata,thefirsttwocolumnsofTable1presentdescriptivestatisticsfor all students observed. The first variable describes the main outcome variable, i.e., the objective reading comprehension scores. The average of 0.29 indicates that the reading comprehension in the sample has increased over time.11 Out of the 4724 students in the sample, 36% are of foreign origin. This share is in line with statistics of the German Microcensus, which estimate a share of (narrowly defined) foreign-origin students of 33% in 2012 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2012). The most common countries of origin in the data are Turkey (16%), Russia (14%), and Poland (12%), which together account 9If parents with strong anti-immigrant sentiments are more likely to switch their children spontaneously out of class once they are informed about the foreign origin of the teacher at the beginning of the school year, and their children are less likely to be receptive to the teaching content of foreign-origin teachers, the foreign-origin teacher effect might be upwards biased. Given that switches are rare, I expect this concern to be of no statistical relevance. 10 To avoid further sample attrition, I keep teacher observations with missing information if the teacher answers at least two questions used for the control variables. 11 Further, the sample is slightly skewed towards higher achieving students as the average reading comprehension in grade 5 is 0.07 rather than 0. 123 Page7of32 45 L.S. Höckel Table 1 Descriptive statistics—students All Native Foreign origin Mean Std. dev. Mean Std. dev. Mean Std. dev. t-test Main outcome variable Reading comprehension 0.285 1.29 0.411 1.29 0.058 1.27 ∗∗∗ Student characteristics Foreign origin 0.358 0.48 Female 0.494 0.50 0.486 0.50 0.509 0.50 Birth year 1999.502 0.61 1999.531 0.60 1999.449 0.64 ∗∗∗ Grade 6.647 1.57 6.685 1.57 6.578 1.56 ∗∗∗ School year repeated 0.025 0.16 0.023 0.15 0.028 0.16 ∗ Household size 4.439 1.38 4.392 1.31 4.523 1.49 ∗∗ Other outcome variables Mathematics score 0.304 1.23 0.453 1.21 0.036 1.22 ∗∗∗ German grade 4.375 0.83 4.445 0.83 4.247 0.82 ∗∗∗ Reading frequency on a school day 0.829 0.74 0.820 0.74 0.845 0.76 Teacher expects me to try my very best 4.030 0.88 4.045 0.86 4.003 0.93 ∗ Satisfaction with school 7.276 2.39 7.334 2.33 7.173 2.48 ∗∗ Panel observations 7351 4768 2583 Student observations 4724 3035 1689 Notes: The descriptive statistics are shown for the whole sample as well as for the two subsamples of native and foreign-origin students. Significance stars indicate the result of the respective t-test of differences in mean values. *p<0.10; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 for around 42% of foreign-origin students. The sample is balanced with respect to gender, and almost 95% of the students are born in 1999 or 2000. The sample contains observations from grades 5, 7, and 9, because reading comprehension is tested in these grades.12 I observe most students in fifth grade due to the 3% of students who repeated a school year and sample attrition due to missing linkages. The average household size is 4 and around 80% of students live in households of 3 to 5 people. Besides reading comprehension scores and student characteristics, Table 1provides information on additional outcome variables. It shows an average math score of 0.30, indicating that the math test score also increases over time. The German grade corresponds to the subjective grade given by the German language teacher at the end of the school year and it ranges from one to six. Here, six corresponds to an outstanding achievement while one (and two) refers to an insufficient achievement. The most prevalent grade is satisfactory (4), which 44% of students receive. The NEPS data also contain survey items that can be linked to the German language teacher’s influence. 12 The missing years are not necessarily a concern, as teachers typically change classes every two years implying that a teacher teaching a certain subject in grade 5 (7) is likely to teach the same class in grade 6 (8). 123 45 Page 8 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers of foreign-origin students does not bias the results, I provide all results separately for native and foreign-origin students. While the NEPS dataset contains a large number of teacher characteristics, the empirical strategy does not allow to test for systematical differences in unobserved characteristics between native and foreign-origin teachers. I therefore address potential differences in effort as a mechanism in Section 5.2.2. 5 Results 5.1 Foreign-origin teacher effect I start the empirical analysis by testing if foreign-origin teachers affect students’ reading comprehension. Panel A of Table 6displays the foreign-origin teacher effect for the full sample. Panels B and C provide separate estimates for native and foreignorigin students to investigate if there are differential effects by students’ origin. As we move along the columns, I increasingly restrict the variation used to identify the parameter of interest. The specification in column (1) controls for student characteristics and class fixed effects. Following Eq. (1), it accounts for peer effects and teacher allocation across schools and classes. Column (2) includes teacher characteristics, and column (3) displays results from the preferred specification described in Eq. (2), which contains both student and class fixed effects.16 For the overall sample, there is a positive and significant correlation between reading comprehension scores and having a foreign-origin teacher in column (1). The foreign-origin teacher estimate becomes larger once its effect is disentangled from teacher characteristics in column (2). This increase in effect size is mainly caused by the inclusion of the teacher grade at the first state exam control variable as foreignorigin teachers perform significantly worse at this examination. Interestingly, teachers who studied languages other than German also positively affect students reading comprehension (see Table A2). In column (3), the effect is identified by within-student variation in teacher allocation. This specification removes correlations between being taught by a foreign-origin teacher and changes in the class composition. Further, it controls for differences in unobserved student heterogeneity. Consequently, less variation is employed and βis less precisely estimated. Nevertheless, the effect stays significant and the magnitude rises to 0.27. The coefficient of 0.27 amounts to 0.2 standard deviations in the reading comprehension test score. The effect size is comparable in magnitude to the effect found by Seah (2018) for immigrant teachers on science test scores of native students. For native students, in panel B, the effect size of having a foreign-origin teacher is similar in size in the specifications including class and student fixed effects (columns (2) and (3)). For foreign-origin students, in panel C, the correlation between student unobserved heterogeneity and the teacher’s origin matters. With student fixed effects, the effect of having a foreign-origin teacher doubles in size and becomes statistically 16 For ease of exposition, coefficients of the control variables are presented in Table A2. They are in the expected direction. 123 Page15of32 45 L.S. Höckel Table 6 Effect of foreign-origin teacher on reading comprehension (1) (2) (3) Panel A: all students Foreign-origin teacher 0.191∗∗∗ 0.264∗∗∗ 0.270∗ (0.067) (0.073) (0.140) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.377 0.377 0.661 Observations 7351 7351 7351 Panel B: native students Foreign-origin teacher 0.286∗∗∗ 0.359∗∗∗ 0.342 (0.102) (0.107) (0.233) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.361 0.362 0.651 Observations 4768 4768 4768 Panel C: foreign-origin students Foreign-origin teacher 0.116 0.151 0.366∗ (0.087) (0.095) (0.199) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.399 0.398 0.654 Observations 2583 2583 2583 Notes: Results are obtained from OLS regressions. All reported standard errors are clustered at the teacher level. *p<0.10; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 significant. This improvement in reading comprehension can have important implications for lifelong outcomes of foreign-origin students, such as productivity and wages, because language fluency facilitates the transfer and adaptation of skills in the job market (Dustmann and van Soest 2001; Hayfron 2001; Dustmann and Fabbri 2003; Clarke and Skuterud 2016; Lochmann et al. 2019; Foged et al. 2022; Lang 2022). Overall, in the preferred third specification, the foreign-origin teacher effect is larger and more precisely estimated for foreign-origin than native students. Neverthe123 45 Page 16 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers less, results obtained from a fully interacted model do not reveal significantly different effects of foreign-origin teachers on students with and without a foreign origin. This finding is in line with Seah (2018), who shows a positive but insignificant correlation between immigrant teachers and both native and immigrant students for English test scores in the US. In contrast to the literature on race-matching, the positive effect of foreign-origin teachers is not caused by matching effects in the sense that there are positive effects on the matched group (here: foreign-origin students) and adverse effects on the mismatched group (here: native students). Instead, Table 6indicates positive effects for foreign-origin students and clearly no negative effect for native students. This result is robust to the inclusion of students’ math test scores (see Table A3). Math test scores proxy student-year-specific performance and accordingly provide a lower bound estimate of the foreign-origin teacher effect if there are positive spillover effects, i.e., if better reading comprehension increases math test scores. 5.2 What explains the foreign-origin teacher effect? 5.2.1 Language-specific skills To understand why there is an effect of teachers’ origin, not only for foreign-origin students but also for native students, this section focuses on an obvious characteristic in which native and foreign-origin teachers differ: language skills. Native teachers— by definition—only have German as a mother tongue, while foreign-origin teachers often grew up learning different mother tongues. The economic literature has established the importance of languages in preference formation (Angerer et al. 2016; Sutter et al. 2018; Chen et al. 2019) and studied the advantagesofbilingualeducationfor both targetedand un-targetedstudents(Chinetal. 2013;Lleras-Muneyand Shertzer 2015;Cappellariand Di Paolo2018).17 However,we know little about how bilingualism affects the way foreign-origin teachers understand and teach languages. The “conscious competence” learning model describes the psychological progress from incompetence to competence in a skill. The model implies that “conscious competence” teachers (e.g., bilingual teachers who have consciously learned German language skills) are better teachers than “unconscious competence” teachers (e.g., native teachers), because “unconscious competence” teachers can have difficulties in explaining the skill that has become largely instinctual to them (Robinson 1974). Such an “awareness” mechanism would be in line with recent evidence indicating that teachers of color are particularly well-equipped in teaching students in a culturally relevant and engaging way in the US (Egalite and Kisida 2018). This study is the first to elicit the effect of a potential language-specific skill by testing if foreign-origin teachers who report a mother tongue other than German affect students’ reading comprehension differently. In the data at hand, the main mother 17 Chin et al. (2013), for example, evaluate the effect of a bilingual education program on the achievement of limited English proficient (LEP) students and their classmates. Employing a regression-discontinuity design, they find no impact on the achievement of students for whom the program was designed (LEP students), but estimate a positive effect for their classmates. 123 Page17of32 45 L.S. Höckel tongues spoken by bilingual teachers are Polish (19%), Italian (17%), and English (17%) and, overall, the distribution of different mother tongues of bilingual teachers is similar for the samples of foreign-origin and native students.18 Table 7splits the category of foreign-origin teacher into two and distinguishes between bilingual teachers, i.e., teachers who report a mother tongue other than German, and foreign-origin teachers which do not report to be bilingual. The table illustrates that the positive effect of foreign-origin teachers is driven by bilingual foreign-origin teachers. In comparison to the baseline regression in Table 6, the effect of having a bilingual teacher is larger and more significant than the effect of having a foreign-origin teacher for both native and foreign-origin students. For native students, the reading comprehension increases by 0.53, i.e., 0.43 standard deviations, when they have a bilingual teacher. The positive effect of being taught by a non-bilingual foreign-origin teacher is smaller in size and statistically insignificant for both subsamples. The information on teachers’ mother tongues further allows for the analysis of the linguistic distance between the teacher’s mother tongue and German. In line with the “conscious competence” learning model, we would expect that bilingual teachers with a large linguistic distance to German have a stronger awareness of linguistic difficulties in German and thus are more successful in teaching German. Table 8 displays the effect of the linguistic distance between bilingual teachers’ mother tongue and German. It illustrates that teachers with mother tongues very dissimilar to German influence students’ reading comprehension more positively than teachers who have German or languages similar to German as a mother tongue. This positive effect of teachers with linguistically different mother tongues to German adds valuable insides to the literature which has identified negative effects of linguistic distance on language acquisition (Isphording and Otten 2014; Isphording 2014) and employment prospects (Wong 2023) of immigrants. As the majority of foreign-origin teachers are second-generation immigrants, I alternatively test if the effect of bilingual teachers is caused by second-generation immigrants, who could be more likely to be bilingual. However, only 33% of bilingual teachers in the sample are second-generation immigrants, indicating that the majority of bilingual teachers are rather immigrant teachers with strong knowledge in their mother tongue who have studied German long enough to be considered bilingual. Overall, there is no effect for neither first nor second-generation immigrant teachers per se (see Table A5) and differences in bilingualism are more successful in explaining the positive effect of foreign-origin teachers’ effect on their students’ reading comprehension.19 A second concern is that the effect could be driven by a particularly well-equipped immigrant group, which is more likely to be bilingual. One example of such a group couldbeGermanminoritiesinEastern Europe who typically learnGermanathomeand have easier access to permanent residence in Germany through the Federal Expellees 18 Table A4 displays descriptive statistics for students with and without bilingual teachers. 19 Alternatively, I test whether it matters if bilingual teachers state that they have learned German as their first mother tongue, their second mother tongue or not as a mother tongue at all. While the overall effect is less pronounced in comparison to the effect of bilingual teachers, Table A6 indicates that foreign-origin students benefit in particular from bilingual teachers who have learned German as a second language or did not mention German as a mother tongue at all. 123 45 Page 18 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers Table 7 Effect of bilingual teacher on reading comprehension (1) (2) (3) Panel A: all students Bilingual teacher (ref.: native teacher) Foreign-origin teacher 0.033 0.136 0.027 (0.091) (0.102) (0.138) Bilingual foreign-origin teacher 0.292∗∗∗ 0.358∗∗∗ 0.440∗∗ (0.074) (0.103) (0.181) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.377 0.378 0.661 Observations 7351 7351 7351 Panel B: native students Bilingual teacher (ref.: native teacher) Foreign-origin teacher 0.141 0.209 0.049 (0.167) (0.167) (0.249) Bilingual foreign-origin teacher 0.365∗∗∗ 0.456∗∗∗ 0.528∗ (0.108) (0.134) (0.291) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.361 0.361 0.651 Observations 4768 4768 4768 Panel C: foreign-origin students Bilingual teacher (ref.: native teacher) Foreign-origin teacher −0.027 0.052 0.125 (0.107) (0.137) (0.291) Bilingual foreign-origin teacher 0.231∗∗ 0.244∗0.575∗∗∗ (0.115) (0.133) (0.218) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.399 0.398 0.655 Observations 2583 2583 2583 Notes: Results are obtained from OLS regressions. All reported standard errors are clustered at the teacher level. *p<0.10; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 123 Page19of32 45 L.S. Höckel Table 8 Effect of linguistic distance between teacher’s mother tongue and German on reading comprehension (1) (2) (3) Panel A: all students Linguistic distance 0.003∗∗∗ 0.004∗∗∗ 0.004∗∗ (0.001) (0.001) (0.002) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.382 0.382 0.669 Observations 7206 7206 7206 Panel B: native students Linguistic distance 0.004∗∗∗ 0.004∗∗∗ 0.005 (0.001) (0.002) (0.003) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.365 0.366 0.654 Observations 4686 4686 4686 Panel C: foreign-origin students Linguistic distance 0.002 0.002 0.006∗∗ (0.001) (0.002) (0.002) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.406 0.405 0.672 Observations 2520 2520 2520 Notes: Results are obtained from OLS regressions. All reported standard errors are clustered at the teacher level. *p<0.10; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 Act. While I do not observe which foreign-origin teachers belong to German minorities in Eastern Europe, I can test for differential effects across language groups. In doing so, I find positive and large point estimates for all language groups (see Table A7). Accordingly, the results cannot be explained by one particularly motivated or able bilingual immigrant group. In summary, the results in this section show that foreign-origin teachers who are bilingual are especially equipped to teach reading comprehension. They increase the 123 45 Page 20 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers reading comprehension of both native and foreign-origin students significantly.20 Furthermore, bilingual teachers with linguistically distant mother tongues to German are particularly successful in improving the reading comprehension of their students. Although the bilingual teacher effect is identified by a rather small sample of bilingual teachers, related teacher characteristics such as language family or immigrant generation do not provide better explanations for the positive foreign-origin teacher effect. 5.2.2 Alternative mechanisms Besides language-specific skills of bilingual teachers, the positive effect of foreignorigin teachers could be explained by other mechanisms. First, I test if foreign-origin students benefit from teacher bias and role model effects in a similar way to minority students benefiting from same-race teachers. Second, I investigate if foreign-origin teachers put more effort and time into their work. Given the high requirements for immigrant teachers to practice teaching in Germany, foreign-origin teachers who end up working as teachers could be a particularly positively selected group of teachers. Empirically, role model and teacher bias effects are difficult to disentangle. Therefore, some studies directly test for teacher bias and discrimination effects (Paredes 2014; Hinnerich et al. 2015; Gershenson et al. 2016; Alan et al. 2018; Alesina et al. 2018). Dee (2005) exploits student-specific evaluations from teachers and shows that ethnic matching between student and teacher has large effects on teachers’ perception of student performance. Similarly, Gershenson et al. (2016) find that non-black teachers have significantly lower educational expectations for black students. Evidence from Germany finds teacher discrimination for essay grades for students with a Turkish-sounding first name (Sprietsma 2013) and grade penalties in primary school for second-generation immigrants (Kiss 2013). For the Netherlands, van Ewijk (2011) cannot confirm a grading bias but lower expectations and unfavorable attitudes of majority teachers towards minority students. Employing Chilean data to investigate gender matching effects on academic achievement, Paredes (2014) uniquely tests for role model and teacher bias effects in the same setting. She finds that girls benefit from having female teachers and shows that the effect is only significant for subjects with lower proportions of female teachers and for girls with less educated mothers. Accordingly, she interprets her results as a role model rather than a teacher bias effect. Following these studies, I first test for a teacher bias effect, meaning an explicit positive behavior of teachers targeted towards matched students. I analyze the grading of foreign-origin teachers towards native and foreign-origin students. A teacher bias effect would imply a positive effect of foreign-origin teachers on the grade rewarded to students whom they demographically match with, i.e., foreign-origin students and a negative effect on students, they demographically do not match with, i.e., native students. In Germany, few centralized exams are conducted until grade 9, and the grading of students is mostly left to the discretion of the teacher. Table 9shows the 20 One further concern could be that students who are exposed to a change in bilingualism of the teacher significantly differ from those who do not. Table A8 shows that foreign-origin students are more likely to be in schools with bilingual teachers and that changes rather happen in higher grades. Apart from that the student characteristics are balanced. 123 Page21of32 45 L.S. Höckel Table 9 Effect of foreign-origin teacher on German grade (1) (2) (3) Panel A: native students Foreign-origin teacher −0.032 −0.062 −0.081 (0.076) (0.050) (0.088) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.225 0.224 0.641 Observations 5704 5704 5704 Panel B: foreign-origin students Foreign-origin teacher −0.174∗∗ −0.122 −0.075 (0.083) (0.101) (0.129) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes Adjusted R20.174 0.176 0.630 Observations 2864 2864 2864 Notes: Results are obtained from OLS regressions. All reported standard errors are clustered at the teacher level. *p<0.10; **p<0.05; ***p<0.01 effect on the German grade rewarded by the teacher and does not reveal a teacher bias effect in the sense that foreign-origin teachers favor foreign-origin students in their grading.21 Overall, the results illustrate that the foreign teacher effect is not driven by an obvious teacher bias leading to a better grading of foreign-origin students by foreign-origin teachers. Instead, there is a negative but insignificant association between foreign-origin teachers and students’ German grade for both foreign-origin and native students. Second, I investigate a role model effect. While studies in a university setting interpret exposure to female faculty members or female instructors in initial courses as femalerolemodeleffects(e.g.,CanesandRosen1995;BettingerandLong2005),these studies cannot rule out direct teacher influence via teacher bias effects. To overcome this problem, Dee (2007) compares students’ perception on the subject taught by matched and unmatched teachers to elicit the role model effect more directly. Survey questions included “Subject is not useful for my future” and “I am afraid to ask questions in subject class”. Likewise, I approximate role mode effects by employing survey questions which reflect the potential influence German language teachers have 21 I obtain similar results running regressions on a harmonized sample of students taking the reading comprehension test. 123 45 Page 22 of 32 Language lesson learned—foreign-origin teachers on students’ subject involvement, their teacher perception and overall happiness. More specifically, I test if having a foreign-origin Germanteacher affects (i) the time students spend reading outside of school, (ii) students’ perceptions if their German language teachers expects them to try their very best, and (iii) how satisfied students are with their situation at school. These three questions capture different dimensions in which a role model effect can operate from a subject-specific to a general way. If teachers’ foreign origin can explain part of the variation in students’ survey answers, this effect can be attributed to a role model effect.22 Table 10 displays the results on a role model effect. For all three survey items, the coefficients for foreign-origin students in panel B in comparison to native students in panel A are larger but not significantly different from zero in the preferred specifications. The effect sizes are small and insignificant for foreign-origin students’ reading time outside of school, while the effects seem sizable but insignificant with respect to teacher perception and school satisfaction.23 This lack of a clear role model effect is different from earlier work from Egalite and Kisida (2018), who show that students who have the same gender or/and racial characteristics as their teacher report a more positive perception of their teacher in terms of feeling cared for and instructional characteristics regarding the student-teacher communication compared to unmatched students in the same classroom.24 Instead, the results in Table 10 can partly be explained by the “imperfect” nature of the matches studied. Here, a role model effect implies that foreign-origin students can be influenced by any foreign-origin teacher equally and by a similar amount. However, thecountries of origin differwidelybetween foreign-origin students and teachers in the sample, including combinations in which role model effects are unlikely to emerge.25 An alternative approach is to allow foreign-origin interaction to operate only if a student is matched with a teacher which is a “closer match” with respect to the foreign origin. Therefore, I further employ a language match variable as the main variable of interest, which is equal to one if student and teacher report a mother tongue of the same language group. The estimates of the language match variable are insignificant forreading comprehension (see TableA9) and grading (seeTableA10). Forthereading comprehension estimations of foreign-origin students, the point estimate of having a student-teacher language match is smaller than the effect of having a foreign-origin teacherandthestandarderrorsarelarger.26 Overall,the positiveeffectofforeign-origin 22 In this context, I define a role model effect as a positive attitude of the student irrespective of this attitude being caused by an underlying teacher bias effect or not. 23 The results of Table 10 are comparable when controlling for students test scores. 24 Results on other survey items such as “I am convinced that I can learn a lot through reading”, “My German teacher first tries to understand my point of view, and then tells me what he/she would do.”, “My German teacher encourages me to ask questions”, and “How satisfied are you currently and in general terms, with your life?” do also not reveal a clear role model effect in the sense that there is a positive effect on the matched and a negative effect on the unmatched students. They are available upon request. 25 E.g., a student from a culturally distant country such as China would probably not identify much more with a Swiss than a German teacher. 26 Using a linguistic distance measure to proxy the match with respect to the disadvantage in reading comprehension arising from the linguistic distance between student and teacher (e.g., Isphording 2014) yields in similar results (see Table A11). 123 Page23of32 45 L.S. Höckel Table 10 Role model effect Reading time Teacher expectation School satisfaction (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Panel A: native students Foreign-origin teacher 0.050 0.034 −0.025 0.046 0.027 0.081 0.498∗0.420∗0.373 (0.073) (0.089) (0.143) (0.091) (0.088) (0.186) (0.300) (0.239) (0.429) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes No No Yes No No Yes Adjusted R20.113 0.111 0.447 0.072 0.070 0.174 0.089 0.092 0.343 Observations 4601 4601 4601 4682 4682 4682 4708 4708 4708 Panel B: foreign-origin students Foreign-origin teacher −0.052 −0.076 0.056 0.072 0.059 0.285 0.083 0.393 0.619 (0.061) (0.078) (0.174) (0.090) (0.118) (0.261) (0.257) (0.289) (0.582) Class FE Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Student controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Teacher controls No Yes Yes No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Student FE No No Yes No No Yes No No Yes Adjusted R20.154 0.150 0.410 0.076 0.071 0.186 0.078 0.084 0.270 Observations 2439 2439 2439 2521 2521 2521 2549 2549 2549 Notes: Results are obtained from OLS regressions. 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