Immigrant English Proficiency, Children’s Educational Performance, and Parental Involvement

Using the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) and the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), this paper estimates the effect of immigrants’ English proficiency on the educational performance of their children as well as measures of parental involvement in school. Together, the data allow us to examine children ranging from preschool to high school age. Given the confounding factors associated with English knowledge, we employ an instrumental variables two-stage least squares strategy that exploits parents’ age at arrival and whether their country of origin is English speaking. For the younger cohort, which we access through the NIS sample, our results suggest that children of immigrant parents with higher English language ability score higher on reading assessments as well as some math-related assessments. For the older students, which we assess through the CILS sample, we see a positive effect on reading scores as a result of parental English proficiency. When examining parental involvement, we find that English proficiency results in a higher likelihood of being part of a parent-teacher organization as well as a higher probability of parent-teacher interaction. Our results are robust to various specifications and alternative instrumental variables.