Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Recent changes in immigration policy have shaped the contexts in which schools and their administrators educate children of immigrants. Intensified immigration enforcement exposes these children to the effects of family separation, housing and socioeconomic instability, and deportation. There is a documented link between intensified immigration enforcement and increased negative academic outcomes for Hispanic children in mixed-status households. Specifically, young Hispanic students (age 6 to 13) with likely unauthorized parents are more likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school if they live in a place with high levels of immigration enforcement activities (Amuedo-Dorantes and Lopez 2015).

At the same time, presented with contentious policy proposals or restrictive immigration policies, local immigrant communities respond through collective action to oppose such initiatives or counter their negative consequences. Similar to past efforts to restrict immigration, the Secure Communities program has been shown to increase the salience of Hispanic ethnic identity and increase participatory behavior in local communities who see themselves under siege (White 2015; Nichols and Lebron 2015; Valenzuela et. al. 2015).

This increased salience of Hispanic identity may have implications for the importance of representative bureaucracy, a theory which posits that a public workforce gains legitimacy and improves outcomes for the public if it is reflective of the demographics of the population it serves (Mosher 1968). In the education context, a large body of research has documented a link between teacher-student racial/ethnic match and positive student outcomes (e.g. Atkins, Fertig, and Wilkins 2014; Dee 2005; Egalite, Kisida, and Winters 2015; Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge 2016; Grissom, Rodriguez, and Kern 2015; Meier 1993; Meier and Bohte 2001; Ouazad 2014). Researchers in this field have also begun to investigate when racial/ethnic representation is likely to translate into positive outcomes. One such condition is racial/ethnic salience (Grissom, Nicholson-Crotty, Nicholson-Crotty 2009). That is, when the salience of a shared identity is strong, representation is more likely to result in positive outcomes.

This study brings together literature linking immigration policies and children’s outcomes with literature linking teacher racial/ethnic representation and children’s outcomes to ask: Is the positive association found in other studies between having a Hispanic teacher and academic and nonacademic outcomes for Hispanic students moderated by contextual factors that may increase the salience of Hispanic identity? We link data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 to county level deportation rates under Secure Communities (a nationwide deportation program active between 2008 and 2013) to investigate this issue empirically. This study uses an individual fixed-effects model to explore whether the relationship between having a Hispanic teacher and students’ attendance, test scores, and social/emotional outcomes are moderated by the local immigration enforcement context.