Country of Origin and Representative Bureaucracy

Abstract

A large body of research shows that clients of government services benefit from the presence of bureaucrats with whom they share race or ethnicity. These benefits arise from active or symbolic representation, which scholars argue are grounded in the shared backgrounds, language, and values that race and ethnicity proxy. We suggest that these shared connections are likely to be even more salient for clients and bureaucrats who share not just the same ethnicity but the same country of origin, and we look for evidence of representation based on country of origin in the context of public schools. Leveraging administrative and survey data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the fourth-largest school district in the United States, we employ regression models with school-by-year fixed effects to test for differences in test scores for students taught by a teacher with the same country of origin relative to similar students taught by other-origin teachers in the same school in the same year. We find that immigrant students with origin-matched teachers score modestly higher than their non-matched peers in both math and reading. These increases are most apparent among low-income students and those who are English learners. Patterns vary by immigrant students’ origin country.