Schooling Inequality among the Indigenous: A Problem of Resources or Language Barriers?

Using large household data sets from rural Mexican communities, where a majority of indigenous people live, we analyze the potential explanatory factors for low educational attainment of indigenous children. We find that, overall, indigenous children fare worse than their non-indigenous classmates. Nevertheless, there is important heterogeneity within the indigenous group. In particular, monolingual indigenous children (those who speak only an indigenous language) perform much worse in school than bilingual indigenous children who speak Spanish as a second language.