The impact of parental involvement on the educational achievement of children of immigrants

Children of immigrants are a rapidly growing segment of the young child population in the United-States. Their educational achievement is crucial for their well being as well as that of the American society. The literature on children's educational achievement provides an important context for understanding the achievement of children of immigrants, but when it comes to young children of immigrants, the literature is scarce.;This dissertation includes three empirical papers analyzing the educational achievement of children of immigrants and children of natives with an emphasis on the role of parental involvement. The dataset used in this dissertation is the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey - Kindergarten Cohort.;The first paper looks at the effect of parental immigration characteristics on the school readiness of children of immigrants. Regression models revealed that in addition to characteristics of the mother, father's immigration characteristics have a strong impact on the child's cognitive outcomes. Children of immigrants are at significant risk to perform more poorly than their native counterparts if they have parents who speak a non English Language at home (-29%), who are not U.S. citizens (-41%) and/or who were born in specific countries such as Mexico.;The second paper analyzes the impact of parental involvement on the school readiness of children of immigrants and of children of natives. Regression models demonstrate that some parental involvement variables at home and at school significantly improve the level of English proficiency (effects ranging from less than 0.5% to 3%) and math scores (effects ranging from 0.01 to 1.92 points) for both children of immigrants and children of natives. In the case of math, controlling for parental involvement decreases the gap in math scores between children of immigrants and children of natives by a third of a standard deviation.;The third paper analyzes the impact of parental involvement on the gap in math scores between children of immigrants and children of natives in the fall and the spring of kindergarten. Controlling for parental involvement reduces the gap for children of Mexican parents (0.35 point) and decreases the advantage of children of Chinese parents (-0.75 point). Interestingly, the negative impact of speaking a non-English language at home decreases by one third from the fall to the spring of kindergarten (from -0.92 to -0.59 point). In addition, it was found that the inclusion of parental involvement variables attenuates the impact (both positive and negative) of the educational attainment of parents on their child's math achievement. Finally, going to kindergarten all day instead of half day increases the math scores by 40%.