The intersection of teacher-child language & ethnic match for Hispanic/Latine dual language learners in early elementary school.

Hispanic/Latine dual language learners (DLLs) - Hispanic/Latine children who speak languages besides English at home - compose 20% of the U.S. young child population. Yet this large and growing group of children remains minoritized along both linguistic and ethnic lines, resulting in intersecting opportunity gaps that stem in part from a mismatch between their developmental needs and what schools provide: this includes a lack of access to teachers who share their backgrounds, broadly referred to as teacher-child demographic match. This study is the first to examine teacher-child match for Hispanic/Latine DLLs, concentrating on their intersecting demographic characteristics: Spanish bilingualism and Hispanic/Latine ethnicity. Data are drawn from an ongoing study, focusing on Spanish-speaking, Hispanic/Latine DLLs from economically-disadvantaged families in early elementary school. In this context, the current study explores associations between having a Spanish-speaking teacher, as well as whether that teacher is Hispanic/Latine, during the first two years of elementary school (grades 1-2), and children's academic skills and executive functions at the start of third grade. Controlling for children's baseline skills, school fixed effects, and a host of family and child characteristics, results indicate that having had a linguistically-matched teacher earlier in elementary school was associated with greater third-grade English literacy, attention, and memory skills. Findings highlight the potential role of teacher-child demographic match in closing opportunity gaps and enhancing school success for Hispanic/Latine DLLs.