Does Mother-tongue Education Matter for School Achievements? Evidence from Denmark

Mother-tongue education can be seen as an important tool for minority children to gain or maintain proficiency in their mother-tongue. They will thereby uphold a cultural and social link to the country and culture of origin. Advocates of mother-tongue education in school also highlight the importance of knowing one’s mother-tongue for successful second language acquisition. Others argue that the focus in school should be on the majority language and thereby question the link between mother-tongue proficiency and the second language development. This paper explores municipal variation in the implementation of a Danish educational reform through a difference-in-difference framework using high quality register data. The aim of the reform was to increase the assimilation of immigrants, and removing mother-tongue training for first and second generation immigrants was believed to increase their proficiency in Danish. This study shows that the expected positive effects of the reform are not found. Rather the opposite – the removal of mother-tongue training leads to lower grades in Danish for boys and in mathematics for boys and girls.