Indigenous learning gaps and home language instruction: new evidence from PISA-D

Even though Indigenous exclusion in education is well understood, there is a lack of comparable evidence across-regions on the extent of the learning gap and challenges faced by Indigenous students and, in turn, which policies may mitigate them. In this paper, I use the new PISA-D learning survey for seventh grade students and I first estimate the learning gap of Indigenous students in Guatemala, Paraguay, Senegal, and Zambia through quantile treatment effects and, then, I assess whether earlier literacy exposure in the mother-tongue language can help towards lessening achievement gaps for Indigenous students. After accounting for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students background differences, I found that the unexplained learning gap can be substantially reduced and turn out to be insignificant if Indigenous students had previous exposure to home language at primary school, especially for low achievers. Thus, school policies providing learning skills in the home language could be an important leveller when transition to the main language at later education stages, boosting equity in line with equity targets of the sustainable development agenda.