"Just teaching" students is impossible as non-proficient students need to be made proficient, and those proficient need to rate at the higher levels of accelerated and advanced in order to satisfy the state report cards.
Another method, called bookmark, involves ranking test questions in order of difficulty and having an educator mark the question that could reasonably be expected to divide the proficient students from the non-proficient.
Discussion with the friendly but non-proficient English speaker on the other end of the hotel phone only serves to deepen the puzzlement.
Thus, we show how immigrant workers who are proficient in Spanish within the various segments of the earning distribution are affected relative to their non-proficient counterparts.
More specifically, the outcome shows that the conditional wage distribution for proficient immigrants is more dispersed than the conditional wage distribution for non-proficient immigrants.
Namely, relative to the non-proficient, high-earning immigrants experience a greater wage premium than low-earning immigrants.
The left panel presents effects for entering 9th graders who scored at the proficient level on the given test, while the right panel presents effects for their non-proficient counterparts.
The major advantage of this approach is that it prevents us from comparing proficient individuals enjoying an advantageous earning capacity with non-proficient individuals subject to an unfavorable earning condition.
By combining average with quantile estimates, we can assess the impact of Spanish proficiency on wage inequality between and within groups: while average returns measure the average differential between proficient and non-proficient immigrants, differences in quantile returns represent the wage differential between proficient immigrants that are located at different quantiles of the distribution.
As expected, they are also less likely to come from a non-Spanish-speaking country (42.5%, against 99.0% among the non-proficient).
Both effects are significant at the 5% level and both effects are significantly different from the corresponding differences found for their non-proficient counterparts.
