October 8 - 9, 1997
Immigration and Education: Issues and Research
Rebecca Barr and Catherine Lacey
The Spencer Foundation
April 3, 1998
Executive Summary
This report describes recommendations for important areas of inquiry pertaining to immigration and education developed by an interdisciplinary group of scholars at a conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation. Beginning with the keynote addresses of Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Leo Estrada, the conference was framed to focus discussion on broad issues of immigration, recent research on educating immigrant populations, and related policy implications. Following panel presentations concerning (1) research on immigration, (2) research on schooling and educational practice, and (3) policy implications, members of discussion groups detailed high priority areas of needed research.
Discussion of needed research is organized in three sections. The first represents some of the challenges inherent in thinking about research on immigration and its implications for education. Central issues discussed included the downward spiral in achievement, the meaning of assimilation and acculturation, the problematic use of comparison groups, and the need to complement large-scale studies with case studies. The second focuses more directly on research on schooling and educational practice. Group members struggled to come to terms with how the complex issues pertaining to the relations between schools and immigrant community should be framed. They urged problematizing the meaning of such terms as "language diversity," "immigrant customs," and "newcomers," and encouraged pursuit of schooling research embedded in its broader context. Four thematic topics emerged from group discussions: immigrant community ambivalence, teacher training and change, educational reform, and student experience. The final section of the report considers the policy implications of research on immigration and education.
Overview
On October 8th and 9th of 1997, the Spencer Foundation, with the assistance of Kris Gutierrez (University of California, Los Angeles) and Gene Garcia (University of California, Berkeley), convened an interdisciplinary group of scholars to consider important areas of inquiry pertaining to immigration and education (Attachment A includes the agenda and list of participants). The conference was framed to focus discussion on broad issues of immigration, recent research on educating immigrant populations, and related policy implications. This report is organized in three sections. The first represents some of the challenges inherent in thinking about research on immigration and its implications for education. The second focuses more directly on research on schooling and educational practice. The final section considers the policy implications of research on immigration and education. A listing of references mentioned during the discussions and/or submitted by participants is included as Attachement B.
Keynote Addresses
How is the current wave of immigration like and unlike that in years past? Just how exceptional is the current American immigration predicament? In the keynote address that opened the conference, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco identified these two broad questions as ones that would guide much of the work of the next generation of immigration researchers. Current immigration issues differ from those of earlier times in part, Suarez-Orozco argues, because "new information technologies, new idioms of communication, new patterns of capital flows, and a new ease of mass transportation are subverting boundaries that delineated much of the 20th Century." Consequently, the "systems that structure our identities and give us a sense of rootedness and continuity. . .are undergoing profound transformation." Current immigrants and the societies into which they enter differ from earlier times, with the "new immigrants" bimodal in distribution including the most educated and the least educated. The types of jobs available are "hour-glass" in shape, offering highly-skilled immigrants work in well-remunerated positions, but locking low- skilled immigrants into low-wage economic sectors. Comparative research is now beginning to describe common patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. The perception of too many "new arrivals" becomes coupled with negative political sentiment and perceptions of negative economic and social impact (Attachment C includes the Suarez-Orozco keynote address). Leo Estrada in his evening presentation graphically described the nature of immigration trends anticipated in the United States over the next several decades. He demonstrated that changes were more profound than widely perceived, particularly in the states of California, Texas, and New Mexico. The population increases, particularly among Hispanics, will potentially have a major impact upon education.
Research on Immigration
To stimulate discussion, panelist Grace Kao discussed aspects of her research on race and ethnic differences in educational performance. She reported, for example, that first generation immigrant youth performed lower on measures of psychological well-being (NELS based estimates of self-efficacy, self-esteem, alienation) than did second generation youth, who in turn, performed less well than third generation youth. The trends in achievement were in the opposite direction, with first generation youth showing the highest achievement. Abel Valenzuela, who is conducting research on undocumented immigrants, noted the difficulties inherent in doing such research, but also the great need to understand the ramifications of undocumented status for educational participation and outcomes. Of the Vietnamese children Min Zhou studied from two New Orleans schools, the majority did disproportionately well in school. Others became alienated from their families and ethnic communities, but integrated into a marginalized local community that tended to be at odds with the larger society; they tended to do poorly in school, drop-out, and disproportionately become delinquent. Based on her research and that of others, she suggests three common patterns of immigrant adaptation to a new society: (1) the traditional pattern of acculturation and upward mobility, particularly for immigrants with skills and money, (2) poverty and assimilation into the underclass, and (3) delayed acculturation with economic advancement though consolidation with the immigrant community. She sees the majority of Vietnamese children she studied as conforming to the third pattern, but a small group to the second pattern.
Workgroups engaged in an ongoing dialogue that continued throughout the day. In this section we summarize participant comments that focus on ways of thinking about immigration in relation to education. We have clustered comments into four main areas: (1) the downward spiral in achievement, (2) the meaning of assimilation and acculturation, (3) the problematic use of comparison groups, and (4) the need to complement large-scale studies with case studies.
(1) The downward spiral in achievement. Many groups puzzled over the findings concerning the decline in achievement among immigrants across generations in relation to increases in well being. Some challenged the decontextualization of variables and the assumptions about linear relationships and causality, arguing that other variables, such as family and community support, are more critical to achievement than immigration status. Other participants questioned the image of a downward spiral and asked how to square this finding with the assumption of intergenerational mobility in educational and economic terms. Although some asked what role the educational system plays in the decreasing achievement of immigrant children, others argued that the accuracy of findings concerning a downward spiral needs to be confirmed through intergenerational studies and other forms of longitudinal research.
(2) The meaning of assimilation and acculturation. Questions raised about the terms --assimilation and acculturation--led to a critical discussion of the underlying significance of these terms for immigrants. Why is assimilation a worthy goal? How do individuals negotiate membership in multiple groups, and how do these multiple memberships influence individuals' behavior? What criteria do communities employ to define membership in an immigrant group, and how does this influence how people perceive their individual identities and are treated by others? What are the implications of assimilation for inter-familial conflicts over the way kids are influenced by the identity of their peer groups and vice versa? What about that group of kids that does not fit in mainstream society nor with their families? If immigrants are attracted to school as one way of assimilating, what does that mean? How valid are the assumptions that prevail in education about the best path for all?
Group members reflected on the thesis that kids educated in Mexico have the capital, but when in this country, by being severed from their roots linguistically and culturally, they become socially decapitalized. The critical influences of language, gender, and religion in an immigrant's experience in U.S. school was noted. Some group members puzzled over why issues of power and race that permeate the terms "assimilation" and "acculturation" were not addressed or developed in the opening talks. How do the political and social values of communities interact with the attitudes and behaviors of immigrant groups in different parts of the U.S. to shape their experiences? There is a need to look at history of immigrant groups to find similarities and differences. What resources are available in different communities to encourage and support educational achievement and advancement? From the perspective of the society of power, how are different immigrant groups perceived? What impact does immigration have on U.S. society in general and on education in particular? What interactive effects do fluid immigration patterns have on the U.S. and home country communities, particularly in the area of education?
(3) The problematic use of comparison groups. Workgroup members expressed concern about the use of comparison groups in immigration research. The use of whites as a norm was problematized, as was the comparison of Hispanic/Latino immigrants to African Americans. Are we constructing blacks as the "failure" norm, much as whites are constructed as the "success" norm? Moreover, comparing Hispanics and African Americans distracts from the larger point and problem that we have a large, growing proportion of the population that is lagging behind. At the same time, the need to take racism into account was recognized: the history of African American relations is affecting the youth of black populations of immigrants in particular ways.
(4) Complementing large-scale research with ethnographic studies. Many group conversations focused on the importance of combining macro and micro studies (qualitative and quantitative methods) on immigration issues. The value of ethnographic material to capture the richness of people's experience and differences in immigrant communities and individual lives, and the contexts of the receiving communities where different dynamics may prevail was emphasized. Posing questions and problems WITH the people we are studying adds to the validity of the research. Groups recognized the importance of conducting cross-generational studies and life cycle stories across longer periods of time to get a fuller understanding of the lives of immigrants as a complex mix of determinants. Such studies are antidotes to the "homogenizing" of communities and reveal that correlations are not as neat as they appear. Ethnographic studies can also serve to challenge the categories we use in quantitative studies of immigrants. How do we construct categories that prevail in the discourse of immigration (e.g., assimilation, generation status, etc.)? How members construct the category of "generations" in the Mexican community differs, for example, from that of other immigrant groups. Concerns were expressed about taking the categories we find in the field and turning them into some kind of crude theory. Intervening variables are not linear or monolithic, but they are treated as such in research models and equations (e.g., definition of success, assimilation, "transition" programs, different types of parenting, class and race differences, alienation from community). Concern was also expressed about the use of data sets designed for research purposes that were not based on understanding of immigrant population. In viewing existing models of cultural change and structural integration, the question was posed as to whether our existing model and analytical framework adequately capture the complexity of the process.
Research on Schooling and Educational Practice
To focus discussion on research on schooling and educational practice, panel member Tamara Lucas drew implications from her studies of the education of immigrant students in U.S. secondary schools. One pressing area of needed research pertains to the preparation of mainstream teachers: What knowledge, disposition, and skills do they need to become linguistically and culturally responsive educators of immigrant students? Research is also needed on transitions that provide immigrant students access to high levels of academic learning. How can smooth transitions be assured and what are the implications for the design of school structures, curricula, and instruction? She emphasized the importance of getting beyond a "special programs mentality" when thinking of immigrant students. Finally, it is important to study how attitudes and public opinion toward immigrants in particular communities shape the education received by immigrant students in these communities. Laurie Olsen, based on her high school ethnographies, described social maps of the daily lives of students and teachers. These revealed the minimally-overlapping realities of (1) the newcomers--recent immigrant students, (2) American students from various backgrounds, (3) the majority of faculty and administrators, and (4) a small group of young teachers new to the school who saw themselves as "advocates," but who were seen by other teachers as "the rookies." Such detailed ethnographies provide a deeper understanding of immigrant students, their needs, how they progress through school, and the sense they make of their experiences. They also reveal the capacity of schools to serve those needs. Harriet Romo's research is motivated by the need to understand the high rates at which Hispanic youth leave school. To give this issue a human face, she described the unique challenges faced by a second generation student who graduated from high school and an immigrant student who left school.
Group members struggled to come to terms with how the complex issues pertaining to the relations between schools and immigrant communities should be framed. They urged problematizing the meaning of such terms as "language diversity," "immigrant customs," and "newcomers." They questioned whether doing research in this area might not mean focusing differently, seeing a bigger picture. They asked whether research always needs to be detached? What would it look like if it were proactive and what sort of a paradigm shift would this entail? Four thematic topics emerged from group discussions: immigrant community ambivalence, teacher training and change, educational reform, and student experience. These are viewed as simply the starting point. Generally, group members encouraged the pursuit of schooling research embedded in its broader context.
(1) Immigrant community ambivalence. Lack of trust prevails between immigrants and schools. Some teachers are found to be advocates, others enemies. Policies and practices at the local school level are highly variable, resulting in different individual experiences and the need for immigrants and their children to negotiate understandings, often on a daily basis. The presence of illegal immigrants creates its own set of problems. School may become a place where illegal immigrants are identified, hence creating fear, lack of trust, and a desire among illegal immigrants not to be noticed. The views of the broader community also add to the tension. When schools are successful in providing immigrants with certain rights and provisions and these give them standing in the broader community, this can create a back-lash among non-immigrants who may feel threatened. These broader community attitudes may in turn create pressures on teachers and administrators that translate into negative attitudes toward immigrants.
Some of the research questions posed pertained to the perceptions of different groups of immigrants. What are the issues that immigrants face who are trying to negotiate the educational system? What issues are resolved and which need to be renegotiated on a daily basis? How does their understanding of civil society and legal rights impact these transactions? To what extent do parents or families, particularly those who are illegal, want to become involved in the school? Do these experiences vary from school to school and from state to state? What are the hopes of various immigrant groups concerning an education? What kinds of values might schools give them that they might not otherwise have? What is the meaning of successfully achieving these goals within the immigrant community? What are the perceptions and attitudes of the broader community when educational goals are achieved? Although difficult to study, how are these experiences the same and different for illegal immigrants? How do school personnel view the role of the school with respect to immigrant kids and the immigrant community? How do different teachers and administrators view different immigrant groups? Group members emphasized the importance of characterizing the culture of schools and showing how education occurs in certain ways and on certain terms, many unfamiliar and unfavorable to immigrants. As a more proactive form of research, it was suggested that researchers might work with individual communities, families, and students to learn how to help them deal with the complexities of schools.
(2) Student experiences. Group members discussed the need for research to document the lives of immigrant students in schools. This would include interpretive studies capturing the perspectives of individual students, those documenting the structure and activities engaged in by students and their immigrant and non-immigrant peers, and those showing how students negotiate the terrain in interracial, inter-ethnic conflicts of the school and classroom. How do different immigrants negotiate the social and academic aspects of school? Who are their peers? Are both they and their peers part of a larger community that migrates back and forth between their host and home countries? Where do the immigrant students "hang out"--what is the physical placement of immigrant kids within the school? In what situations do they interact with non-immigrant students? How do patterns differ across elementary, middle, and high school levels? How do institutional structures and procedures impact different immigrant groups in comparison with non-immigrant groups? How do these patterns differ across elementary, middle, and high school levels?
Another possible research approach might be to elicit multiple perspectives on a given topic, such as schooling circumstances of a bilingual child. Aspects of the research might include (1) measures of the language acquisition of the child, (2) documentation of classroom activities by shadowing the child during school time to gain the child's interpretations of events or having the student act as researcher within his of her own complex environment, (3) a reflective piece by a teacher from within the classroom, (4) researching bilingual education policy and its impact on the instruction of this particular child, and (5) an historical analysis of bilingualism in this particular community. There is a need, particularly, to study the school experiences of students who are not making academic progress, and to develop portraits of the experiences of immigrant children who do not understand what and how their teachers are teaching.
(3) Teachers and teaching. Just as group members sought a more textured and contextualized view of students, similar in-depth understanding was advocated for understanding teachers and their teaching. Many teachers of immigrant children come from backgrounds quite different than their students, and the knowledge they have developed for teaching non-immigrant children may not prepare them well to support of development of immigrant students. How do teachers who advocate for students and value plurality differ in ideology and attitudes from those who perceive immigrants as different and of less value? How do the classroom communities of these teachers reflect their values? How do teachers interpret and write about their circumstances? How can uninformed teacher perspectives be modified? Can prejudice be "untaught" in teacher education programs and in professional development activities for experienced teachers? Can a change in attitudes result when mainstream teachers learn about the cultural resources that immigrant children bring to school? What does it mean for teachers to receive cultural information and to explore their own use of cultural information? What impact are teacher preparation programs having on the development of professional attitudes and knowledge? What role should teachers have in encouraging the viability of a community that is ethnically and linguistically different? What does tension between an immigrant and host community mean for teachers?
What are the assumptions that teachers make about what learning will do for their students? Do tensions exist between looking at the individual needs of the child and what that child represents as a member of the immigrant community? How do the controversies over the meaning of "being bilingual" impact the thinking and practice of teachers? What problems arise when the language used in the community is not recognized in the idealized form of language being used in the classroom? What views do teachers hold on language learning and acquisition - what do they mean and what do they look like in the classroom? What kinds of research methodologies need to be considered for looking at teacher practice? How do teachers and students interpret and write about living and learning in classrooms? What sense do teachers make of kids who are not progressing? How well are bilingual and mainstream teachers trained to do this challenging form of teaching? How do the structural arrangements of schools impact negatively or positively on the teaching and learning of students? In what particular ways are teachers' jobs configured and reconfigured? What are the relationships between mainstream teachers and bilingual teachers and pre-teachers? What are the roles of other adults in the classroom, paraprofessionals, etc.?
(4) School reform. How does research on immigration and education relate to broader issues of school reform? The increasing numbers of immigrant students in the school communities, coupled with a teacher population that is not well-informed about the immigrant community, beg for a linking of research on school reform with that of the education of immigrants. Yet, the connections seems not to be made. Why this is the case represents an interesting puzzle. Only a few reform efforts focus on making school better for immigrant minority students. Research is needed to document the nature of the reform and its impact on the lives of the immigrant minority, as well as other minority students. Special challenges arise from the tension between the need for special attention and programming by immigrants and the negative effects of segregation. How does, for example, research on immigrant groups intersect with research on minorities in such areas as tracking? How should we think about segregation through bilingual programs and segregation through tracking?
Are there commonalities among various minority groups, including immigrants, when we focus on minorities as providing assets rather than liabilities in schools? What special knowledge and resources do the various minority groups bring to instruction? What would it look like if bilingual education were treated as a program as opposed to some sort of so-called "language accommodation" for newcomer kids? What sorts of initiatives can induce teachers to draw on the funds of knowledge from homes and communities so that students can use these resources in schools, and how should these initiatives be studied? Similarly, how do programs that entail two-way bilingual immersion work, and what student resources are further developed? How can reform initiatives be documented in ways that recognize the complexity of immigrant issues, and that focus on how these initiatives get worked out through instructional practices, other school practices, and student progress academically and socially? What do we know about school expectations of different racial and ethnic groups and their impact on student achievement? What outcomes beyond learning should be considered? Might we not also measure school success in terms of how well immigrants assimilate, how well we teach children to live in multicultural communities, and how well the non-immigrant population is being educated about the changing face of school?
Policy Implications
To focus discussion on the policy implications of research, panel member Kenji Hakuta noted the difficulties inherent in researchers gaining respectability among policy makers. He asked researchers to consider the pros and cons of "ambulance chasing" issues versus establishing long term research programs to address "some the persistent myths in our field." Jane Hannaway discussed policy development at the local level. She explored the policy implications of the teacher observation that language is not a problem for bilingual students in learning math. Georges Vernez discussed his findings concerning the educational performance and college attendance of immigrant children and children born in the United States of immigrant parents. He concluded that the main issue has to do with changes occurring in the composition of the U.S. student body with a rapidly expanding Hispanic group, which is not performing at a level likely needed for them to compete in an economy which requires some college experience.
Group discussions centered on the complexity of the issues involved in using research to establish policy guidelines. Participants considered the interconnections between theory and research, policy, and practice. It was noted that research does not necessarily dictate practice and policy; witness the number of reforms taking place (cooperative learning, Charter schools, etc.) where policy and practice take the lead. Moreover, what should be the scope of the policy; that is, to what extent are research and policy issues exclusive to immigration, and in what ways do they pertain to more general concerns about education, poverty, and race? The complexity of the interconnections between policy and practice is revealed in the suggestions that group members made for research that would inform policy: What are the short term and long term social costs of letting kids drop out or fail? What does the de-regulation of teaching credential mean to immigrant and bilingual children? Who is succeeding and who is failing in special programs? How do you nurture academic competence (perhaps language learning has been overemphasized)? To get beyond labels for programs such as "bilingual education" and "multicultural education," what is actually going on in programs and classrooms; how is policy being worked out in practice? What can we learn from studies of alternative schools about how to educate immigrant students more effectively in a way that respects and reinforces their cultural identity? What works for certain populations and how?
Based on these questions, the research expected to inform practice seems to be of two sorts: longitudinal studies of populations and descriptions of practices and their various effects. In both types of research, the importance of distinguishing among specific populations (e.g., Puerto Ricans vs. Mexican) and describing the variation within populations (Puerto Ricans who came to settle here and those who are part of a transnational community) was emphasized. There was agreement on the usefulness of ethnographic studies to inform policy and practice. Policy audiences seem to respond well to rich stories of individual lives and communities. Some group members advocated the use of longitudinal studies, citing the ability to define "success" for immigrant children in ways more complex than is possible in large quantitative surveys. Others were concerned about the cost of such studies, particularly since they do not provide results in a timely manner that would be helpful to policy.
Discussion also focused on how researchers gain the attention of policy makers. What happens, for example, when policy makers do not want to hear and be convinced of the merits of bilingual education based on accountability evidence? Policy-makers were characterized as not interested in research and skeptical of educational researchers themselves touting the value of research. Many group members shared the sentiment that researchers need to become aware of the discourse on immigration that shapes our public thinking about immigrants and more proactive than reactive with regard to the policy realm, responding in a timely way to immediate policy needs, such as early childhood intervention. Some members suggested that researchers need to anticipate the next reform, the next trend, and try to put some research together in response. Whether or not it is legitimate in this effort to over-generalize from data was considered. This discussion surfaced the tension between "ambulance-chasing" research for immediate policy impact and work that will take longer to develop but is grounded in theory. The policy arena related to court cases was a primary concern because so many gains in minority education have been as a result of court action. The suggestion was made that research not tied to policy, but to policy makers who are advocates or strategists with regards to litigation should be supported. Discussion also focused on the need for immigrant communities to become far more politically active to ensure that the educational needs of their children are met.