Immigrant Stories

While often living only miles (or blocks) away from each other, the children of Rhode Island's Cambodian, Dominican and Portuguese immigrants are living in very different worlds.
Immigrant Stories  (published this Summer, Oxford Press) takes a multileveled approach to modeling the academic pathways (and the contexts influencing these pathways) of these elementary-aged children.
They find strikingly different immigration histories, family and school situations as well as differences in how these children are relating to their parents native culture (e.g. do they watch media in their parents native language?) and how they conceptualize the role of their own ethnic identity (e.g. is being a student or being Dominican more important to who they are?).
More interestingly they find that these contexts and attitudes play out in very different ways in terms of their effect on the elementary school success of these kids.

While high levels of ethnic pride and desire to be with co-ethnic peers contributed to positive outcomes for Cambodian youth, for Dominican children wanting to be with peers outside of their ethnic group, a preference for English and lower ethnic identity centrality was associated with more positive outcomes.
These results are worthy of much future speculation; a central question being:  Why does identification and active participation in a parent's native culture prove a source of academic support for one child while proving an obstacle for another?

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Community Organization

There are substantial differences in academic outcomes among country of origin groups. These differences start very early on and (even when lessened) often persist. In a nationally representative sample of third graders Glick and Hohmann-Marriott (2007) show that while children of Chinese, Vietnamese and East Asian immigrants outperform their native White peers in math, children from Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Filipino families fall behind.

Recent research points to the role of community structure and functioning in producing these differences.  Min Zhou, who has spent her carreer studying immigrant communities from Vietnamese communities in New Orleans to Mexican and Chinese communities in California, finds consistent and powerful differences in the ways that these communities function and the knowledge bases that they hold.

While both the Pico Union and Chinatown neighborhoods of Los Angelos have a predominantly immigrant populace and a share a strong emphasis on education the families of Chinatown benefit from deep wells of community knowledge about  educational systems (what SAT scores kids need to get into college, what schools are the best in the district) as well as high numbers of ethnic-based educational organizations (afterschool tutoring programs, enrichment programs and community scholarship funds.) The Pico Union (primarily Mexican immigrants) neighborhood, on the other, does not have a single community driven enrichment program and thus lacks avenues through which new immigrant families can learn pathways toward higher education and support them in their children.

Zhou notes, ""In the past, we've tended to chalk up differences in achievement to cultural differences, but we really need to look more closely at variations in neighborhood resources and how they may contribute to academic success."