Arizona: English Only

This week the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Arizona State Department of Education will be cracking down on teachers who do not speak English flawlessly. These teachers, who were recruited in the not so distant past by the same Department, will now be forced out of classrooms with English Language Learners.  The State is announcing these changes in the name of English-only movement, noting that these children will not learn English as well under the supervision of these bilingual teachers.

The role of language in American classrooms has become a particularly contentious and complicated issue. Especially in school districts, like many in Arizona, where there are large populations of ELL learners and where students come to school with many different levels of English and other language fluency.


Language policy in school has become an emotional rather than a logical debate.  Data is largely missing from media forums and  public dialogue on policy regarding language in schools. 

It starts with hello

Many studies have shown that parents' involvement in their child's school has long term effects on student achievement.

But for many immigrant parents--especially those who have recently arrived in the US--there are many barriers to such involvement. Carreon, Drake and Barton identify structural and psychological barriers in their ethnographic study of  immigrant parents in New York. These included.

• Inflexible work schedules and long hours.
• Language barriers with teachers. Child is often the only translator available.
• A devaluing of the type of cultural capital they are bringing to their children (teaching their children to respect authority rather than voice opinion in class).
• Isolation from network of parents who could support them and share information about education system.

Many foundations and policy organizations have developed recommendations for better involving immigrant parents in school; often focusing on making meeting times with teachers flexible, providing translators or translated school materials and offering childcare during meeting times.

But one of most easily implemented recommendations turns out to also be one of the most effective. The Harvard Family Research project reports that making parents feel welcome and valued is critical.  Many immigrant parents felt that the school saw them as liabilities rather than assets and feared humiliation in the school setting. Simple steps such as learning parents names, learning more about their situation and engaging in individualized conversation were shown as effective ways to get and keep parents involved.

On a larger scale, other policy groups pointed toward creating events or classes that would increase parents feeling of partnership with schools and develop peer networks among immigrant parents; as one New York school district did:

"Early in the school year, families meet with teachers for “Parents as Partners Day,” building a two-way partnership between the teachers and families before any problems start. Parents are invited to workshops that focus on the strengths of their culture and the importance of respecting other cultures. They learn techniques to share their culture with their children, such as storytelling or talking about the significance of certain foods and mealtime in their home country. Professionals from the community, such as Judith Rapley, a social worker who is the minister of an Afro-Caribbean church, build relationships with the families and connect them to resources. “We use the parents own cultural values to encourage them to get involved in school,” says project director Esther Calzada

Latina Sexual Risk and Acculturation

In the US, the pregnancy rate for Latina adolescents is nearly twice the national average.

This however, is not a pattern that starts with the first generation. In a 2006 review of the literature, Afable-Munsuz and Brindis document 15 studies that show that greater acculturation (birth in the US, higher levels of US cultural/English language orientation) is positively related to higher levels sexual risk taking in Latina and Latino adolescents as compared to only two studies which show the reverse.

First generation Latina adolescents are less likely to have had sex (see figure) and, if they have, are less likely to have be involved with multiple partners. They also show lower rates of early pregnancy than later generation youth.

Advocacy for Youth identifies high levels of monitoring by parents, high educational aspirations, and tight-knit ethnic communities which reinforce traditional Latino cultural values as particularly strong and positive influences for Latina adolescents; all areas which have been documented as more likely to be present in the lives of the first generation.

However, while many areas of sex-risk are lower for first generation Latinas, condom use and knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases are considerably lower for these adolescents. This gap in weakens the possitive effects of their other positive behaviors; recent work by Guarini and Marks reports equivalent levels of STI and STDS in first and later generations of Latino adolescents.

What makes the news?

In a media content analysis of news stories published and produced in 2009 the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Hispanic Center find that the Hispanic population remains barely represented in major media.
As the Hispanic population grows so has its importance in larger public dialogues but official coverage has lacked meaningful content concerning the lives of Hispanic Americans.  Rather existing coverage (involving Hispanic individuals/groups) has been almost exclusively "event driven". The debates around the Sonia Sotomayor, the Mexican drug war, the H1NI outbreak and  immigration have become the central, and often only, narratives.
Rapidly changing demographics in the US have opened the door to what could be a fascinating dialogue around what is already happening in American communities, what is already being seen in schools and how immigrant individuals and communities are creating and building on narratives in the US. But buried under a mass of disjointed headlines, the public narrative around Hispanic Americans remains largely incoherent.

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."

The big task

There is much debate surrounding the best way to aid young English Language Learners in transitioning  into US classrooms and keeping up with their classmates during the critical elementary grades.

A recent report from the Foundation for Child Development reports that:

"Research on the effects of early English immersion programs for ELL students...suggests that children in [English immersion only] preschool programs tend to lose their ability to communicate in their first language, start to prefer the English language, frequently develop communication problems with their extended families, and experience depressed academic achievement in English."

There are a myriad of reasons for how and why fluent bilingualism may support immigrant children; but especially compelling is the notion that bilingualism is at its core, a matter of keeping families functional and connected.

One striking piece of evidence comes from work by Mouw and Xie (1999) who find that bilingaul Asian American first and second generation adolescents have a pronounced academic advantage over their monolingual peers. But this effect was only significant when parents were not fluent in English.