Urban schools and immigrant families: Teacher perspectives

Teachers of two urban senior high schools talk about barriers and bridges in communicating with English as Second Language (ESL) minority students and their parents. The paper focuses on student, parent, and school characteristics with respect to intercultural communication. The typical ESL student is characterized to be alienated, displaced, and in denial of other cultures. Typical parents are distrustful of Western ways, resistant to adopting new values, patriarchal, yet dependent on their children. The school system is characterized as ethnocentric and uncommitted to providing equal services to all students including ESL students. The paper then focuses on student, parent, and school needs to enhance intercultural communication effectiveness. ESL students need to feel connected at many levels of society and to develop social communication skiils, self-empowerment, and greater sensitivity to other cultural minorities. Parents need a greater connection with the school system, a greater understanding of the tensions between their culture and the mainstream culture, greater collaboration skills, and less dependency upon their children as interpreters. Members of schools systems need to develop policies that reflect a greater awareness of intercultural problems and a greater commitment to equal educational opportunities.This study is partially supported by the Alberta Advisory Committee for Educational Studies (AACES). A version of this paper was originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, April 1992.     

Chicken Club: schools and their relationship with families

Over time, schools have developed systems that include the families of children. Families often sign a home school agreement and attend parent forums or more formal meetings designed to plan provision for children with special educational needs. These endeavours, however, are arguably inadequate when the full influence of the family is properly acknowledged. Research makes clear that the main influencer on the child’s self-efficacy and therefore learning behaviours, is the family. This article reports findings from literature and a case study looking at making the most of the partnership between families and schools in order to meet the learning needs of individual children. It also addresses many barriers that families face in approaching schools and three ways schools in Cornwall, a rural county in South West England, are 'opening out’ their practice. The case study provides evidence of the progress children made in learning as a response to the new school and family partnership.     

The effect of immigrant concentration in schools on native and immigrant children's reading and math skills

Using a unique and very rich PISA dataset from Denmark, we show that the immigrant concentration in the school influences reading and math skills for both immigrant children and native children. Overall, children in schools with a high immigrant concentration score lower on reading and math test scores. The negative effects associated with attending a school with a high immigrant concentration are fairly robust across estimation methods. IV estimates, taking into consideration that parental sorting across neighborhoods might bias the OLS estimates, indicate that immigrant concentration in schools is still important in determining children's math test scores. The estimates are less precise regarding the effect of immigrant concentration on reading test scores. The immigrant concentration in the school has a stronger effect for native children than for immigrant children, but the differences are more pronounced for the math test.     

The educational performance of immigrant children at Czech schools

The integration of immigrant children into the education system is a process that is accompanied by serious debate, especially in advanced countries, which have large shares of immigrants and a long history of immigration. The poorer educational outcomes of foreign-born children are largely explained there through their socio-economically disadvantaged background compared to the native-born population. This article examines whether the observations for those countries also apply to the Czech Republic—a country with a relatively short immigration history and immigration flows from different source countries than those in Western Europe. Regression analyses conducted on PISA 2012 data focusing largely on the maths skills of 15-year-olds reveal that the performance of immigrant children in Czech schools roughly compares to that of their counterparts in Western Europe. While their PISA outcomes were lower than those of Czechs, this was because immigrant children have poorer conditions at home or in the classroom.     

Cultural values and intergenerational value discrepancies in immigrant and non-immigrant families

The goal of this research was to explore the generality of developmental processes related to intergenerational value discrepancies across 701 families from immigrant and non-immigrant groups. In a study involving 471 immigrant families (197 Armenian, 103 Vietnamese, and 171 Mexican) and 230 non-immigrant families (95 African American and 135 European American), adolescents and parents reported their endorsement of values pertaining to family obligations. We examined similarities and differences at three levels of analysis, from the general to the group-specific. Results provide evidence for general developmental processes (family obligations were endorsed more by parents than by adolescents in all groups), processes associated with immigration (the intergenerational value discrepancy generally increased with time in the United States), and processes that are unique to each ethnic group.     

Life circumstances and public policies for young children in immigrant families

Young children, birth through eight, are more diverse than other age groups in the United States. They are more likely to be first- or second-generation immigrants and, as a consequence, more likely to belong to racial-ethnic groups originating outside European nations. Many also live with parents whose heritage language is not English. For these reasons, children in immigrant families merit special attention by policy-makers, program administrators, and others who have responsibility for assuring that the young children of today become competent students, workers, citizens, and parents in the years ahead. The development of effective policies and programs for all children and families depends on having information about their life circumstances, including their family composition, education, work, income, and housing, and for immigrants, also their country of origin, citizenship, and language skills. This article presents new results from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2005, 2006, and 2007, reflecting important life circumstances of young children in immigrant families, compared to those in native-born families. We present new population projections from the U.S. Census Bureau, which highlight the increasingly important role that children of immigrants will play in the economy and civil society during the coming decades. We then discuss implications for the design and implementation of effective policies and programs.     

Relations between parent-child acculturation differences and adjustment within immigrant Chinese families

The relations between parent and child acculturation and family and child adjustment were examined among 91 immigrant Chinese families in Canada with early adolescents (average age of 12). Acculturation was assessed in public (e.g., language use) and private (e.g., values) domains separately in Chinese and Canadian cultures. With one exception, interactions between parent and child acculturation in Canadian domains were unrelated to adjustment (conflict intensity, depressive feelings, and achievement motivation). Interactions in Chinese domains were more clearly associated with adjustment. Specifically, mother-child interactions in Chinese public domains and father-child interactions in the Chinese private domain predicted adjustment. In all interactions, when parents were strongly orientated toward Chinese culture, lower levels of Chinese orientation among children were associated with lower adjustment.     

Welcoming practices: creating schools that support students and families in transition

ABSTRACT

The book sheds light on school transition and provides school leaders and teachers with practical strategies to support children and families changing schools, and is divided into 11 chapters and 4 appendixes that seem to cover most of the aspects related to student transition from one school to another.     

The factors of child physical abuse in Korean immigrant families

OBJECTIVE: This study explores Korean immigrant mothers' attitudes toward child physical abuse based on an ecological perspective. METHOD: One hundred and forty-four Korean immigrant mothers who came to the US after age 16 and have at least one child under 18 years old participated in this study. Data were collected using instruments translated in Korean that measure mothers' attitudes toward child physical abuse in four areas: degree of agreement with physical abuse, conflict tactics, belief in the use of physical punishment, and perceptions regarding physical abuse. RESULTS: This study found that the following variables affect Korean immigrant mothers' attitudes toward child physical abuse at ecological levels of the environment: amount of time spent with children, experience of corporal punishment as a child, children's gender and age, family acculturation conflicts, mothers' age, and length of time in US at the micro level; involvement in their children's school and involvement in social organizations at the meso level; level of education and reported stress of immigrant life at the exo level; value of children in Korean culture, familiarity with Child Protective Services (CPS), perceived discrimination, and value of corporal punishment at the macro level. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests the importance of cultural sensitivity in social work practice when working with Korean immigrants. It also implies that intervention and prevention efforts of child abuse should be targeted at more than one level of the environment.     

Disrupting Eurocentric epistemologies: Re-mediating transitions to centre intersectionally-minoritised immigrant children,families and communities

In this article, I examine intersectionally-minoritised immigrant children’s transitions from community-based pre-kindergartens to elementary schools (kindergartens) in the most segregated school system in the US. Attending to issues of blockage and fragmentation inherent to transitions, I analyse transition supports, interpreting and critiquing them through the perspectives of Latinx immigrant teachers and mothers. Through interviews, I listen to, learn from and reposition Latinx immigrant teachers and mothers as important constructors of knowledge who hold valuable (albeit often disprivileged) perspectives for reorganising the ecology of transitions. Centering the experiences of immigrant mothers and their young children, I problematise dominant understandings and conceptualisations of transition, unveiling how these privilege dominant ways of being and behaving. In doing so, I shed light on the possibility of re-mediating transitions in ways that centre the perspectives of Latinx immigrants.     

6 Urban schools as organizations: political perspectives

Reformed at the turn of the century toward top‐down, centralized administration, city school systems are frequently being reorganized today toward a bottom‐up, decentralized construction. The most radical of these is Chicago. But Chicago, in a condition shared widely throughout the USA, is a city school system experiencing serious budgetary and infrastructure decline ‐ a condition tending anew toward organizational centralization. Such political forces may not mesh well ‐ as a new politics of adaptive realignment at the grassroots encounters renewed strength in an ‘old politics’ of bureaucratic centralization. Largely unstudied and unknown at this time are the effects on the internal politics of the organization in city schooling ‐ a politics that may adapt in some unforeseen way to new battles between top‐down and bottom‐up.     

Parental involvement,children's aspirations,and achievement in new immigrant families

The authors investigated the relationships among multiple aspects of parental involvement (English proficiency, school involvement, control and monitoring of children), children's aspirations, and achievement in new immigrant families in the United States. They used data on immigrant parents and school-age children (N = 1,255) from the New Immigrant Survey to examine immigrant families from diverse backgrounds. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that parental English proficiency and involvement in school education are related to children's academic achievement, cognitive development, and English language ability, directly as well as indirectly, through children's educational aspirations. Parental control and monitoring is not beneficial to immigrant children's cognitive development, although variations were found across different groups. They also observed intriguing findings regarding gender and racial or ethnic diversity. Based on their findings, they provide recommendations for the fostering of academic success and the design and implementation of educational programs and practices for immigrant children.     

外来工与城市居民家庭父母养育方式的调查研究

本研究采用父母养育方式评价量表(EMBU)对1767名小学四年级至初中三年级的外来工与城市居民子女进行调查,发现不同社会环境下父母养育方式存在显著差异,这些差异表现在子女的年龄发展、对子女的性别期待等方面.     

Learning with immigrant children,families and communities: the imperative of early childhood teacher education

Abstract

This article reports on a longitudinal study spanning over 5 years, involving the design and implementation of an early childhood teacher education program model that engages a critical-ecological theoretical approach, a funds of knowledge perspective, and design-based methodology. This project aimed to promote equitable education for all children, and especially for young immigrant children encountering situations of oppression within the national and local educational contexts in Arizona. In this teacher education program, families, community members, researchers, pre-service teachers and teachers worked together to develop new modes of curricular activity, new spaces, new relationships, and new forms of movement among participants, as well as new circulations of literacy artefacts.