Home-School Conflicts and Barriers to the Academic Achievement of Children of Latin American Immigrants.

This paper explores the role of home-school conflicts in the educational failure of children of Latin American immigrants and examines how these conflicts have been framed and understood in the existing research literature. It argues that structural analyses of barriers to educational attainment alone fail to capture the multiplicity of forces that contribute to negative academic outcomes. Instead, understanding this phenomenon requires a fusion of structural and cultural analytic perspectives that take into account school-based factors such as pedagogical styles, policies, and norms and the ways in which students’ cultures interact with these institutional arrangements. The author starts by reviewing some of the most serious structural barriers in the lives of children of Latin American immigrants: poverty, segregation, and limited English proficiency. Then, she examines key research on the factors associated with the poor educational outcomes of many of these students. A discussion of some of the major theoretical contributions to the study of educational stratification follows, and the author highlights and analyzes three important examples of home-school conflicts that affect immigrant student outcomes. The paper will close with suggestions for future research and education reforms, including a specific focus on increasing the role of schools in generating students’ social capital. INTRODUCTION Children in immigrant families1 are the fastest-growing sector of the school-age population in the United States. These youth account for twenty percent of all children in the United States, and it is projected that children of immigrants will represent twentyfive percent of the primary and secondary-school age population by 2010 (Fix & Capps, 2005; Hernandez, Denton & Macartney, 2007). The exponential growth in the size of the immigrantorigin student population in the United States has come at a time when earning at least a high school degree has never been more important for longterm personal and professional stability. While at the start of the twentieth century there were occupational avenues that allowed social mobility for people with minimal formal education, the current knowledge economy is largely closed to those who do not attain post-secondary credentials. Thus, schooling stands to play a more significant role in the lives and futures of immigrant-origin children today than it has in any other moment in history. Between fifty-five and sixty percent of children of immigrants enrolled in school in the United States today have geographic origins in Latin America (Hernandez et al., 2007). Latino2 students, many of whom are children of immigrants, demonstrate some of the most alarming educational outcomes, including widespread school desertion, low levels of literacy, and poor college enrollment and completion rates (Lutz, 2007; MacDonald, 2004; Perreira, Harris & Lee, 2006; Swail, Cabrera & Lee, 2006). Low parental education, high levels of poverty, and limited English proficiency are some of the major barriers identified in these students’ pathways to academic success (Capps et al., 2005; Gandara, 1995; Gandara & Contreras, 2009; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008; Valenzuela, 1999). Institutional factors such as school culture, policies, and norms, which tend to correspond with middle-class forms of cultural capital and socialization in the United States, frequently interact with these structural barriers to further disadvantage lowincome children in immigrant families (Delgado-Gaitan, 1992; Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Valdes, 1996). These additional institutional and cultural challenges are often overlooked or their significance is minimized in analyses of Latino youth’s school failure. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by demonstrating the ways in which cultural clashes between home and school— one powerful symptom of the institutional arrangements that complicate ethnic and racial minority students’ educational experiences— combine with existing structural forces to hinder the academic progress of poor children of Latin American immigrants. The contemporary, post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States can best be characterized by the diversity in the newcomers’ education levels, skills, and countries of origin. There has been a dramatic shift from earlier waves in the primary regions sending immigrants to this country. Until 1950, nearly ninety percent of all immigrants were European and PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN EDUCATION SPRING 2009 | PAGE 6 Canadian; today, more than fifty-five percent come from Latin America and the Caribbean (overwhelmingly from Mexico), and twenty-five percent come from Asia (Camarota, 2007; SuárezOrozco, 2005). Current immigrants to the United States represent both the most highly skilled and highly educated and the lowest-skilled and least educated members of society. On one hand, the “new” immigrants, particularly from Asia, are more likely to have advanced degrees than the native-born population in the U.S. (Suárez-Orozco, 2005). On the other, they possess some of lowest education and income levels in the country, particularly the approximately twelve million undocumented immigrants (Camarota, 2007). According to the 2000 Current Population Survey, more than twentytwo percent of all immigrants in the United States had less than a ninth grade education, the majority of whom had come from Latin America and the Caribbean (Suárez-Orozco, 2005). As would be expected given the range of educational and professional skill levels of the foreign-born population, the academic and labor market outcomes of children of immigrants in the United States are quite varied. Status attainment research has powerfully demonstrated the role of parental education and income in intergenerational transfer of privilege (Blau & Duncan, 1967; Jencks, 1972; Mare, 1981). In general, this pattern holds true for children in immigrant families where children of low-educated, poor immigrant parents have, on average, lower levels of educational attainment than those students of higher status backgrounds.3 According to a report from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP, 2006), compared to White, Black, and Asian children, Latino children are the least likely to have a parent who attended college, and, along with Black children, Latinos are more likely to be considered low income4 even when their parents have had some college education and are employed full-time (NCCP, 2006). Other studies have shown a marked increase in poverty levels among immigrant families over the course of the past thirty years (Capps et al., 2005). It is not surprising, then, that students of Latin-American origin demonstrate some of the worst academic outcomes (Lutz, 2007; MacDonald, 2004; Perreira et al., 2006; Swail et al., 2004). In fact, statistics show that Latin American-origin students have the highest drop out rates of any major racial or ethnic group in U.S. schools, and those students who do make it to post-secondary education are overrepresented in two-year colleges (MacDonald, 2004; Swail et al., 2004). Identifying the factors that contribute to these disturbing educational trends is critical to interrupting this vicious cycle of poverty, inequality, and structural and cultural neglect. This paper aims to advance current discussions of the challenges to Latin American immigrant children’s school success by exploring the role of home-school conflicts in their current educational failure. Using the issue of cultural discontinuity as an example, it will argue that a range of institutional factors interact with structural barriers such as poverty, segregation, and limited English proficiency to further disadvantage low-income Latin American immigrant students, and this powerful interaction between cultural and structural obstacles must be taken into consideration in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon at hand. Given the multiplicity of forces at play when immigrant parents and students engage with schools, solely structural or cultural analyses are often inadequate to fully explain the complexity of these exchanges and their consequences. Instead, family-school relations and the accompanying clashes, misunderstandings, and moments of convergence must be viewed as the outcome of a series of mutually constitutive structural and cultural elements, and this analysis will pay special attention to scholars’ treatment of structural and cultural analyses of conflict and school failure. This paper will begin with an overview of the most prevalent and serious structural barriers in the lives of children of Latin American immigrants: poverty, segregation, and limited English proficiency. It will also include a discussion of some of the key factors associated with their low participation rates in post-secondary education: an important indicator of the failure of education systems to adequately prepare these students for success in the twenty-first century economy. Next, it will review some of the main theoretical contributions to the study of educational stratification and pay particular attention to the concepts of cultural capital, constitutive action, and constitutive rules. A discussion of the implications of internal school policies, practices, and culture for the academic experiences of low-income children of immigrants will follow, focusing on three of the major analytic points at which home-school conflicts and their consequences can be observed. Finally, the paper will close with a brief review of some of the explanations for immigrants’ academic achievement in the face of considerable barriers. Concluding remarks will include suggestions for next steps in the research and policy arenas as well as school reform proposals to better meet the needs of the growing population of children of immigrants in schools both in the United S