Adult immigrants from Mexico and Central America were among the least likely to have made it to high school. Adult immigrants from East Asia and the Middle East were among the most likely to have a high school or college degree. But in the case of immigrant groups, that may mask some crucial differences.Ī 2009 analysis led by Hunter College professor Donald Hernandez found, for instance, large discrepancies in the relative education levels of many immigrant groups. Many of the proxies we use to measure poverty or disadvantage trace back to how much money a family makes. "They may have been physicians in their home country, but now they're having to work as a cook." "Immigrants often look low-income because they're in transition," says Patricia Gandara, a UCLA professor who has studied this trend in California. If you look only at family income, you might assume many immigrant groups come from relatively similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Those researchers have still found Spanish speakers lagging.
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It's no surprise that researchers studying this trend in the past have used income-based controls - such as whether a child qualifies for free or reduced lunch. It could be true that Spanish-speaking English learners in Philadelphia are generally poorer than, say, Vietnamese-speaking students, but it's unlikely family income totally accounts for the achievement gap. NPR Ed 6 Potential Brain Benefits Of Bilingual Education Plus, these schools have to deal with the compound effect of having so many students who experience trauma, transience and other disadvantages. High-poverty schools, Flores points out, tend to receive fewer resources and less-experienced teachers. So why aren't they testing well? Flores believes it's because Latino students are disproportionately living in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods and learning in isolated, high-poverty schools. Many of them, he says, can speak English better than Spanish. "We're talking about the ability to do grade-level content in English."įlores believes a lot of the students who score below proficient in English can speak and comprehend the language with ease. "We're not talking about the ability to communicate in English," Flores says.
Family income and segregationįlores contests the notion that Spanish speakers aren't learning English - at least in the way we typically understand language acquisition. In fact, he doesn't think the Spanish-language achievement gap has much to do with language at all. The report cited 12 studies - dating back to 2004 - that found this gap between Spanish-speaking English learners and other groups.īut Nelson Flores, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, grew up in an area of Philadelphia with a lot of Spanish speakers, too, and he says that's not always the case. "I have never seen any study that has looked at this question and not found this trend," says Ilana Umansky, who studies English acquisition at the University of Oregon.Įarlier this year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a 415-page report on English learners. The study, conducted by the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, just looked at English learners who entered the district as kindergartners in 2008 and their progress through the end of third grade.īut this phenomenon isn't specific to Philadelphia. And, on the extreme end, Spanish speakers were almost half as likely as Chinese speakers to cross the proficiency threshold.
Students whose home language was Spanish were considerably less likely to reach proficiency than any other subgroup. A recent study out of Philadelphia tracked kindergartners who were learning English and found that four years later there were major discrepancies between which groups of students had mastered the language.
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