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If you prefer audio to reading, you can catch this one hour Migration Policy Institute (MPI) presentation about MPI’s current findings on the educational progress of young refugee children in the United States.  I only perused a portion of the entire presentation (not due to lack of interest or applicability, I prefer text to audio), but it appears to provide an overview of key research findings and verbal discussions of data graphs from the written reports which I’ve encapsulated below.

I’m naturally a “close reader” and here are a few takeaways from each report, which by all means should not preclude you from investigating the plethora of information you’ll find upon your own close read.

Providing a Head Start:  Improving Access to Early Childhood Education for Refugees by Lyn Moreland, Nicole Ives, Clea McNeely, and Chenoa Allen, March 2016, Migration Policy Institute (MPI)

Although my background is not in early childhood education, I skimmed this report from the perspective of an educator with eight years of experience teaching immigrant, migrant, and refugee adults who are often also parents of children attending U.S. schools.  I frequently encounter an attitude of disdain from English-dominant literate adults who make an assumption that adult ELLs are somehow at personal fault for a lack of English proficiency.  There are many factors which contribute to an adult’s struggle to learn a new language; among them are the social and emotional implications tied to learning a new language that is not chosen as a purely educational or hobbyist pursuit.  When language is thrust upon you as one factor among many on a long list of survival needs that must be prioritized with food, shelter, and employment, the dissonance of needing English in order to get survival needs met locks even highly educated ELLs into linguistically isolating circumstances.    Parents in my adult ELL class frequently get a bad rap for non-participation in their child’s education or for seemingly not caring about it.  This is simply not a stereotype that can be applied any more broadly to parents who are ELLs (U.S-born or not) than can be said conversely about English-dominant parents.  The following excerpt from the MPI report illuminates barriers many PK-20 educators haven’t encountered in their own lives, and are therefore unlikely to consider as underlying causes for what the see as an intentional lack of parent participation.  MPI sites the following barriers to families’ participation [in ECEC programs] as primarily:

 “Those with limited formal education may not realize the importance of ECEC for their children’s educational success.  When parents are new to this country, they are less likely to understand ECEC programs and how to access them, and their beliefs regarding child rearing and education may differ from those in the U.S. mainstream.²¹  These barriers to ECEC participation are compounded when immigrant parents have limited English proficiency and low educational attainment and literacy – characteristics that are common among refugees resettled to the United States, given their increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.²²” (p 5)

My opinion is that we need to be watchful of our nation’s history of using education as a means of assimilation over acculturation.  Otherwise how do we ensure that our intentions and motivations don’t impose child-rearing practices that might truncate or usurp a stay-at-home-parenting model of young children that may be even more critical to a family who places a different emphasis on by whom and how a child should be nurtured in the early years?  How might differing beliefs about parenting combined with a personal history of previously forced family separations often experienced by refugee and migrant families also impact parent reluctance to enroll children in ECEC?  And if that is a contributing factor, I wonder how many (if any) ECEC programs exist that are created on a model where the parent and child attend together, explicitly with the intention that the parent learns English through their role as a caregiver while attending to their child at the ECEC?  In creating one we would be serving two needs through one program.  This would require that ECEC staff be trained in or have at least one staff member trained in educating ELL adults.  And this model would enable parents who become bilingual to assume teaching responsibilities within the ECEC in the future.  Pardon my daydreaming…back to the MPI reports.

A separate report also issued by MPI in March 2016 is, “Young Children of Refugees in the United States:  Integration Successes and Challenges” by Kate Hooper, Jie Zong, Randy Capps, and Michael Fix.  This report focuses on children up to age 10 who are living with refugee parents in the United States and mirrors the emerging profiles of parents noted in the ECEC research report encapsulated above:

“Another risk factor is the low education level or illiteracy of a parent.  Lacking reliable data on refugees’ educational attainment at resettlement, this study employs data on native-language literacy as a proxy.³⁴” (p 11)

“Proxy” meaning that refugees often “self-report” their native language literacy levels and are not given a native language literacy screening test.

“The English-language skills of arriving refugees varied widely according to their origins (see Figure 3).  Eighty-nine percent of Liberians reported speaking some English (with 44 percent speaking good English), but only 4 percent of Cubans made the same claim (with less than 1 percent speaking good English).  More recent arrivals (e.g. from Bhutan and Liberia) were more likely to speak English prior to resettlement than some of the larger groups with longer U.S. residence (from Ukraine, Russia, and Cuba) – further evidence that the English proficiency of refugee arrivals has risen over time.”  (p 12)

These findings might also connect to the research report I posted and encapsulated in last week’s blog entry that examined which linguistic populations reclassify from language services most rapidly in K-12 and emerging patterns indicating why.

Although the MPI report on young refugee children recognizes that a risk factor of children of refugees is “low parental English proficiency and high poverty” (p 2), the report also speaks of many highly valuable family structures that will enlighten some educators and administrators.  For example,

“many children in refugee families benefit from protective factors such as strong family structures, high parental employment, and high parental education.”  (p 2)

The supporting data paints a complimentary comparison of parental supports in families who are also refugee in comparison to how some children of U.S.-born parents fare educationally.  This underscores what I see in ELL adults who are highly educated in their first language – similar to their children, ELL parents experience a cultural and linguistic barrier that disenfranchises them from fully expressing their desire to participate in their own much less their children’s educational pursuits.

While the MPR report substantiates the existence of ELL parent disenfranchisement as partially a linguistic one, the report also provides evidence that a strong network of social service and public benefits exists to support refugee family integrationin the U.S., and that as a result children

“fare as well or almost as well as children with U.S.-born parents on several indicators.  There are some exceptions to this largely positive story, however.  Linguistic isolation is high among refugee families, including Cubans and Vietnamese, the two largest and most established groups.”  (emphasis added)  (p 2)

How are you meeting the needs of refugee families in your school district or community?  I, and other readers, would love to hear from you.