Without a Paddle: Barriers to School Enrollment Procedures for Immigrant Students and Families

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (9) ◽  
pp. 1283-1304
Author(s):  
Kerri Evans ◽  
Jaime Perez-Aponte ◽  
Ruth McRoy

The growing immigrant population in the United States consists of school-aged children who are in need of educational opportunities available through the country’s existing educational system. Education, a basic human right, is mandated through compulsory education laws in the United States so that all children can learn, grow, and be prepared for the future. However, immigrant children and families face a challenge early on, with the enrollment process itself. Enrollment barriers include lack of proper documentation, medical clearance, absence of parents, and discrimination. This article includes a review of relevant policy, a discussion of the implications of enforcing standards on immigrant students, and provides recommendations for future educational policy, practice, and guidelines for immigrant children. There is a need to provide culturally and trauma-sensitive services to this population as they adapt to American schools academically, culturally, linguistically, and psychosocially. More professional education, policies, and research are needed to streamline enrollment processes.

Author(s):  
Bic Ngo ◽  
Nimo Abdi ◽  
Diana Chandara

Education research has long highlighted gender disparities in the academic achievement of women and men. At the dawn of the 20th century, men attained higher levels of education than women. By the 21st century, women from all racial groups achieved higher levels of education than men. Likewise, among the children of post-1965 “new immigrants,” female students have higher levels of educational attainment than male students. While gender has remained important as a domain of analysis for understanding disparities in education, analyses of the significance of gender in the education of immigrant children have focused primarily on differences in gender norms and expectations of immigrant groups from those of dominant culture in the United States. Such an emphasis disregards the social, cultural, and political dynamics of acculturation and adaptation where gender is shaped by the ethnic family, race and racialization, and religion, among other things. The “caring,” translational work that Mexican American girls do for parents, the racialized gender construction of Southeast Asian American male students as Other (not male), and the Islamophobia faced by Somali American female students wearing hijabs make salient family obligations, race, and religious identity, respectively, in the educational experiences and outcomes of female and male immigrant students. Considerations of gender in the education of immigrant children in the United States necessitate an intersectional analysis that puts gender in conversation with social factors and institutions.


Author(s):  
Lyn Morland ◽  
Dina Birman ◽  
Burna L. Dunn ◽  
Myrna Ann Adkins ◽  
Laura Gardner

The United States is increasingly diverse and this is nowhere more evident than in our public schools. Children who arrive as immigrants, as well as those born here to at least one immigrant parent, currently make up nearly one-quarter of all children in the United States.2 By the year 2025, it is estimated that one-third or more of the students in our nation’s schools will be children of immigrants.3 After providing a brief overview of the immigrant population in the United States, this chapter will describe both the unique challenges as well as the strengths that many immigrant children bring to the classroom, and how teachers can help support their resilience and academic success.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Takafor Ndemanu ◽  
Sheri Jordan

This article sheds light on the challenges African immigrant children face in navigating through a relatively different and unfamiliar system of education in the United States. It also provides pre-emigration background information to the systems of education prevalent in Africa as well as the culturally responsive teaching strategies that support and enhance learning for the African immigrant students. Teachers of African immigrant children around the world will find this article particularly resourceful because there is limited scholarship about this segment of the public school population in the United States and in other developed countries.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


Author(s):  
Peter Westwood

Abstract This article describes the evolution of inclusive education in Hong Kong, moving from segregation via integration to inclusion. The outside influence of education policies and trends from Britain, Australia, and the United States are identified, and the current situation is described. In particular, obstacles that are encountered on the route to inclusion are compared with those found in other countries. These obstacles include large class size, teachers’ often negative attitudes, parents’ expectations, teachers’ lack of expertise for adapting the curriculum and for providing differentiated teaching, and ongoing conflicts between the notion of ‘inclusive schooling for all’ and the ‘academic standards agenda’.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002242942098252
Author(s):  
Justin J. West

The purpose of this study was to evaluate music teacher professional development (PD) practice and policy in the United States between 1993 and 2012. Using data from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) spanning these 20 years, I examined music teacher PD participation by topic, intensity, relevance, and format; music teachers’ top PD priorities; and the reach of certain PD-supportive policies. I assessed these descriptive results against a set of broadly agreed-on criteria for “effective” PD: content specificity, relevance, voluntariness/autonomy, social interaction, and sustained duration. Findings revealed a mixed record. Commendable improvements in content-specific PD access were undercut by deficiencies in social interaction, voluntariness/autonomy, sustained duration, and relevance. School policy, as reported by teachers, was grossly inadequate, with only one of the nine PD-supportive measures appearing on SASS reaching a majority of teachers in any given survey year. Implications for policy, practice, and scholarship are presented.


Author(s):  
Dick M. Carpenter

For decades, scholars have debated the purpose of U.S. education, but too often ignored how non-education-related power brokers define education or the requisite consequences.[Qu: Is there a different way of phrasing this? I'm not sure, in reading it, what you intend "the requisite consequences" to mean. Does this mean the results of education, or the consequences of inaccurate definitions of it? Also, may we rephrase "non-education-related power brokers" to something like "power brokers without education experience"?]This study examines how one of the most prominent categories of U.S. leaders, state governors, defines education and discusses the policy implications. We examine gubernatorial rhetoric—that is, public speeches—about education, collected from State of the State speeches from 2001 to 2008. In all, one purpose gains overwhelmingly more attention—economic efficiency. As long as governors and the general public, seen enthymematically through gubernatorial rhetoric, define education in economic terms, other purposes will likely remain marginalized, leading to education policies designed disproportionately to advance economic ends.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 716-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chi Nguyen ◽  
Maraki Kebede

The 2016 U.S. presidential election marked a time of deep political divide for the nation and resulted in an administrative transition that represented a drastic shift in values and opinions on several matters, including immigration. This article explores the implications of this political transition for immigrants’ K-16 educational experiences during President Trump’s administration. We revisit literature on school choice and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—two policy areas where the most significant changes are expected to occur—as it pertains to immigrant students in the United States. We identify areas where there is limited scholarship, such as the unique educational experiences of various minority immigrant subgroups, the interplay between race and immigration status, and immigrant students in rural areas. Recommendations are made for policy and research.


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