Immigrants Do Well in School, Study Finds

The conventional wisdom about immigrant children suggests that they bring substandard skills and poor attitudes to school and that assimilation--the embrace of mainstream American values and lifestyles--is their salvation.

But a new national study of 25,000 eighth-graders offers compelling evidence to the contrary. The findings are likely to stir further debate about how well immigrant youths learn and whether they are a boon for--or a drag on--the nation’s economy and public schools.

The analysis by two University of Chicago researchers found that Asian, Latino and black children with immigrant parents perform better in school than minorities whose parents were born here. Their grades are superior, they score higher on standardized tests and they aspire to college at a greater rate than their third-generation peers.

The defining difference, the researchers believe, is the hopeful outlook of their immigrant parents.

Immigrant mothers and fathers generally “harbor optimism about the advantages of playing by the rules and the benefits that will occur through education,” said University of Chicago sociology professor Marta Tienda, one of the study’s authors.

Thus, even though they may occupy the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, immigrant parents expect to improve their status and strive to ensure their children’s upward mobility. Compared to American-born minority parents, they have a greater tendency to relieve their children of household chores to give them more study time, encourage older siblings to tutor younger children, and restrict television viewing, the study found.

These findings reinforce conclusions reported recently by other experts on immigrants that contradict the popular belief that assimilation leads to greater success in school and life.

“A number of these studies suggest there is a very funny paradox at work,” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, visiting professor of human development and psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, whose studies have compared the attitudes and aspirations of Mexican children with successive generations of Mexican migrants to this country.

“New immigrants in general . . . are reported to be very eager to do well in school, to learn English, as a way of enhancing their status. But there is this paradox that the longer they are in the U.S., the more ambivalent they become in their attitude toward school.”

Suarez-Orozco, whose permanent post is associate professor of anthropology at UC San Diego, said the emerging research indicates that the academic difficulties encountered by many Latino, black and Asian youths may have more to do with their negative experiences as ethnic minorities in this country than with the cultural systems that their families brought from their native lands.

The optimism of immigrant parents and children stems from their ability to contrast their new lives with the hardships of life in their old country. But native-born children, Suarez-Orozco said, have only the standards of mainstream American society to measure themselves against. They run a greater risk of viewing their future through a “prism of deprivation” and developing a skepticism about the advantages of schooling.

The positive view of the educational attainments of immigrant children may surprise leaders in the anti-immigration movement, who argue that newcomers and their offspring are straining public resources and driving down the quality of life.

Glenn Spenser, founder of a Sherman Oaks-based group that supports Proposition 187, which restricts access to public services for illegal immigrants, said he is “totally skeptical” of the findings.

“With California receiving such a large percentage of immigrants from around the world,” he said, “we should be experiencing outstanding performances in our schools. I don’t see it, do you?”

But studies by Tienda and others strongly suggest that the debate over immigration is poorly framed, Suarez-Orozco said. “Perhaps the question is, are we (America) still good for immigrants? It may be that assimilation is dangerous to your health.”

The University of Chicago study is one of the largest scale examinations of educational progress to focus on several generations of minority children. Published in the March issue of Social Science Quarterly, it drew upon a representative sample of 24,599 students from 1,052 randomly selected schools nationwide. The students were eighth-graders in 1988.

The higher achievement levels of the first- and second-generation children were clearest among Asian students, Tienda and co-author Grace Kao, a University of Chicago graduate student, found.

First- and second-generation Asian eighth-graders scored about five points higher on standardized reading and math tests than third-generation Asians. On a 4.0 grade scale, the first and second generations also rated about half of a grade-point higher than their third-generation peers.

First-generation black students, who were largely immigrants from Caribbean nations, attained higher grades and math test scores than all native-born blacks, and second-generation black youths had the best reading scores.

Among Latinos, the researchers found that generational status did not markedly improve scholastic performance. But first- and second-generation Latino youths were more likely to express the desire to graduate from college than their third-generation counterparts.

Tienda and Kao believe that these findings point to beneficial aspects of having immigrant parents. They found, for instance, that foreign-born parents were more likely to attend parent-teacher meetings, set aside a place in the home for doing homework, and limit chores and television time.

The process that leads to academic deterioration in the third generation is complex, but Tienda speculates that the “negative influence of assimilation” gradually erodes the optimism that drove the new arrivals to succeed in school. Suarez-Orozco believes that the downturn strikes earlier, in the second generation.

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Generation Gap

Here are math and reading test scores for three generations of Asian, Latino, black and white eighth-graders, generally showing higher achievement by first- and second-generation youths. The scores have been adjusted for differences in socioeconomic background. Shown are the mean scores of eighth-grade boys with high school-educated parents and family incomes of $40,000, but the point differences reflect the trends found in the total survey, which included more than 24,000 students nationwide.

Source: The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago