Immigrant students may improve their classmates' academic success, reports Ileana Najarro in Education Week, citing a recent study in Florida by David Figlio, a University of Rochester professor of economics and education, and colleagues.
In most cases, "greater exposure to immigrant peers correlated with better math and reading scores among U.S.-born students," researchers found.
Immigrant students tend to be well-behaved, which leads to more orderly classrooms, Figlio said. That's linked to higher academic outcomes. In addition, immigrants tend to be highly motivated, which could raise their classmates' expectations.
“It takes just an extraordinary degree of motivation and desire to make a better life for yourself and your family or for a family to uproot themselves from their home and their culture and make a home in another culture, another country,” Figlio said.
U.S. born students also may benefit from resources for immigrants, such as teachers trained in language development and funding for counselors, said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 Education Research at the Migration Policy Institute.
Children of immigrants experience significant upward mobility, wrote economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan in 2022. That was true in the 19th and 20th century, and it's still true in the 21st.They are the authors of Streets of Gold: America's Untold of Immigrant Success.
"No matter which country their parents came from, children of immigrants are more likely than the children of the U.S.-born to surpass their parents’ incomes when they are adults," they write. "Children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic today are just as likely to move up from their parents’ circumstances as were children of poor Swedes and Finns a hundred years ago."
Central American immigrants' children move up the economic ladder faster than U.S.-born children from low-income families and and end up, on average, "in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada)."
Such economic migration may be good for them; it doesn't mean it's good for us, particularly if such immigrants immigrate illegally, a word left out of this report.
That was the rationale for forced busing back in the 1970s. The better behaved white children would raise the standard of the black classmate next to them. How'd that work out.
It is very sad to see racism return, even if it is reversed back-flipped.
And will the schools permit the immigrants to retain their better behaved culture when the teachers are there to impose their Progressive values on students, which has led to the breakdown of school discipline?
In other news, when you average in some higher numbers to a set of lower numbers, the overall average goes up.
I don't know if I believe this. I had a long conversation recently with a 3rd-grade teacher with a lot of recent immigrants in her class. She said the burden was huge, because they had missed out on so much standard cultural behavior and now had to be taught all of it. For example, she said she had to take time out to teach them that one knocks at a door if one wants in. Her immigrant students didn't know this basic cultural norm and would stand outside and yell or kick at the door. Of course, this is no reflection on the students; how would they know this stuff if they had never been taught it?
But, it's hard…