Beginning
In college,
my friends and I started an after school pre-k literacy program for Hispanic
children. Because Hispanic children in
the United States face major obstacles standing in between them and their own
dreams. Our current immigration laws
refuse to give immigrant Hispanic children citizenship and continue to break up
Hispanic families. This economically
(and arguably morally) jeopardizes our nation’s promise of opportunity--our
American Dream--for any child who works hard.
Here’s why.
Introduction
to Academic and Economic Issues Facing Hispanic Children
Compared to all other ethnicities in the US,
hispanic children have the highest high school dropout rates in the country1,
and they academically underperform their white peers at every grade K-122. Consequently, as adults these children can
expect to be unemployed, earn low-incomes, and struggle as they straddle the
lines between struggling and living3,4.
Source of Academic and Economic Gaps
These children’s gaps in academics and economics
are the result of their cognitive and noncognitive skills deficits that began
in and grew larger since their early childhood4. Their mothers, who raise them and who, on
average, come from disadvantaged backgrounds with little formal schooling, know
they should invest in developing their children’s skills--but they don’t know
how and their children’s skill deficits reflect that lack of knowledge6.
Almost half, 46%, of all Hispanic children in
2010 had mothers who had not graduated from high school (8% for Whites)--and
20% of them had mothers with an education below the 8th grade; and among
immigrant Hispanic families, the percent of a Hispanic children with a mother
without a high school education rises to 54%; the percent with a mother’s
education below 8th grade, up to 29%!
Unfortunately, these mothers do not read to their
children as frequently as more educated mothers do; do not use and expose their
children to vibrant, expansive language and vocabularies as frequently; and
they do not enroll their children into high quality preschool and early
childhood programs that develop their children’s skills where they, the
mothers, cannot5,6. These
children lack these investments, and this lack of investment causes them to
develop skills deficits that open up early in their lives, widen over time, and
predict academic achievement gaps and adverse life outcomes according to their
finances and health.
These children also largely live in immigrant
homes where Spanish is the dominant language in the household. This linguistic isolation makes learning in
the American classroom all the more difficult, as English proficiency is a
major predictor of academic success for Hispanic children5.
NOTE:
1. Child
defined as child aged between 0 and 8 years of age.
2. All
percentages in following statistics are taken from footnotes 5 and 6
The first 5 years of a child’s life are critical
for their success as adults in the labor market. Within
these first few years of life (and even before birth), children develop most of their cognitive and
noncognitive skills that determine the rate at which they learn and the size of
the positive impact that schooling has on their lives. Cognitive skills are the “smarts” of a
child. Being able to do math problems
immediately and solve equations and puzzles.
The non-cognitive skills, also termed their social and emotional skills,
are their “soft skills,” their ability to motivate themselves, to be patient,
to persevere, and to sit down to study for long periods of time.
According to James Heckman, University Professor
at the University of Chicago, children with larger amounts of non-cognitive
skills develop their cognitive skills faster.
They learn faster. When they
realize this, they in turn invest more in their non-cognitive skills too
because they realize the complementary benefits of investing in both skills.
This is dynamic complementarity: it is a
virtuous cycle. And the more a child
already knows, the easier it is to learn new skills! This is self-productivity.
Simply put, a child that can study for long
periods of time and remain motivated to learn is going to learn faster than
another child that does not. And the
more the child continues to learn, the more the child will be willing to study
longer, making learn even easier over time.
Lastly, the more a child already knows, the easier it is to learn
something new!
Most importantly, there is a critical window in
time in a child’s life where these skills first develop and are easiest to
develop. These are the years from birth
to age 5.
The Future if We Don’t Act
As Hispanic immigration trends remain constant
for the foreseeable future, as largely
disadvantaged and uneducated Hispanic mothers and families immigrate
from Mexico and Central America to raise their children in the US, these
children will continue to drop-out of school at the nation’s highest rates;
they will continue to academically underperform; and they will continue to struggle
economically in the labor market5.
This means we’re going to have high rates of
poverty, violence, incarceration, high school dropouts, and civil-strife—we’ll
have a big chunk of the nation living in horrible conditions; and we’ll have
increasing inequality across racial and class lines that will only fuel racial
and class violence.
Simply put, Hispanic families tend to be, on
average, poor, uneducated, and linguistically isolated. Families expressing these characteristics,
unfortunately, provide suboptimal early childhood environments for their
children causing their skills deficits which lead to adverse life outcomes,
including lower educational attainment and poverty. It is also well documented that families
expressing these characteristics also express higher fertility rates: this
leads to a vicious cycle of intergenerational, adverse early childhood
environments and therefore intergenerational poverty.
Immigration,
Children, and America
These children have dreams. They live in the United States; they grow up
under the American flag; they make friends with American children--and they are
American in every way except for their parents’ immigration status (or their
own).
And 70% of them end up in only 10% of our
schools, and usually they’re the worst we have.
Instead of giving them our immigrant Founding
Fathers’ promise of opportunity, we stack the odds against them. Instead of helping their mothers get an
education, we send them back to their native countries--leaving their child to
grow up without a parent, without an advocate, without someone to invest in
their human capital--their cognitive and noncognitive skills.
We exacerbate their skills gaps and then deride
them for their poor performance in our schools and their performance in our
labor markets--even though they pick our vegetables, fruits, and crops at
dirt-cheap wages so we can eat them at dirt-cheap prices.
We endanger our country’s promise of opportunity
for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breathe free.
Why My Friends Decided to Teach
If we actually invested in our Hispanic children,
kept their families together, provided education to their mothers, these
children would go to college, earn higher incomes, raise their employment
rates, and--instead of allegedly draining our economy--would make our economy
and nation grow faster, grow more resilient, and grow closer to our Founding
Fathers’ vision of our nation as the home of opportunity.
That’s why my Hispanic friends decided to
teach. Because everyday that we focused
on investing in these children’s human capital--in their cognitive and
noncognitive skills--the closer we get to tearing down one obstacle in front of
them: their skills gap. If we could at
least tear this obstacle down, we have then gotten these children one step closer
to their American Dream. Whatever that
may be for them. To be a doctor, a
mechanic, a teacher--anything.
Because they deserve the same shot, like every child in America, at their own American Dream.
References
1. United States. Institute of
Education Sciences (IES), National Center for Education Statistics, US
Department of Education. Fast Facts: Dropout Rates. US Department of Education,
2013. Web. <http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16>.
2.
Reardon, S. F., & Galindo, C. (2006). Patterns of Hispanic students’ math
and English literacy test
scores in the early elementary grades: A report to the National Task Force on Early
Childhood Education for Hispanics. Tempe, AZ: National Task Force on Early Childhood
Education for Hispanics. Retrieved November 28, 2007, from
http://www.ecehispanic.org/work/patterns.pdf.
3. United States. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, US Department of Labor. Employment
Projections:
Education and employment rates by
educational attainment. Washington, DC: BLS, 2013.
4. Heckman, James (2008), “Schools, Skills, and
Synapses,” Economic Inquiry, 46(3): 289-324.
5. Understanding the language development and
Early Education of Hispanic Children.
Eugene
Garcia
and Erminda, 2012.
6. Risley, Todd, and Betty Hart. Meaningful
Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young
American
Children. York, Pennsylvania: Paul H.
Brookes Publishing Co, 1995.
