Hispanic Immigrants’ Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: NYT

The children of Hispanic immigrants tend to be born healthy and start life on an intellectual par with other American children, but by the age of 2 they begin to lag in linguistic and cognitive skills, a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, shows.

The study highlights a paradox that has bedeviled educators and Hispanic families for some time. By and large, mothers from Latin American countries take care of their health during their pregnancies and give birth to robust children, but those children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older.

The new Berkeley study suggests the shortfall may start even before the children enter preschool, supporting calls in Washington to spend more on programs that coach parents to stimulate their children with books, drills and games earlier in their lives.

“Our results show a very significant gap even at age 3,” said Bruce Fuller, one of the study’s authors and a professor of education at Berkeley. “If we don’t attack this disparity early on, these kids are headed quickly for a pretty dismal future in elementary school.”



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21latina.html

[no_hypocrisy]

1. NCLB

No time to provide remedial education when you're teaching how to pass standardized tests.

[Crzyrussell]

2. They aren't being

taught to standardized test at two and three years of age as the article states.

This issue starts in the home and probably has cultural roots.

[WriteDown]

4. Ugh..

Mention culture and you'll be labeled a racist.

[AnneD]

15. I'll take that risk.....

My Ex's family was from Cuba and there is a distinct difference in the way Anglo parents interact vs Hispanic. I did not coddle my daughter to the extent that my in laws did. She would just hold up her hand and the would offer her food, drink, whatever. I made her ask for what she wanted. They carried her everywhere-I made her walk. I wasn't cruel, but if she started crying, I let her get it out of her system. I let her figure out things for herself (puzzles and such) not do them for her as they often did. There is also a tendency for the kids to stay home rather than daycare. that is generally a good thing but only if the mother takes the initiative to teach the babies. PBS has some wonderful programs that address this.

[LanternWaste]

16. Those being?

"...and probably has cultural roots."

With both precision and relevance-- those being?

[WriteDown]

3. The daycare SAT's?

:shrug:

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I was thinking more in terms of Kindergarten when the big push in alphabet and numbers

comes into play.

[Igel]

13. A lot of damage is done by K.

Oddly, when I was little kindergarten was all fingerpainting and storytime. It was all about structured play and socialization. Learning to tie your shoes, learn to sit still. Maybe count to 10, learn your colors, and even the alphabet song.

I always thought that the reason for pushing content earlier and earlier was twofold: To make neurotic tax-paying parents happy and to start introducing content to "disadvantaged" kids who need an extra year.

My kid's in K from 8:30 to 3:30 M-F. Kindergarten's gone about 2 months here. He should be able to count to 50, have 10 sight words, simple phonics, shapes, colors, and write his name legibly. Most of his peers went to pre-K and had a bit leg up on these things. His handwriting's shakey, but the rest he's just about got nailed. He has 30 minutes' homework four days a week. His assessment test (informal, no official score) results told the teacher what to have us work over with him in addition to his required homework.

He's 5. I was less put upon, and usually had less homework, when I was in 9th and 10th grade.

[timo]

6. funny

The wife works at a local highschool, valedictorian 6 years in a row has been a child who was not a citizen of this country and who was here without any documentation, which is way more kids than you think given this town has 2 high schools. I dont want to be labeled a racist so feel free to bash me if I didnt use the proper terminologyin my description of the kids status.

[bertman]

7. I didn't see anything racist in your post, timo. The fact that there have been valedictorians

who were children of illegal immigrants is quite an achievement, or conversely, the rest of the student population may be a little slow. Pardon my sarcasm.

But, what's relevant here may be that some parents are more focused on the types of activities that give their children an advantage in an educational environment.

Thanks for the interesting comment.

[Mopar151]

8. Shedding a little light here

“The reading activities, educational games and performing the ABCs for Grandma — so often witnessed in middle-class homes — are less consistently seen in poor Latino households,” Professor Fuller said.

And the solution is in the works already:


“It seems like what might be the most helpful with Latino kids is early intervention,” Dr. Garcia said.

Carmen Rodriguez, the director of the Columbia University Head Start in New York City, said there was a waiting list of parents, most of them Hispanic, who want to take Early Head Start classes with their children

[WriteDown]

9. I'm working on a new set of learning CD's called "Hooked on Chavez"...

I'll have to make an announcement when they're done. :)

[pattmarty]

10. Jeez, a racist prick to boot. Who would of guessed????

[WriteDown]

11. Now you're just making things up.

:)

[Igel]

12. Mostly a waste of money.

Sorry for stating the obvious. Very few do.

The problems that cause these "low-income toddlers" (as though many toddlers had an income over $300/year) to underachieve don't stop upon starting K-12. They continue. While these kids benefit from early intervention, these programs stop at the pre-K/K boundary, for the most part. And by 5th grade they're mostly again below grade level as the kids typically barred from early intervention programs continue to perform at grade-level or exceed grade level. Often there's a differntial loss or gain in grade-level over the summer, achievement starts to lag by 3rd grade and by the end of grade school it's about the same between the experiment and control groups. The difference is significant, of course--but statistically significant, not significant as in large.

The response is to have after-school programs, special remediation programs in school, revamp the entire teaching methodology for low-achieving students, institute weekend programs, have a longer school year, not just in 1st and 2nd grade, but straight on through high school. Or at least until a kid's "internal culture" trumps his home culture--whether that be Latino, African-American, or "Anglo" (which, oddly, includes far more Celts and Slavs than Angles). The key isn't to remediate the effects of low-income, it's to remediate the effects of low-education parents or parents who haven't learned effective parenting strategies for the world outside their communities, past or present.

It's very important, however, not to blame the people disadvantaging their kids, the kids' parents. It's best to let people think that "society" is disadvantaging them, when all the kids need are parents that talk to their kids, explain things patiently, read to them, monitor their tv watching, and all other sorts of things that are really, really cheap.

[Name removed]

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