Melissa Marchall Vanderbilt University
This research studies immigrant parental involvement in schools and the extent to which it links to civic and political incorporation. Tremendous rapid demographic change in urban schools over the past generation has meant an influx of young migrants and their families who are confronting public institutions not accustomed to serving them. Although considerable research has been devoted to the effects of immigrant status on schooling outcomes and achievement, less attention has been focused on immigrant parents' involvement in schools. The study will thus investigate whether and how immigrants engage in schools and other community institutions, and examine differences in form and frequency across immigrant groups situated in different structural circumstances and local contexts. A major focus is to evaluate whether immigrant parents know about school-initiated programs designed to encourage and promote their involvement and whether they respond to these programs by getting involved.
The project merges knowledge, methodologies, and personnel across the disciplines of sociology, political science, demography, and public policy. The analysis draws on studies about immigrant civic and political engagement, parental involvement in schools, and institutional (school) attributes. The macro-level analysis uses data from the National Center for Educational Statistics Schools and Staffing Surveys), supplemented by our interviews with school personnel in New York and Chicago, to examine the programs and practices of schools that attempt to reach immigrant parents. The micro-level analysis features parental responses to an original survey designed to capture their involvement in immigrant communities in two of the largest gateway cities, Chicago and New York. In each city, the PIs will survey Asian/Latino respondents from three predominantly foreign-born communities that represent distinct ethnic origin groups (Chinese, Dominicans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans). Together, the analyses will illuminate how school and teacher practices influence the pattern and form of involvement among immigrant parents. By comparing what schools report they offer to parent's knowledge of initiatives and programs, the analyses will offer insights into the effectiveness of existing school programs. In addition, they will highlight the extent to which the particular types of parental involvement emphasized by schools are consistent with the types reported by parents. Finally, the PIs will study links between school involvement and broader political/civic participation.
Broader Impacts
The research relies on several different methodologies, including telephone surveys of immigrant parents, in-depth interviews of school administrators, and site visits to elementary and middle schools. These interactions will forge relationships with local public schools. Further, project results will include 'best practices' for how schools may develop and improve programs and practices to foster immigrant parent involvement. By sharing findings with administrators, the project will advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning. This information, in turn, should help build more effective schools, improve the educational prospects of immigrant children, and increase understanding about how immigrant parents engage their schools and communities. In addition, because the project requires that graduate research assistants be fluent in Spanish, Mandarin, or Cantonese, the investigators will recruit students with these language skills as research assistants and therefore provide valuable opportunities for minority student participation. Finally, having an immigration fellow from the Brookings Institution on the research team increases the ability to disseminate project results to a broad audience, particularly policy makers and practitioners who are not likely to read academic books and journal articles. In this way, findings will enhance the scientific understanding of how immigrant parents participate in schools, communities and politics, and provide real policy and programmatic insights to teachers, principals and other school officials.
