Clearing the Path for First-Generation College Students by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498537025
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Parent Influences on Education through Advocating and Intervening in School

Unlike the direct support that parents provide in their children’s educational lives, the intergenerational and transnational process that privileges undocumented students with college-educated parents over their first-generation peers operates in less direct and sometimes unexpected ways. The educational trajectory of immigrant students is shaped by the educational systems and opportunities for these students in their home country as well as those they are met with upon arriving in the United States, reflecting social, political, and economic differences between sending countries as well as differences in wealth among immigrant families (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, Feliciano 2006). Contrary to some common expectations about the quality of education in developing nations compared to the United States, three interviewees described private schools that they attended in their home country, and the shock of transitioning to an urban school system in the United States. This observation about the experience of private education does not imply that all immigrants experienced higher educational quality in their home country than in the United States; rather, it is meant to challenge sometimes mistaken assumptions about the superiority of US education and is consistent with segmented assimilation theory, which recognizes that many new immigrant children are channeled into low-income public schools (Portes and Zhou 1993). For example, Alejandra, one of the students with college-educated parents, described her shock when she encountered the behavior of classmates in Boston Public Schools:

I was sheltered in Colombia. Y’know, Colombia is very violent, yeah, you hear all about this, but I was very sheltered in a way, so I didn’t hear it. But my experiences in [US] public school, I toughened up. I guess that’s the word like, I toughened up. I learned about that kids would do drugs. I learned that kids who don’t go to school, they could drop out at 16. I never thought that. . . . And oh!—what shocked me the most was like, when kids would yell at the teachers. Like, in Colombia you don’t do that. You respect your teachers. You’re supposed to respect your elders. Y’know, but you don’t hear them yelling, be like “bitch! You’re such a bitch.” I never heard that in Colombia until I came here. I never thought that kids my age would be yelling at their professors, saying like “bitch!” Or “you’re such an asshole.” Y’know, all those bad words. That was really a shock, a cultural shock for me because kids were like very “out there.” I don’t know what kind of “out there” but they were out there. I went to [a competitive public school] because my experience was like, too much for me, I couldn’t take it.

TPS: That was here in Boston?

Alejandra: Yeah, in [another neighborhood]. So, then I went there, but I was in shock, because I thought that [my neighborhood public school] was tough… but that was so much tougher than [the public school]. Like they had no mirrors inside the bathrooms. Because they knew that they would fight, the girls, and y’know they would hurt them with the mirrors.

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