Failing to Meet the Challenge of Educating Children of Immigrants

After the federal government released the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the "Nation's Report Card" — we noted that children from poor families and from households that do not speak English continue to struggle. School quality certainly matters, but at present our school system's ability to raise the achievement level of at-risk children is limited. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on how to turn things around.

It seems very likely that immigration policy is exacerbating these challenges. Almost one in three students receiving free or reduced-priced school lunch — a common measure of poverty — is from an immigrant-headed household, as are 73 percent of children who speak a language other than English at home.

For more context on achievement disparities, it may be helpful to put the performance of demographic subgroups in the United States on an international scale. The following tables rank the 34 OECD countries on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a battery of tests administered in 2012. Interspersed among the scores achieved by OECD countries are the scores of various U.S. subgroups. There is a wide variation in scores among those subgroups.

Of course, international comparisons should always be interpreted with caution. There is no guarantee that every country tested a representative sample of its student population, and some of the variation could simply reflect how closely each country happens to align its curriculum with the PISA. Nevertheless, placing American subgroups on an international scale gives us some idea of what the differences within our own country can be.
 

Notes: C.I. = Confidence Interval.
OECD countries are ranked from 1 to 34.
In PISA data, the first generation are themselves foreign-born, the second generation has foreign-born fathers, and the third generation has U.S.-born fathers.
"High school dropout" refers to fathers who have more than nine, but fewer than 12 years of schooling.

Notes: C.I. = Confidence Interval.
OECD countries are ranked from 1 to 34.
In PISA data, the first generation are themselves foreign-born, the second generation has foreign-born fathers, and the third generation has U.S.-born fathers.
"High school dropout" refers to fathers who have more than nine, but fewer than 12 years of schooling.