The “Latino Education Crisis” not only threatens to dash the middle class aspirations of the nation’s largest immigrant group, it is also an ominous sign for democratic engagement and global competitiveness for U.S. society as a whole. This timely book argues that this crisis is more aptly characterized as a “Mexican Education Crisis.” This book brings together voices that are rarely heard on the same stage—Mexican and U.S. scholars of migration, schooling, and human development—to articulate a new approach to Mexican-American schooling: a bi-national focus that highlights the interpersonal assets of Mexican-origin children. Contributors document the urgency of adopting this approach and provide a framework for crossing national and disciplinary borders to improve scholarship, policy, and practice associated with PreK–12 schooling.

Contributors: James D. Bachmeier, Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, Benilde García Cabrero, Cynthia García Coll, Regina Cortina, Ivania de la Cruz, Guadalupe Ruiz Cuéllar, Claudia Galindo, Francisco X. Gaytán, Edmund T. Hamann, Nadia Huq, Mark A. Leach, Gabriela Livas Stein, Carmina Makar, Mary Martinez-Wenzl, Vilma Ortíz, María Guadalupe Pérez Martínez, Leslie Reese, Rosaura Tafoya-Estrada, Edward Telles, Ernesto Treviño, Víctor Zúñiga

Researchers and policymakers in the US and beyond increasingly seek to identify teaching qualities that are associated with academic achievement gains for K-12 students through effectiveness studies. Yet teaching quality varies with academic content and social contexts, involves multiple participants, and requires a range of skills, knowledge, and dispositions. In this essay, we address the inescapable tension between complexity and scale in research on teaching effectiveness. We provide five recommendations to study designers and analysts to manage this tension to enhance effectiveness research, drawing on our recent experiences as the first external analysts of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study. Our recommendations address conceptual framing, the measurement of teaching (e.g., observation protocols, student surveys), sampling, classroom videoing, and the use and interpretation of value-added models.

With the recommendations provided here, educators can better meet the needs of transnational students, particularly those U.S.-born children returning with their families to Mexico.

Claims abound in the research literature regarding multicultural teacher dispositions, including how to foster them in teacher preparation programs. However, measures of multicultural dispositions of teachers that (a) capture the range of conceptually rich constructs and (b) demonstrate strong psychometric properties are not represented in the literature. In this article, we discuss the iterative development and psychometric properties of the Multicultural Teacher Dispositions Scale (MTDS), a survey of 15 items designed to assess three dispositions/factors: Meekness, Social Awareness, and Advocacy. We analyze responses from 372 preservice teachers in three samples and analytic phases, and discuss factor and item analytic results from the final phase. Results demonstrate strong support for Meekness, though moderate support for Social Awareness and Advocacy. We discuss limitations, implications for measure refinement, and eventual use for research and practice improvement.

We analyze path models of a nationally representative sample of Mexican adolescents in 2008 to explore how migration variables interact with school retention to shape their migration plans, effort in school, and achievement on a standardized measure of Spanish literacy. Among other findings, we discover that more immediate plans are associated with lower performance for students considering migration, and that this relationship varies by family SES. We also find that parent migration exposure negatively affects achievement for some groups. We interpret findings in terms of structural inequalities in Mexico, and conclude with recommendations to enrich academic learning opportunities for children and youth within migrant families and communities.

We trace the development and analyze the generalizability of the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), an observation system designed to measure cultural dimensions of classroom interactions. We establish CASI measurement properties by analyzing panoramic videos of 4th and 5th grade classrooms from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and argue for its significance in terms of achievement opportunity for minoritized students and needed evidence regarding equitable teaching. We frame ten dimensions of sociocultural interactions within three domains: Life Applications (i.e., connections with what students know and do outside of school); Self in Group (i.e., interdependence to motivate learning and foster social identities); and Agency (i.e., how freedom and choice are managed).

We demonstrate how measurement error is associated with raters, lessons, and lesson segments, and discuss implications for CASI refinement, as well as appropriate instrument uses to enrich learning opportunities for minoritized students across a variety of classroom settings.

The number of Mexicans leaving the U.S. is now greater than the number coming to the U.S., signaling monumental shifts in U.S.-Mexico relations. This is evoking new questions about bi-national collaboration, particularly regarding the wellbeing of transnational children and youth. Analyzing data from the Mexican Census, we identify basic demographic trends of “returnee” children and youth —those in Mexico after living in the US. Most are US-born with a Mexican-born parent, relatively young, and dispersed across the country, with concentrations in municipalities in northern and central states. We frame classroom-learning needs for these students and share descriptive findings from a recent study of equitable teaching —i.e., high quality, adequate quantity, and meaningful (Jensen, Perez Martinez & Aguilar Escobar, 2016)—through video recordings of classroom interactions in early elementary settings in the state of Aguascalientes. We conclude with a series of recommendations to enrich learning opportunities for returnee students in Mexican classrooms.

We are struggling as a nation to make sense of the horror of innocent lives taken, the motives of killers, and the implications for race and police-community relations in America. I only wish that we white people would practice more meekness.

Educational opportunity—access to high quality schooling—is a critical aspect of social mobility and integration in the United States. This policy brief provides a demographic portrait of children with Central American heritage, with a focus on educational opportunity. We describe educational outcomes as well as some institutional conditions and family circumstances associated with opportunity.

Nearly 1.7 million children (ages 0 to 17 years) of Central American origin lived in the United States in 2011. Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Honduran origins are the most prevalent. Central American families settle throughout the U.S., though California, Texas, and Florida are the most common destination states. Most children of Central American origins (86%) were born in the United States, and most (82%) live in immigrant households (those with one or more foreign-born parents).

Among their Latino peers, children of Central American origins (40%) are the most likely to have an undocumented parent. Having an undocumented parent is associated with weaker educational opportunity—e.g., lower parent education, higher poverty, and lower rates of health insurance coverage.

Overall, children of Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran origin have weaker educational opportunity than their peers from the rest of Central America. These differences are associated with pre-existing social inequalities within migrant-sending communities, the selectivity of migrants versus non-migrants in their countries of origin, and structural inequalities in the U.S. school system.

The integration of Central American-origin children into the U.S. mainstream, as with other Latinos, is an intergenerational process. By the third generation, however, it appears that many children with Central American heritage are not integrated. Poverty, overcrowded housing, and health coverage rates between those with documented immigrant and U.S.-born parents are comparable. We conclude with four recommendations to improve educational opportunity of Central-American-origin children.

Research Findings: In this study we analyze how parent and teacher ratings of young Latino children’s social competencies in rural California are associated with children’s oral language development. We find (a) that there is considerable incongruence between parent and teacher ratings of child social competence, (b) that both parent and teacher ratings account for meaningful variation in children’s oral language development, and (c) that incongruence between parent and teacher ratings is associated with oral language above and beyond the effects of parent and teacher ratings alone. Practice or Policy: Young Latino children’s social competencies contribute to their oral language development. These competencies represent an important, though to date underutilized, asset for building stronger academic/language functioning. Part of the paradoxical development of Latino children (i.e., strong social though weak academic/language competence) could be attributable to cultural differences that underlie teacher and parent perceptions of social competence. Teachers of young Latino children should (a) be aware of the cultural nature of social competence and (b) explore culturally responsive ways of interacting in classrooms to build stronger oral language functioning.