Strong English Crucial to Immigrants’ School Success

     English proficiency is the largest indicator of the academic success of immigrant students, and the quality of the overall language arts program at a school—not just programs for English-Language Learners within the school, according to an in-depth study. 
According to the study, researchers conclude that English proficiency has more of an impact on immigrant students’ academic success, as measured by grade point averages and standardized-test scores, than all other elements they studied put together.
Those other elements were students’ behavioral engagement, maternal education, having a working father, and being in a two-parent family. The study found that how well students learn English is also very strongly correlated with the quality of schools they attend. A school’s percentage of students who scored as proficient or above on the state’s English-language-arts test and the school’s average-daily-attendance rate were highly predictive of whether immigrant students learned English.
The researchers presented their findings in Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society.  Harvard University Press expects to release the volume in February. The researchers started with a sample of 407 immigrant students from Central America, China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico, whom they caught up with in middle school in the Boston and San Francisco areas and followed for five years, until 2002.
The sample had an average attrition rate of 5 percent each year; 309 students were left at the end of the study. The book includes 16 individual portraits of students, identified as “declining achievers,” “low achievers,” “improvers,” or “high achievers.” The researchers found that two-thirds of the several hundred students in their study showed declines in their grade point averages over five years.