Ideals and Realities: An Examination of the Factors Shaping Newcomer Programming in Six U.S. School Districts

ABSTRACT

District and school leaders face the challenge of designing and implementing supports for immigrant newcomers who have recently arrived in the US, speak little English, and are unfamiliar with the US school system. This study draws on 117 interviews with educators in six purposefully-sampled school districts across the country to examine the factors that shaped newcomer educational services across grades K-12. Findings reveal that, although district leaders held particular ideals around positive and negative equality that aligned with their policy designs, how these policies were implemented depended on organizational capacity and resources, as well as school-based perceptions of newcomer needs.

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful for collaboration and support from Fen Chou and Kenji Hakuta of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and to the participants in the Council’s English Learner State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards. In addition, we are indebted to individuals in each of the six school districts examined who, with time and care, participated in this study. Finally, we are grateful for the excellent research assistance of Lorna Porter, Kylie Hiemstra, Hayley Weddle, and Peter Bjorklund, Jr.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although there are many terms used to describe recently-arrived immigrant students, in this paper we use the term newcomer. We settled on this term because unlike some other terms such as “immigrant student” and “recently-arrived English learner” used in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015), newcomer is a broader term without strict definitions regarding the amount of time a student has been in the United States. The definition provided in the Department of Education’s Newcomer Toolkit states that newcomers are “any foreign-born students and their families who have recently arrived in the United States” (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Equally as important, newcomer was the term most commonly used among our participants.

2. English learner is the term used in federal law to refer to an official classification in school for students who have a primary language other than English and whose English is determined to fall below a state-developed threshold indicating English proficiency. We acknowledge the deficit orientation of this term, which identifies students not by their proficiency in a non-English language, or by their bilingualism, but instead by their perceived lack of proficiency in English (Garcia, 2009). We use the term in this study because it is the term used in the districts in this study.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded through a generous grant from the Council of Chief State School Officers.