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In the fall of 1989, with the assistance of school officials, we sent contact letters to the parents of all Spanish-speaking children in 13 kindergarten classrooms in two Los Angeles area school districts. These classrooms were selected in four different schools that had large bilingual education programs. Based on school-conducted assessments, all children in the sample pool were to be placed in Spanish-language reading instruction at the time the study began. Of the 296 letters sent home, 252 (85%) were returned by parents indicating willingness to participate in the study. Of these, 154 parents were selected at random and contacted by phone to construct a Longitudinal Cohort of 121 families with a child entering kindergarten. In 15 cases, it was not possible to contact the family after making repeated attempts and/or leaving messages. In another 6 cases we were given incorrect telephone numbers. Six families had moved by time of the telephone contact. Five families declined to participate after we called and explained the project. One family was omitted from the sample because they had insisted to the school their child be placed in an English-only instructional program. Among the cohort of 121 children when the study began in 1989, 91 lived in Lawson, an unincorporated area of approximately 1.2 square miles in metropolitan Los Angeles. School enrollment in the Lawson District was over 90% Latino. Lawson is a small, Latino community near a major airport. In this district, children were placed in the district's bilingual education programs in which early instruction was carried out predominantly in Spanish. Spanish is also the language used in most of the small businesses and churches in the area. The remaining 30 families of the 121 in the initial sample included immigrant Spanish-speaking families residing in a racially-mixed neighborhood approximately 25 miles south of Lawson (Sandy Beach); these children attend school in a large urban district. The great majority (84%) of the parents in both communities came to the United States from Mexico; the rest were from Central America. Although all of the parents in the sample are immigrants, the majority (75.2%) of their kindergarten-aged children were born in the United States. In comparison with the mothers, fathers tended to have lived longer in the United States. When the study began in 1989, mothers had spent an average of 10.3 years in the United States, while fathers averaged 11.8 years. Mothers and fathers had virtually identical levels of education; both averaged 7.0 years of education (range = 0 to 16 years). These averages are similar to those reported for first generation Mexican Americans according to the 1979 Current Population Survey carried out by the US Census Department (Chapa, 1988). They are within the range reported for rural migrants to and non-migrants in the city of Oaxaca in 1987: 5.4 years of education for rural migrant females, 6.7 for non-migrant females, 6.8 for migrant males and 7.8 years of education for non-migrant males (Rees, Murphy, Morris & Winter, 1991). It should be noted, however, that years of schooling in the U.S. and Mexico are not directly comparable. At the time that the parents in the study were in school themselves, elementary schooling was universally available throughout the country but secondary schooling (grades 7-9) was not. Those who had completed secondary (grade 9) schooling were able to obtain white collar jobs such as cashiers, bank tellers, secretaries, and private accountants. Families were mostly low-income, with over 90% of the families qualifying for the free or reduced lunch program in kindergarten. Only 3.2% of the fathers reported being unemployed when the study began in 1989; however, this percentage rose during the economic decline of the early 1990's which had a strong impact in California. Parents with jobs in the service industries worked as cooks, waiters, maids and housekeepers, janitors, bartenders, bus boys, parking attendants, childcare workers, and cafeteria workers. Also included were two teacher's assistants and several gardeners. Skilled workers included mechanics, electricians, carpenters, welders, construction workers, as well as a dressmaker. Both men and women were employed as laborers, including factory work such as assembly, packing, machine operation, loading, and factory supervisor positions, as well as drivers of various types of vehicles. Approximately 43% of the mothers worked outside the home when the study began, with numbers rising as children grew older. Over 90% of the men, and 86% of the women were employed in skilled or unskilled labor jobs, and only 2% of the men and 3% of women were found in managerial or administrative positions. Sample retention. Currently, 91 of the original 121 families recruited for the study continue to participate. Of the 30 lost cases, half were lost during the first two years of the study when families moved away and contact information proved inadequate. For the last four years, the sample has remained constant at N=91. Sixty percent of the children are boys; 40% are girls. Goldenberg, et al. (2001) conducted a comparison of retained and missing cases. They compared 81 cases with complete data with the 40 cases excluded from stheir analyses (31 no longer participating in the project; 10 had more than two years of achievement data missing) indicated no significant differences at entry in mother's or father's education or family income. The 81 children with complete data did not have significantly different entering kindergarten reading skills but had significantly lower end of kindergarten reading skills (mean=-.28 + 1.01 for children retained in the sample compared to a mean=.12 +.98 for children missing from the sample, p<.05), and beginning and ending kindergarten teacher ratings (for beginning kindergarten: mean=-.25 + 1.07 for children retained compared to a mean=.19 +.91 for children missing from the sample, p<.05; for ending kindergarten: mean=-.23 + 1.01 for children retained compared to a mean=.18 +.89 for children missing from the sample, p<.05). Children in the present analyses did not differ otherwise from the total sample.
Interviews, child assessments, and school records beginning at child age 5 and continuing through child age 13 were used to obtain data on family background, home literacy activities, child outcomes, and child gender. Families were interviewed in their homes in the fall of children's kindergarten year by project-trained Spanish-speaking interviewers following a standard protocol. The interview included questions on family characteristics and demographics, parents' views of their children's projected academic progress, their aspirations and expectations with regard to their children's educational and occupational future, and their attitudes toward the instrumental value of schooling. Parents also were asked about factors that they considered important for student academic success and about the role parents play in school achievement. In-depth home interviews were carried out in the spring of 1993 and 1995. In addition, parents were interviewed by telephone in the fall and spring of each year through the fall of 1997. We asked about children's school progress, parents' aspirations and expectations for children's future educational attainment, specific learning activities in the home, parents' beliefs about how children learn, and their views regarding parent and teacher responsibilities in the learning process. Each telephone interview lasted approximately 20 minutes. Spring telephone contacts were shorter and served to collect updated information on children's school attendance and performance. Nested in the Longitudinal Cohort was the Case Sample, originally consisting of 32 families who were randomly selected from the entire longitudinal cohort. This subset was visited at home by a fieldworker 3-6 times each year in order to supplement information obtained during home and phone interviews with the entire Longitudinal Cohort and to provide a more detailed picture of family life. In 1996-1998, 21 adolescents from the cohort participated in a qualitative study, which was followed in 1999 by contacts begun with all adolescents in the study (N=90). The latter study continues to the present.
Chapa, J. (1988). The Question of Mexican American Assimilation: Socioeconomic Parity or Underclass Formation. Public Affairs Comment. Austin: Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin (Fall). Goldenberg, C.N, Gallimore, R., Reese, L. J., & Garnier, H. (2001). Cause or effect? A longitudinal study of immigrant Latinos' parents aspirations and expectations and their children's school performance. American Educational Research Journal. Rees, M., Murphy, A. Morris. E & Winter, M. (1991). Migrants to and in Oaxaca City. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 20, (1).
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