Abstract
A critical issue facing the majority of immigrant adolescents in U.S. public schools is persistent academic underperformance. Using data from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, this study investigates the extent to which negative social environments in U.S. public schools predict the academic achievement of immigrant adolescents. Importantly, we simultaneously examine the roles of both the relational (individual-level) and structural (school-level) characteristics of these negative social environments. Multilevel structural equation modeling revealed that immigrant students who are embedded in more negative relationships (e.g., having peers who discriminate against them) have lower levels of academic achievement. These predictive effects of individual-level negative social environments on academic achievement are mediated by both perceived school safety and educational expectations. Furthermore, we find double mediation effects (i.e., three-pathway mediations) via perceptions of school safety and educational expectations. The existence of these double mediation effects implies that relational characteristics strongly predict immigrant adolescents’ perceptions, attitudes, and school outcomes. Finally, we find that structural characteristics of negative social environments in U.S. public schools (i.e., total student enrollment and school-level dropout rate) also negatively predict immigrant adolescent achievement. We discuss the implications of these findings for improving immigrant adolescents’ achievements in U.S. public schools.
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Notes
At the same time, we note that Asian immigrant children are not a monolithic entity. Polarization in terms of educational attainment within Asian immigrant students has been evidenced. For example, Southeast Asian ethnic groups lag far behind East Asian ethnic groups (Lee and Madyun 2008; Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2002).
Institutional agents are in general defined as adults who are affiliated with a school organization and can provide either academic support or non-academic care for the students. Thus, institutional agents include regular teachers, counselors, social workers, para-teachers, administrators, and volunteer aides, to name a few (see Stanton-Salazar (2011) for more categories of institutional agents).
See the Academy of Achievement website. http://www.achievement.org/.
However, Harrington and Boardman (1997) reported that middle-class students are more likely to possess redundant social capital, meaning that in addition to their parents, they are connected with resourceful people who could provide sufficient academic support, encouragement, and role-modeling.
One relevant question here is “who should be the positive reference group?” More often than not, the positive reference peer group refers to middle-class White students. However, the classifying of racial-ethnic minority students’ assimilation and acculturation to White middle-class standards or ideals as “success” needs to be revisited. When minority students are equipped with “positive racial self-conception,” they can “situationally and strategically racialize and deracialize achievement and the task of achievement as a form of academic motivation and self-preservation” (Carter 2005, p. 267). As long as minority students have positive ethnic identities, certain ethnically homogenous minority peer groups could serve as positive reference groups (Lee 2009).
Educational expectations here refer to beliefs regarding future academic performance based on more realistic self-assessments, whereas educational aspirations may indicate some level of hopefulness of future academic performance beyond one’s realistic expectation (Kao and Tienda 1998; Mickelson 1990; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Szalacha et al. 2005).
However, we note that the opposite method of influence is possible—i.e., high academic performance reinforces high educational expectation. Since our research is based on cross-sectional analysis, it is a daunting task to posit which causes which (Portes and Rivas 2011). As such, our final model examined the impact of educational expectation on academic achievement based on comparing the overall model fit between our final model (Fig. 1) and the competing model representing the inverse impact of academic achievement on educational expectation. The result indicated that the competing model did not fit the data better than the proposed model in our study. Furthermore, we checked a non-recursive model between educational expectation and GPA. However, since GPA’s effect on educational expectation turned out to be negative, indicating certain irrationality in terms of interpretation, we maintained the proposed model in this study as the final model. In similar logic, one may raise the question whether the model might fit better when the model uses educational expectation as a predictor of the five exogenous variables. In this case, the model fit turned out to be the same because the model is mathematically identical to the final model. Based on our literature review, however, we believe that the exogenous variables are predictive of educational expectation. In other words, psychological constructs such as educational expectations are more likely to be attributed to social contexts such as negative school environment in terms of time sequence.
The GPA of the excluded group was 2.57 while that of the included group was 2.53: t (899.4) = − 1.04, p = .297.
See Yuan and Bentler (2000) for details about this robust method.
While one may raise a concern about whether some of the exogenous variables might fit just as well as indicator variables in the School Safety construct, we wish to note that there are substantial differences in scales between the exogenous variables and the four indicator variables regressed on the School Safety construct. Also, we think that the perception of safety is substantively different from the perception of discrimination, even though they could be conceptually associated with each other. Finally, one may suggest that school safety could be conceptually modeled as a school-level variable. While this might be another competing model, we used school safety as an individual level because the data do not provide school-level measures on school safety.
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Lee, M., Kim, Y. & Madyun, N. Do relational and structural characteristics of negative school environments independently predict immigrant adolescents’ academic achievement?. Soc Psychol Educ 21, 539–563 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-018-9427-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-018-9427-0