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Children of immigrants: how well do they do in school?Measuring performance Record numbers of new immigrants arrived in Canada during the 1990s. In 2001, about 1.8 million people living in Canada were immigrants who had arrived during the previous ten years.1 Of these, 17%, or close to 310,000, were school children between the ages of 5 and 16. The integration of immigrant children – both children who immigrated with their parents and those born in Canada to parents who had immigrated – into the school system is an important issue for educators. The concentration of immigrant children in a relatively few cities presents challenges for local schools, as these children represent diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In a recent study, Christopher Worswick assesses the academic performance of Canadian-born children of immigrant parents from 1994 to 1998 using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) .2 He finds that while these children are more likely to start school with less-developed reading, writing and mathematics skills than their classmates with Canadian-born parents, the gap between the two groups disappears before the end of elementary school. Results from the 2000 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are consistent with these findings. Measuring performanceDuring household interviews, the NLSCY administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, which is designed to test a child’s level of oral vocabulary, to children aged 4 and 5 years old and for 6-year-olds who had not yet reached Grade 2. Children in Grade 2 or higher completed tests in reading and mathematics.Information was collected from teachers as well. Children were considered to have high performance if the teacher rated the child’s performance as being above the middle of the class; children rated at the middle or below were considered to have low performance. Finally, parents were also asked to provide an assessment of their child’s performance. Children’s performance varies by parents’ mother tongueWorswick’s work shows that mother tongue has an impact on school performance in a child’s early years. Children from immigrant families whose parents’ mother tongue was neither English nor French (allophone children) faced significant disadvantages in the first years of elementary school, but they made gains with each passing year. Teachers were much less likely to consider these students as being above the middle of the class than their classmates of Canadian-born parents. Their mathematics and reading skills were about 20% lower and their writing skills almost 30% lower. However, by age 10 or 11, these children were considered to be performing as well as their classmates in all three subject areas.While children from immigrant families whose parents’ mother tongue was either English or French had similar experiences, the gap between them and children of Canadian-born parents was much smaller. They were about as likely to be above the middle of the class in mathematics when they started school, but their writing and reading skills tended to be weaker. However, by the age of 9, they had caught up to, and even performed a bit better than, their classmates with Canadian-born parents. School performance over timeAnalysis of data from the 2000 PISA yields very similar results. As the number of years that an immigrant student lives in Canada increases, the closer the average score in reading is to the average scores of Canadian-born students (Figure 1). Rapid gains are made especially in the early years, as proficiency in English or French improves. The PISA results find that the average performance of immigrant and of Canadian-born students converges after the immigrant students have lived in Canada for about 14 years.Figure 1. Literacy scores of immigrant and Canadian-born students converge over time Source: Programme for International Student Assessment/Youth in Transition Survey 2000 Location of the school-aged immigrant populationThe success of school systems across Canada in meeting the educational requirements of young immigrant children is put into perspective when the scale of the challenge is understood. Nearly 2 million immigrants who arrived in Canada during the 1990s settled in one of the country’s 27 major cities. Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal received the greatest numbers of immigrants. In 2001, for example, more than one in four young people between the ages of 5 and 24 living in Toronto and Vancouver had immigrated to Canada in the 1990s.Figure 2. Proportion of immigrants among the school-age population (ages 5-24), selected census metropolitan areas, 1991, 1996, 2001
Furthermore, for the majority of these children, the language most
often used at home by their parents was neither English nor French. In
both Vancouver and Toronto in 2001, about one in five young people aged 5
to 24 spoke a language other than English or French at home. Many young,
recent immigrants, then, face the demands of academic studies at the same
time that they are adjusting to a new culture, language and environment.
Immigrant parents’ educational attainmentResearch consistently finds a strong link between parents’ education levels and children’s success in school. On this count, many children who immigrated to Canada during the 1990s fared well; 61% of working-age immigrants who arrived in Canada in the 1990s had postsecondary qualifications, compared to 48% for immigrants of the 1980s and 1970s.3 Forty-one percent of the 1990s arrivals were university graduates; in fact, both male and female immigrants were more likely to have a university degree than other working-age Canadians. The recent-immigrant population’s higher educational attainment should have a positive effect on their children’s performance in school.ConclusionFrom 1991 to 2000, 2.2 million immigrants were admitted to Canada , the highest number for any decade in the past century. In 2001, close to three-quarters of them lived in just three census metropolitan areas: Toronto , Vancouver and Montreal.Among 1990s immigrants, 310,000 were children between the ages of 5 and 16. For many of these children, the first language learned and used at home was neither English nor French. The language skills of children of immigrant parents just entering the school system were weaker than those of Canadian-born parents, but the longer the children lived in Canada , the smaller the gap in performance became, until it disappeared. In fact, in later years, the academic performance of many of these students surpassed that of their Canadian-born counterparts. This positive outcome attests to the efforts of school communities, of the children of immigrant families and of their parents. Setting a good foundation in the early years is essential for equipping these children with the skills they will need as they progress through the school system.Notes
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