Students in migrant farmworker families may move around the country with growing seasons and may not stay in your class for the entire year. Your migrant students may have In-depth knowledge of agriculture, seasons, and geography and can also benefit from strong support wherever they are residing.

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Migrant Students: What We Need to Know to Help Them Succeed

Migrant Students: What We Need to Know to Help Them Succeed

By

Giselle Lundy-Ponce
(2010)

It was just after college that I had my first encounter with migrant students and the world of migrant education. Following graduation, I got a job with The Close Up Foundation, a non-profit organization that promoted civic involvement and the study of democracy. The foundation provided a civics and social studies curriculum and materials for middle- and high school teachers to implement in their classes throughout the year. My particular program was targeted to English language learners (ELLs) who were immigrant and/or migrant students.

Through this job, I worked with ESL/ESOL teachers of migrant students and administrators of the Migrant Education Program (MEP)1 all over the country. I found them to be tireless advocates and passionate in their efforts to teach and serve their students, and learned immensely about migrant families and the educators who work with them. I hope some of those lessons shared in this article will provide a helpful context for educators who work with this unique population of students. These experiences opened my eyes to a reality I was unaware of, and inspired my subsequent work in education throughout all these years.

The historical background, issues, context, and data about migrant students are all too numerous and complex to explore in depth in this article. What follows is a snapshot of demographics (updated where possible), academic achievement data, a discussion of some of the other challenges these students confront as well as promising programs, and some recommendations for educators with migrant students in their classrooms to help them succeed. Additionally, at the end of the article, there is a listing of recommended resources for further information.

Who Are Migrant Children?

Migrant children2 served by the MEP are children and youth ages 0-213 whose families work in the agricultural and/or fisheries industries and who will often move across districts and state lines several times within a 12-36 month period of time, following the various crops by season. It is not unusual for children to also work in the fields, alongside their families, when they're not in school and even during the school year.

How many?

The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education (for the 2021-22 school year) shows that the MEP served a total of 213,569 students nationwide. Of these students, nearly half are ELLs.

Where are they?

Every state, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, has migrant students. California, Texas, Florida, Washington, and Oregon serve the most migrant students. (See Table 5A for a related map.)

What is their background?

While the majority of farmworkers are Latino, the population is diversifying. For example, the Shenandoah Migrant Valley Education Program reports that they are serving a growing number of families from North Africa and the Middle East. It is also important to note that many families hailing from Latin America may be Indigenous families who speak Indigenous languages and speak Spanish as a second or third language.

Challenges for migrant families

In 1994, the National Commission on Migrant Education (NCME) released its breakthrough report on the condition of education for school-age migrant children and youth. While there have been improvements, many of the Commission's startling findings still ring true today. At the time the NCME released its report, its findings included the following risk factors (Martinez et al, 1994):

  • Physical hazards

    Migrant farmworkers have one of the most labor-intensive, physically-demanding, often hazardous yet grossly undercompensated occupations in the country

  • Isolation

    Migrant families tend to live in isolation from the communities where they work

  • Family separation

    It is not uncommon for parents and children to be separated if parents want the children to finish the school year in the same school while they move on to the next work site

  • Socioeconomic disadvantages

    Migrant children experience more acute poverty, health problems, health hazards, social alienation, educational disadvantages, mobility and lack of educational opportunities than any other major school population segment

  • Educational background

    Migrant parents have the lowest levels of educational attainment of any occupational group

  • Language

    Large numbers of migrant students lack English language proficiency (even though most are U.S. citizens) and/or require remedial instruction

  • Graduation rates

    Migrant children have one of the highest dropout rates in the nation

  • Program support

    Federally-funded programs for migrant children are not sufficiently funded to meet the children's needs

Many migrant farmworkers in Florida will only earn $2.50 per large bucket of peanuts, and they can expect to fill some 10 buckets per person after a long 10-12 hour day.

Poverty, low wages, deplorable and unsafe living/working conditions, interrupted schooling, lack of social mobility and lack of educational opportunities still plague migrant families. Migrant farmworkers still toil long hours in the fields and most live well below the poverty level (Education Week, 2009; LaCroix, 2007; Franquiz et al, 2004).

There are generally no health insurance benefits, paid leave, pensions, workers' compensation benefits, overtime pay, life insurance or other benefits for migrant workers and their families (Branz-Spall et al, 2003).

For additional information about migrant farmworkers, including the increasing numbers of female workers and Indigenous workers, see these data summaries from the National Center for Farmworker Health and Farmworker Justice.

 

Lesson #1: Migrant parents want their children to have more, different and better opportunities than they ever had.

I recall that on my first trip to a district in southern California, the MEP administrator I was working with had planned a parent orientation meeting to talk about the program. When she scheduled the meeting for 8:00 p.m., I naïvely assumed that parents would be arriving after some "downtime" from work, having eaten dinner and leaving their children in the care of a babysitter. It occurred to me that the refreshments the administrator had laid out seemed more like dinner and that the food would go to waste since people would rather have coffee, tea, and cookies. I envisioned talking about the program's civics coursework, giving out brochures about the featured trip to Washington, DC, and getting parents to sign consent forms. I estimated that it wouldn't take longer than an hour.

Nothing really prepared me for what I would experience that evening. Parents arrived with their children — infants to teenagers — and it was clear they had come directly here from their arduous work in the fields. Some had driven over an hour to get there, and so the meeting started after everyone had eaten dinner and fed their babies, while the older children watched their younger siblings in an adjoining room.

I didn't get too far into my presentation when parents began telling me how much they wanted their children to do better in school, and about all the different problems their children experienced every day. Parents expressed concern about how much time commitment our program required after school since some children were out working in the fields with their parents afterhours. They were also hesitant to sign consent forms, afraid that their children could be reported to immigration officials — even when most of them there were born in the U.S.

After much reassurance, mostly from the administrator in charge of planning the meeting, the majority of parents agreed to let their children participate. Afterwards, as they left, they came up to both of us and thanked us profusely for the opportunity. They told us that they hoped this program would help their kids in the long run so they wouldn't have to work in the fields like they did. This was a very explicit and repeated sentiment at this meeting and at the many others that followed in different parts of the country. It was clear that even though parents felt pride and dignity in their work, they wanted more and better opportunities for their children.

 

Barriers to Achievement

Given these challenges, it is not surprising that most migrant students face multiple barriers to academic achievement, high school completion, and post-secondary attainment. Researchers, experts and advocates (NCBE, 2001; Kindler, 2002; Branz-Spall et al, 2003; Fránquiz & Salinas, 2004; LaCroix, 2007; USDE, 2006; NCES, 2010) have identified some of the following factors as key challenges jeopardizing migrant students' chances to excel academically and later in life:

These include a lack of:

  • Access to fully-qualified or adequately prepared teachers and staff
  • Enrollment in rigorous, college preparatory coursework
  • Participation in challenging grade-level content coursework if students are ELLs
  • Resources for unmet instructional needs
  • Knowledge about and access to information on higher education or post-secondary vocational options

Other challenges include:

  • Disproportionate attendance at high-needs schools with high concentrations of children who are poor and/or who are ELLs
  • Large gaps in missed instructional and assessment time
  • Missed time and lack of continuity while adjusting to different academic standards, curriculum, expectations, instructional programs, and school environments every time they move
  • Being overage in many cases, yet not being able to perform at grade level due to interrupted schooling, late-entry into the country, lack of exposure to high-quality early childhood education prior to Kindergarten
  • Difficulty keeping track of high school credits earned for graduation if students attend multiple schools in different states

Graduation rates

One of the most pernicious results of all these impediments is the unacceptably large number of students who drop out. Most of these students will not continue their education, which means they will remain in poverty and marginalized from the communities in which they live. While it is challenging to determine an exact nationwide dropout rate due to inconsistent record-keeping and tracking, different state formulas for calculating dropouts, and other data gathering challenges in trying to follow cohorts of students, all nationwide estimates for the migrant high school dropout rate are exceptionally high. Current estimates for the high school graduation rate of migrant students nationwide are equally difficult to establish. However, participation in migrant programs such as those detailed below can increase a student's chances of staying in school and graduating.

Age and grade gaps

It is not uncommon for migrant students to be at least one year older than their peers, and be at least half a year behind — this is especially true for those migrant students who are also ELLs. It is common knowledge that as students fall behind more and more, they give up the struggle to catch up and end up leaving school before they even reach the 11th or 12th grades. According to a 2018 Education Week report, "Just under 30 percent of migrant education students in the United States scored at or above proficient on their states’ reading/language arts assessments in grades 3-8, according to the 2016 program-performance report from the Migrant State Agency Program, part of the federal Education Department."

Upheaval and disruption

In addition to the barriers to educational achievement outlined above, many migrant children are subjected to the harmful disruptions of:

  • Moving in the middle of a school year
  • Navigating a new school system and environment multiple times in a school year
  • Not having an adequate living space to focus on their studies
  • Being physically far away from the resources of the school and the community afterhours and on weekends
  • Being separated from family members, teachers, and friends they have gotten to know and trust when they have to move
  • Being exposed to numerous hazards when they are working in the fields (lack of safety equipment and gear, pesticides, insecticides, heavy equipment and machinery, toxic fumes, insects, inclement weather, etc.)

Lesson #2: The mainstream community needs to know more about the work and efforts of migrant educators and students.

My work with the MEP program also gave me a new appreciation for the administrators, teachers and other educators of ELL and migrant students. All too often, they were eager to meet with me to talk about their project activities early in the mornings before school started or well after the afterschool activities.

Knowing that I was new to this field and the student population involved, they did everything they could to give me exposure to their work and invited me to observe their classrooms, attend planning meetings, school fairs, and other community events. Their extreme dedication to their students was evident in classrooms that were wallpapered with student work, where objects and furniture were often identified with labels in English and Spanish, and where children were usually enthusiastic, cheerful, and eager to participate and always encouraged to ask questions during lessons.

I also found that many of these teachers and administrators worked in separate sections of the school or had offices that were hard-to-find, hidden cubicles on windowless office floors in school district office buildings or in an annex. It was not unusual for other teachers and staff in schools and district office buildings to not even know that their school or district had a program that funded services for migrant students. In many conversations with administrators, teachers and students, they mentioned how they wished they were more visible to the rest of the school community.

 

Promising Programs

Despite the myriad difficulties that besiege migrant children and their families, scores of them have been successful and have overcome the odds thanks to the joint and coordinated efforts of targeted programs. Their resiliency also comes as a result of their own efforts, as well as the support and encouragement from family, schools, teachers, administrators, community organizers, advocates, foundations, etc. who have instilled in these students the belief that they can rise above their circumstances.

In addition to the Migrant Education Program, these other federally funded programs set up around the country to address the needs of migrant students have the widest reach:

  • The High School Equivalency Program (HEP) was established in 1967. HEP works with students who have dropped out of school to get them to acquire their general education diploma or GED. It reaches more than 7,000 students every year.
  • The College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) was established in 1972. CAMP works with students in their first year of college and helps them with academics, personal issues, and offers financial assistance. Approximately 2,400 migrant students participate annually. Close to 75 percent of all CAMP students graduate with a bachelor's degree.
  • Seasonal and Migrant Head Start serves children of migrant and seasonal farm workers who meet income and other eligibility guidelines. Services are for children from six-months to five-years of age. Because of the nature of the work done by the families, the hours of services are longer and the length of program is shorter (fewer months) than traditional Head Start services. It serves close to 35,000 children in 38 states.

There are also smaller, innovative programs that have been developed with Title I Part C funding that focus at the state and district level on dropout prevention, parent involvement, and after school programs. One such program that is well-know is the state consortia-led effort Project SMART (Summer Migrants Access Resources through Technology), which offers distance learning, enriched, engaging coursework, tutoring, televised instructional shows, and videotaped instruction. It was originally piloted in Montana and Texas, but currently operates in 16 states.

Some states like Florida and Montana also have laptop loan programs for migrant students so that they can keep up with their schoolwork, have access to online coursework and/or instructional information on core academic content, and stay connected to the teachers and program staff they have had contact with in the schools where they have been enrolled.

Lesson #3: When given the tools they need to succeed, migrant students rise to the challenge.

The foundation I worked for engaged teachers and students nationwide in its various secondary school programs by providing curriculum and resources for teachers to implement in their civics/history/social studies classes for a whole year. The program culminated in a one-week trip to Washington DC where students and their teachers participated in instructor-led seminars, workshops, and meetings with members of Congress, scholars, government officials, and other policy experts.

The civics curriculum I was helping teachers implement included service learning projects for the duration of the course. These were projects that went beyond routine community service project such as a one-time food or clothes collection for the needy. Teachers and students together would pick a theme or themes they wanted to explore and tied the project/s to corresponding lesson plans. One of the most popular themes for these projects was civic engagement to enact change. Teachers would instruct students about the history, traditions and institutions of democracy, and then students would select a particular topic that the school, community, town or city should address.

One class chose the topic of traffic safety — they wanted the town to put in more stop signs at busy intersections, inform families about the importance of wearing seat belts, and find the funding for a driver's education program at the school. They embarked on a letter writing campaign to the mayor and other locally elected officials, as well as to officials and representatives in their state capitol, followed by appearances at town hall and school board meetings to voice support for their initiatives, made presentations to the community, and partnered with the local radio station to launch a public awareness campaign about these issues.

It was all student-driven, and made the school and community pay attention to these students as active, engaged participants of the school, town and community. By the time students traveled to Washington, DC with their teacher, they were more prepared to share their experiences about civic involvement and its role in a democracy. More importantly, they had the knowledge and confidence to know that their views matter, that they have an important role to play in society.

 

Strategies for Success

What can educators do in the classroom to meet the needs of their migrant students, especially those who are ELLs? Some helpful ideas include:

Welcoming students and families

  • Creating a positive and welcoming classroom environment by modeling respect for differences, and sharing experiences and values
  • Reaching out to the families of migrant students and help them become familiarized and comfortable with the school their children currently attend
  • Creating a list of helpful social service resources and advocacy organizations that families can call on
  • Encouraging families to sustain their language and maintain strong cultural ties
  • Empowering families, students, and educators alike to recognize and harness migrant students' strengths and rich knowledge base, including as part of the curriculum

Encouraging academic success

  • Implementing research-based methods on effective instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse student populations into classroom practice
  • Exposing students to the more academically rigorous coursework and content that mainstream students have access to
  • Holding students to high expectations
  • Using cooperative learning strategies

Increasing collaboration and professional development

  • Reaching out to mainstream colleagues to get their assistance in teaching core content to students
  • Reaching out to colleagues at the school or via social networking sites to share best practices, resources, tools, information, etc. and not feel isolated

Encouraging future educational participation

  • Making sure that families of migrant students know what to do to navigate the system better once they are ready to move on
  • Urging students to continue their schooling, keeping in mind the particularly challenging situations of each student, and making appropriate referrals to other staff and/or community-based organizations whenever possible
  • Encouraging students to establish electronic mail "pen-pal" relationships with migrant students when they leave the school so that a sense of continuity and the security of familiarity can be established

When teachers, parents, administrators, the community, and other advocates work in concert to share best practices, communicate to each other and the community at large how important and necessary it is to pay particular attention to the needs of this population, and work closely with the children toward specific outcomes, migrant students greatly benefit.

Lesson #4: When you help your colleagues see migrant students' potential, the pieces will begin to fall into place.

In my experience with teachers, parents, and administrators in the MEP schools and districts, one thing was clear — they did not want their students to inspire pity or ephemeral charitable acts on behalf of the children. They wanted the cooperation of colleagues, the adequate resources, the will of community leaders and government officials to do right by these kids, and they wanted action, not words on behalf of politicians.

I recall one teacher who organized a day-long Saturday workshop for MEP teachers as well as for mainstream teachers at the school to focus on the achievement of migrant students as everyone's responsibility. She explicitly beckoned everyone to quit thinking of these students as "los pobrecitos" (those poor students we pity). Of course she wanted everyone to exercise empathy and compassion, but not at the expense of high academic expectations and the belief that students could improve and do more.

At the end of that training, everyone left with a different perspective and they were willing to set aside time each week to all come together and discuss particular strategies that worked, what didn't, what else would be needed, etc. — very much the way that doctors come together to share a diagnosis and a plan of action for a patient depending on the specialty needed. Many of them did not know, for example, that such few numbers of students graduated from high school (this was a middle school) and that knowledge made a big difference in their sense of shared accountability. They wanted to shift from working with these children based on a deficit perspective to instead focusing on their great potential.

 

Policy Recommendations

As important as the previously mentioned recommendations, strategies and lessons are for our schools to try and implement, teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors, school principals and other school staff can not do it alone. To better meet the needs of our migrant students, it is critical that we call attention to their plight and urge our nation's leaders to act in the following areas:

  • Dropout prevention and continuing education

    Call for the widespread implementation and strengthening of dropout prevention programs, as well as programs that reach out to "out of school" youth-students with interrupted formal schooling or no prior formal schooling who may have never been enrolled in U.S. schools

    Call for better outreach to school dropouts to return to school or enroll in high school equivalency or GED programs

  • Social services

    Call for the provision of more 'wraparound' social services for migrant families such as health screenings, nutrition counseling, child care referrals, pre-natal care, mental health services referrals

  • Collaboration

    Call for more targeted, concerted efforts between states, community-based organizations, districts, and schools to better coordinate efforts to meet the needs of migrant students without duplicating efforts

  • Child protection

    Enact legislation or enforce laws prohibiting children from working in the fields such as the CARE Act4

  • Intervention

    Commission and fund evaluations of intervention programs that specifically target migrant students to then disseminate best practices

  • Professional development

    Advocate for stronger, more widely available professional development programs for teachers and school staff on effective instruction for migrant students who are English language learners

  • Best practices

    Continue to help resource-poor schools improve and promote school improvement strategies that work

  • Student data tracking

    Provide adequate funding for better, more accurate tracking systems

  • Early childhood education

    Fund and implement more early childhood care and education programs for migrant infants, toddlers and preschoolers

  • Adult and parent education

    Promote adult education and parent involvement programs

We must recognize and respect the important and numerous contributions of migrant families to the country's economy, culture, and diversity. An informed, active citizenry and an educated workforce are the pillars of our democracy and our economy, and so we must engage in a concerted effort to address the many and significant challenges keeping too many of our migrant students from reaching their potential. We must look forward to telling a different story twenty years from now.

 

Recommended Resources

The following resources may be helpful in providing further information about migrant students.

Giselle Lundy-Ponce is an education policy and research analyst with the American Federation of Teachers.

Special thanks to Roger Rosenthal, Executive Director of the Migrant Legal Action Program, for his review of this article.

Video: The migrant education program

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