Spare Parts, which tells the true story of an underdog robotics team of Mexican immigrants, is inspirational and nearly waylaid by cliches, writes the Arizona Republic.

In 2004, Arizona high school boys — all undocumented immigrants — beat well-funded teams from around the country — including a team from MIT — in an underwater robotics competition. Joshua Davis’ Wired article and book inspired a documentary, Underwater Dreams.

When the movie ends, the boys’ future seems to be bright, writes Joshua Davis in a New York Times op-ed. But, because they were undocumented, only one earned a bachelor’s degree and none work in robotics.

One works as a cook, another as a janitor, according to Davis. A third is unemployed. He dropped out of Arizona State when voters passed Proposition 300, which banned state aid or in-state tuition for undocumented students.

 Oscar Vazquez . . . also had a scholarship to A.S.U., and after working menial jobs for a year, was able to attend. He was a sophomore when Proposition 300 passed, and managed to stay in school only by piecing together more scholarships, all while leading the university’s robotics team to regional championships. He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2009 and applied for legal residency.

Not only was his application denied, but he was also summarily banned from the United States for 10 years for living here without a visa. He ended up working on an assembly line in Mexico.

After a year, his ban was reversed when Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, interceded on his behalf. Mr. Vazquez returned, enlisted in the Army, and served a tour of combat duty in Afghanistan. He is finally a citizen, and repairs trains in Montana for the railroad company BNSF.

Deporting talented young people who’ve grown up in the U.S. is “a startling rebuke to the American dream,” concludes Davis, who argues for President Obama’s executive action granting work permits to undocumented immigrants like the robotics team.

As a private school, Tufts is not obligated to report violations of (immigration) law to federal authorities.  If Tufts wants to consider illegal immigrants as “domestic applicants”, that’s their own business.  It’s their money, they can even pay for tuition for illegal immigrants if they so choose, and they have so chosen:

Tufts University announced Tuesday it will “proactively and openly” recruit undocumented students and offer financial aid to eligible students, a clear declaration that immigration advocates hailed as a significant victory.

 

Under the new policy, the private university will consider all students in the country illegally as regular domestic applicants, eligible for the same university aid as US citizens. Because undocumented students are ineligible for federal financial aid, the university will make up the difference out of its own funds for students who cannot afford to pay their own way.

 

“In keeping with our current undergraduate financial aid policy, Tufts will meet 100 percent of the demonstrated need of every undocumented student offered undergraduate admission to Tufts,” the university said in a statement.

I would be interested in seeing how Tufts’ endowment changes over the next several years if this policy continues.

Classics scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a graduate of Manhattan’s Collegiate School, Princeton, Oxford and Stanford, will join the Princeton faculty next year. In Undocumented, he describes his “odyssey from a homeless shelter to the Ivy League.”

Born in the Dominican Republic, Padilla came to the U.S. at the age of four with his parents, who were seeking medical care for his pregnant mother. When the visa expired, she stayed with her two sons. His father, unable to find a job, returned home.

In a homeless shelter’s library, Padilla discovered a book on ancient Greece. He also met an arts teacher who helped him apply for a scholarship to Collegiate, an elite private school that teaches Latin and Greek.

His research focuses on the importance of religion in the rise of mid-Republican Rome.

Students leaving Patterson High at the end of a spring day include, starting fourth from left, Nadifa Idriss, Mona Al halabi, Manuel Maurizaca and Fayza Al halabi. Credit: Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun

At Baltimore’s Patterson High, 370 of 1,100 students are immigrants, including refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Central America. The number has tripled in the past two years, reports Liz Bowie in the Baltimore Sun in part 1 of Unsettled Journeys.

Many of these students “came to escape war, gang violence and starvation,” reports Bowie.

At the Hispanic Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Donna Fallon Batkis is treating young immigrants who’ve survived kidnappings and rape, “not just rape of women, but sexual abuse of men.”

Reema and Ahmed Alfaheed look at videos of the refugee camp near the Iraq-Syria border, where they lived for six years. Credit: Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun

Thanks to modern technology, students can stay in touch with loved ones  — or watch a beheading in their home country.

Narmin Al Eethawi’s father was kidnapped and tortured in Baghdad. Four uncles were killed.

Her “phone buzzed with Facebook text messages throughout her day with snippets of news from Iraq,” writes Bowie. Her sister is there — and Mustafa, who wants her to return to marry him. “When she got lost in Baltimore and didn’t know what to do, she called 22-year-old Mustafa to help her with directions.”

Even amid the tranquillity of a soccer field, Reema Alfaheed, one of Narmin’s best friends, couldn’t escape. She was on the phone with a friend, a boy in Syria, who was lamenting that, because of the war, he couldn’t play soccer or go to school. Then Reema heard an explosion and people screaming. The phone went dead.

Three days later, she learned her friend had survived the bombing, but was left with a head injury and broken leg.

At his retirement party, Tom Smith, who taught English as a Second Language, encouraged Narmin to break off the relationship with Mustafa and commit to living in America.

Her father, a truck driver, was earning enough for the family to buy a house. Her mother was learning English at community college. Narmin got a summer job at a diner — and a learner’s permit.

By the start of senior year, Narmin “still struggled with English, and anatomy and physiology was a challenge, but she was earning top grades,” writes Bowie. “She wanted a career in medicine.”

She’d decided not to return to Iraq.

Part two focuses on Central American immigrants. Many are here illegally. Exel Estrada, 17, now reunited with his mother after years of fending for himself in Guatemala, works a swing shift as a janitor. “His homework had to wait for the moments he could fit it in: the bus ride to school, a 20-minute free period, lunch or a slow moment during class.”

The fall issue of Education Next is out, including my article on what’s changed in how schools are educating students who aren’t proficient in English.

Pushed by No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) accountability measures and the college-for-all movement, educators nationwide have raised expectations for children from immigrant families.

More ELLs are learning in English, as old-style bilingual ed fades away. However, “dual immersion” bilingual programs are proving popular with educated, English-speaking parents.

There’s a greater sense of urgency about getting kids to proficiency in elementary school.

PBS Newshour is airing a two part series on how schools are trying to educate immigrant and refugee students.

Las Americas Newcomer School in Houston enrolls newly arrived students who speak nearly 30 languages.  It takes a year or two to understand the language and the culture, says Principal Marie Moreno.

A high-achieving New Jersey school district needs to ease pressure on students and focus more on “social-emotional development,” West Windsor-Plainsboro Superintendent David Aderhold argued in a letter to parents.

“The perpetual achievement machine continues to demand higher scores and greater success each passing year,” he wrote. “The grade has become the end point, not the learning.”

The changes have revealed a divide between white parents, who welcome the changes, and Asian parents, who think achievement should come first, reports the New York Times.

Educated immigrants from China, India and Korea have flooded into the district, which is near Princeton: 65 percent of students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007.

At follow-up meetings, Aderhold talked about two clusters of suicides in the last six years in high-achieving Palo Alto (California) schools. Many blame stress. (Most of the suicides were Chinese-American or had one Asian parent.)

Helen Yin, the mother of an eighth grader and a kindergartner, spoke against the district’s new approach. Credit: Mark Makela/New York Times

Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter’s middle school, backs the changes. “My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,’ ” she said.

Another parent, Mike Jia, condemned “dumbing down” his children’s education. “What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” he said.

The changes include “no-homework nights, an end to high school midterms and finals, and a ‘right to squeak’ initiative that made it easier to participate in the music program,” reports the Times.

 Asian-American parents are enthusiastic supporters of the competitive instrumental music program. They have been huge supporters of the district’s advanced mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold’s reforms.

Asian-American students have been avid participants in a state program that permits them to take summer classes off campus for high school credit, allowing them to maximize the number of honors and Advanced Placement classes they can take, another practice that Dr. Aderhold is limiting this school year.

 At a meeting, white parents sat on one side, while Asian parents sat on the other.

This has been an issue where I live, in Silicon Valley, for years. Asian immigrant parents put heavy pressure on their kids to earn high grades. (It’s not the schools. It’s the parents.) Some white parents worry their kids can’t compete — or will go nuts trying. The pressure to get into an elite college means all the A students feel they’re in competition with each other.

My daughter, a Palo Alto High graduate, was talking about the suicides, which were after her time, with a classmate. “Paly taught me that I didn’t always have to be the best,” she said.

“But we were the best,” he replied.

Graduation rates have soared at New York City schools that don’t require students to take Regents exams, reports the New York Post.

Ten percent of the city’s high schools are allowed to use alternatives to the state exam. Many are “international” schools that cater to immigrants who aren’t fluent in English.

Science students at Pan American International High in Queens.

Students qualify for graduation by writing essays, doing oral presentations and other projects that are graded by their own teachers.

The graduation rate at Pan American International HS in Queens went from 50 percent in 2014 to 76 percent in 2015, “leap-frogging past even the citywide average of 70 percent,” reports the Post.

Lyons Community School in Brooklyn raised its graduation rate from 46 percent to 65 percent, “while the International Community HS in The Bronx and International HS at Union Square in Manhattan both produced 18 percent spikes.”

Will these students be prepared for success in college or the workforce? Will the district track them to find out?

The problems facing the students and their schools in these two stories couldn’t be more different.

First, from Massachusetts:

The only sound that could be heard in Maria Simon’s first-grade classroom one December morning was the soothing hum from a vibrating Tibetan singing bowl. Her students had gathered on a brightly colored rug at the back of the classroom, sitting with their eyes shut, their legs crossed, and their arms extended outward palms up.

Each time a classmate struck the small bowl with a mallet — releasing a low sounding gong — the students breathed in. Then as the sound faded away, they breathed out. The exercise lasted about five minutes, and they started their math lesson.

“It helps give us a few minutes of peace and quiet so we can focus on our work,” said one student, Grace Hayes.

This moment of “mindfulness” in Simon’s classroom is part of a broader effort at Birch Meadow Elementary School and Reading’s eight other schools to help put students at ease and get them more in tune with their emotions, and one another, so they can concentrate on learning.

Across Massachusetts, schools are devoting more time to address the social and emotional well-being of their students. Educators stress the movement is not simply “feel good” education. They say teaching students at every grade to manage their emotions can help them deal with a multitude of serious issues, including bullying, mental illness, substance abuse, or trauma.

Next, from Europe:

AFTER Aida Hadzialic’s parents fled war-torn Bosnia for Sweden in the early 1990s, they put their five-year-old daughter in a school full of native Swedes and made sure she studied hard to get ahead. It worked. Today Ms Hadzialic, 27, is Sweden’s minister for upper secondary education. Like her counterparts across Europe, she faces a new challenge: ensuring that a fresh wave of refugee children can integrate as successfully as she did.

Even before this year’s surge, western Europe had lots of immigrant students. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the proportion of 15-year-old schoolchildren in Spain who are foreign-born rose from 3% to 8% from 2003 to 2012 (though in Germany it fell by about the same amount). The new wave of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere has redoubled the strains on school systems.

In the countries accepting the most refugees—Sweden and Germany—lack of space is not a problem. Before the migrant surge, both countries faced declining numbers of pupils because of low birth rates. In Sweden the number of children in ninth grade fell from 120,000 in 2005 to 96,000 in 2015. “We have places for a hundred more pupils,” says Henrik Ljungqvist, the headmaster of Ronna School in Sodertalje, a city near Stockholm. (His school admits two to four new refugee pupils a week.) In Germany, without the new migrants, the number of students was projected to decline by 10% over the next decade, says Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich.

The biggest problem for education systems is that refugee children tend to be concentrated together. Many attend schools near refugee centres or in immigrant neighbourhoods. In Norway, Denmark and Sweden about 70% go to schools where at least half of the pupils are immigrants. This means they are partially segregated and less likely to learn the local language.

Moreover, immigrants tend to find housing in poor areas with lower education standards. Schools where more than a quarter of students are immigrants usually perform worse than those with no immigrants (see chart), although the gap shrinks when economic status is accounted for. At Mr Ljungqvist’s school, where about 350 of the 750 students were born abroad, many of the brightest pupils have left…

Germany’s PISA rankings remain high, but its school system is “almost the worst you could pick” for migrants, says Maurice Crul, an expert on immigrant youth at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Unlike France or Sweden, where most children start preschool before age three, German children tend to start school at four or five. Many schools have only half-day classes.

Moreover, the German system streams pupils at 10 into either vocational or academic systems—and immigrant children are 44 percentage points more likely than natives to be sent to vocational courses. Unlike other vocational systems such as that in the Netherlands, Germany’s makes it hard to move from a vocational track to an academic one. Lack of native language skills can steer bright immigrant children away from a university education. The system’s inflexibility also makes it harder to integrate older immigrant children. Germany has one of the world’s biggest gaps in reading proficiency between those who arrive aged between six and 11 and those who arrive aged 12 or over.

Why don’t we read stories about all those “unaccompanied/undocumented minors/immigrants” who came to the US a year or two ago?  Where are they, how well are they being integrated into their local school systems?  My guess–and it’s only a (cynical) guess–is that if things were going well, we’d be hearing a lot more about it.

Cedrick Argueta, right, is congratulated by his calculus teacher, Anthony Yom, left. Photo: Al Seib, Los Angeles Times

Of 302,531 students who took the Advanced Placement Calculus exam last year, only twelve earned a perfect score, reports the Los Angeles Times. Cedrick Argueta, the son of a Salvadoran maintenance worker and a Filipina vocational nurse, was one of them.

At Lincoln High in a heavily Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles, students shouted, “Ced-rick! Ced-rick!” when Principal Jose Torres announced his score, reports the Times.

Math has always just made sense to him, he said. He appreciates the creativity of it, the different methods you can take to solve a problem.

“There’s also some beauty in it being absolute,” Cedrick said. “There’s always a right answer.”

He credits “everybody else that helped me along the way.”

Both parents are immigrants. His father, Marcos, never attended high school. His mother, Lilian, said that she told Cedrick and his younger sister to finish their homework and to “read, read, read.”

His math teacher, Anthony Yom, says all of his AP Calculus students have passed the exam for three years running. Last year, 17 of 21 earned a 5, the highest score.

Yom, 35, said he treats his students like a sports team. They’d stay after school, practicing problem solving for three or four extra hours, and they’d come on weekends. On test day, they wore matching blue T-shirts sporting their names, “like they’re wearing jerseys to the game,” Yom said.

Cedrick also earned perfect scores on the science and math sections of the ACT, he said. He’s taking four more AP exams this year, including Calculus BC.

He hopes to earn a scholarship to Cal Tech to study engineering.

San Jose is the land of opportunity — or used to be, writes Alana Semuels in The Atlantic‘s City Lab. “A child born in the early 1980s into a low-income family in San Jose had a 12.9 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult,” according to a 2014 study by economist Raj Chetty. That’s the best upward mobility in the country.

“Children in the 25th percentile of income at birth in San Jose ended up, on average, in the 45th percentile as adults, while kids in Charlotte who started out in the 25th percentile of income only ended up in the 36th percentile as adults,” she writes.

But do today’s poor kids have the same chance to thrive in Silicon Valley?

The percentage chance that a child born in the early ‘80s in the bottom quintile of income made it to the top quintile in selected cities.(Datawrapper / Equality of Opportunity Project)

“San Jose used to have a happy mix of a number of factors—cheap housing, proximity to a burgeoning industry, tightly-knit immigrant communities—that together opened up the possibility of prosperity for even its poorest residents,” she writes. “But in recent years, housing prices have skyrocketed, the region’s rich and poor have segregated, and middle-class jobs have disappeared.”

San Jose is a city of immigrants — 38 percent of the city’s population is foreign-born, writes Semuels. Researchers found “a low prevalence of children growing up in single-parent families, and a low level of concentrated poverty.”

Tri Tran and his brother fled Vietnam on a boat in 1986. Tran was 11. They moved in with an aunt and uncle, a semiconductor factory tech and a data entry worker who earned enough to buy a small home.

A refugee from Vietnam, Tri Tran is now a millionaire entrepreneur.

Their uncle, who knew highly educated engineers at work, urged the boys to go to MIT. Tran founded the food-delivery start-up Munchery, which is valued at $300 million. “I think that in this land, if you are really determined and focused, you can go pretty far,” he told her. His brother is an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins.

Many of San Jose’s low-income families in the 1980’s were Vietnamese refugees who valued education highly and pushed their children to work hard in school. Others were Mexican immigrants with a strong work ethic. In San Jose, the poor are very likely to be working poor.

I don’t think middle-income jobs are disappearing in Silicon Valley, as Semuels suggests. There are lots of jobs — and not enough housing. A couple with middle-income jobs can’t afford to live here — unless their parents can loan them money to get into the inflated housing market. The median price for a Silicon Valley home is $875,000. The poor are being pushed farther away from the jobs.

Somali students study together at a St. Cloud school.

How does a small city in Minnesota cope with an influx of Somali immigrants? Tonight, PBS NewsHour looks at St. Cloud, Minnesota schools, which are trying help Somali students learn English and adapt to a new culture (and climate) while creating a welcoming and tolerant school climate.

The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a federal civil rights complaint against the St. Cloud school district in 2011, alleging widespread and frequent harassment of Somali Muslim students, reports Education Week.

A history teacher in Silicon Valley was placed on paid leave Thursday after comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

A parent complained about remarks by Frank Navarro, who’s taught at Mountain View High for 40 years.

Frank Navarro, a history and special education teacher, in his Mountain View High classroom.

“The Oracle, Mountain View High’s independent student newspaper, said some of Navarro’s students alleged his lessons were one-sided,” reports Sharon Noguchi.

“Everything I talk about is factually based,” said the teacher. “It’s not propaganda or bias if it’s based on hard facts.”

Like Hitler, Trump was elected. I wonder what the other “hard facts” are.

In a letter to parents, Principal Dave Grissom said he is obliged to maintain an “emotionally safe environment” for students, reports SFGate.

Also on Thursday, Milpitas High School Principal Phil Morales was placed on administrative leave for using a profanity about Trump during a student walkout.

Greg, a social studies teacher in Texas, is encouraged by his students. “An impromptu discussion of the election — and why Trump may not be able to accomplish many of his goals — made me realize that my students actually get what I have been teaching about the Constitution, the limits of government power, and the ability of the people to bring change through their involvement.”

In Los Angeles, a substitute PE teacher was fired for telling students their undocumented parents would be deported and they’d be placed in foster care.

The DREAM Act, which would have legalized immigrants who came as children, failed in the Senate in 2010. Photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call

I thought at first he was teaching that Trump is evil, but later stories say he was taunting inattentive students. On an audio tape, he tells a sixth grader that “the system” knows where to find them. “I have your phone numbers, your address, your mama’s address, your daddy’s address. It’s all in the system, sweetie.”

By executive order, President Obama deferred deportation for young people brought here illegally as children and offered work permits. That’s an enormous boon to “Dreamers” trying to build their future. President Trump could end deferred deportation and work permits for non-legal residents with a stroke of the pen. Surely, he will.

Undocumented students have reason to fear the future. I’m not sure what their teachers should be telling them.

Anthony David Martinez raises his hand in class at the Escuela 20 Noviembre school in Tijuana, Mexico. Photo: Sandy Huffaker/NPR

When Mexican immigrants return to their homeland, their U.S.-born children struggle in Mexican schools, reports Claudio Sanchez for NPR.

Most were labeled English Language Learners in U.S. schools because they don’t read or write proficiently in English. But they’re not literate in Spanish either.

In the last eight years, nearly 500,000 children — 90 percent American born — have returned to Mexico with their families, estimates UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. Some immigrants left because of the economic downturn. Others were deported.

Patricia Gandara, co-chair of the Civil Rights Project, thinks Mexican educators should learn from the U.S. experience with English-only and bilingual education.

In Mexican schools, the goal is to transition children as quickly as possible to Spanish fluency — because it’s the only language that matters. We’ve tried to estimate the percentage of classroom teachers in Mexico who speak English at a level that they can communicate with these [U.S.-born] kids, and found that fewer than 5 percent in public schools across [Mexico] can communicate with these children.

U.S. educators build on children’s “primary language,” says Gandara. She wants Mexican schools to assess U.S. returnees in their primary language, English.

In the U.S., these students were treated as though Spanish was their primary language.

The children of poorly educated parents often lack well-developed skills and vocabulary in any language; they’re also weak on general knowledge about the world. No es el lenguaje estúpido.  You can figure out what that means because you’re educated readers.

Luis E. Juarez-Trevino, a fifth grade bilingual teacher in Dallas, is “DACAmented.”

President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) order make it possible for undocumented immigrants to work legally without fear of deportation. Teach for America has placed 146 “DACAmented” teachers — also known as “Dreamers” — in classrooms, reports Education Week. Will they stay or will they go?

In a 60 Minutes interview, Trump said he’ll prioritize deporting criminal immigrants before deciding about people who’ve broken only the immigration laws. (His estimate of two to three million “bad hombres” is very high.)

Deporting Dreamers makes little sense, says Stephen Legomsky, former chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. To qualify for DACA, they’re supposed to be in school or working and have clean records. “As a practical matter, it seems like these folks would be the lowest priority of all,” he said.

Will Trump let people who arrived as children continue to get work permits?

Abdul Artan, who tried to kill his Ohio State classmates with a car and knife, had a group project due this week on “microaggressions,” reports Robby Soave in Reason‘s Hit & Run. Born in Somalia and mostly raised in Pakistan, Artan came to the U.S. as a refugee with his mother and siblings two years ago.

Interviewed by a student journalist at the start of the school year, Abdul Artan said he was afraid to pray publicly.

Artan, “who reportedly became radicalized after learning about injustices committed against fellow Muslims,” was enrolled in  class called Crossing Identity Boundaries.

“The assignment, worth 15 percent of his grade, required students to find a dozen examples of microaggressions on social media and explain which identity groups were the victims, according to the syllabus,” writes Soave.

The purpose of the class is to promote “intercultural leadership” and transform students into “actively engaged, socially just global citizen/leaders.”

. . . According to the syllabus, the point of the microaggressions project is to make students “recognize the role of social diversity” and “demonstrate an appreciation for other points of view and cultures.”

A friend claimed Artan “loved America.” However, in his final Facebook post, Artan vowed to “kill a billion infidels” to save a single Muslim, called radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki a “hero” and complained about the treatment of a Muslim minority in Burma.

He was shot and killed by a campus police officer. All his victims survived.

Most English Learner students were born in the U.S., reports the Migration Policy Institute.

Eighty-two percent of pre-K to fifth grade ELs and 65 percent of those in middle and high school were born in the U.S., the Census Data analysis shows.

Students who speak “social English” fluently often remain as English Learners because they don’t test as proficient in “academic English.”

In The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America, Daniel Connolly follows Isaias Ramos in his final year of high school and the next two years. He’s a math star at his low-performing Memphis high school — and an undocumented immigrant. Will he go to college?

Although he passed a prestigious national calculus test as a junior and his counselors are pushing Harvard, Isaias has doubts. “Why should I go to college?” he asks. “Why? I mean everybody tells you to get a good job, right? But I think about a good job doing what? A college degree gives you the ability, but not the actual job. And I guess from my mindset I just don’t see college as being that important.”

Isaias considers working in the family house-painting business instead of college.

His parents don’t speak English. His finished the ninth grade, his father the sixth. “In many ways, Isaias is on his own,” writes Connolly.

It’s called the “immigrant paradox.” Immigrants’ children do better in school and behave better than classmates from native-born families of similar socioeconomic status.

Some speculate that “Americanization undermines achievement,” writes sociologist Cynthia Feliciano of University of California at Irvine.

But there is no paradox, Feliciano’s research, published in the American Sociological Review, concluded.

Immigrant kids tend to succeed because their parents were successful in their native countries,” Feliciano found.

By U.S. standards, many immigrants are poorly educated, but most are better educated and more successful than those who stay behind, explains Emily DeRuy in The Atlantic.

Consider this scenario: A Filipino woman starts and runs her own business in the Philippines. Then, her family moves to the United States. Without a college degree and possibly still learning English, she works as a home health aide . . .  the lower paycheck doesn’t mean she’s suddenly lost the skills that propelled her to become a businesswoman in her native country. And, crucially, Feliciano’s research suggests, she’s likely to cultivate those skills in her own children.

Even though immigrant parents may not speak English well or understand American culture, they can pass on their work ethic and aspirations to their children.

One in four children have at least one immigrant parent.

Samah Hussein, 13, and Abdulraheem Qadour, 11, study on their laptops in a class for refugee children at Cajon Valley Middle School. Photo: Christine Armario/AP