Third Example of the "Americanization" Danger

In 2001 Dr. Carol L. Schmid wrote an article entitled Educational achievement language-minority students, and the new second generation. In this article she notes some disturbing research findings.

For example she mentions that Rumberger (1995) found that second-generation Mexican-Americans were less likely to drop out of school than were their third-generation counterparts, even though their SES (Socioeconomic status), on average, was lower. Driscoll's (1999) study of immigrant and native Latino youth found that U.S.-born students of U.S.-born parents were more than twice as likely to drop out of high school as were U.S.-born students with foreign-born parents. Furthermore, the third-generation sophomores in her sample were almost three times as likely to drop out as were the immigrant sophomores.

Although the exact cause (s) for this is unknown, Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco (1995) can provide some insight from what they found in the analysis of their comparison between recent Mexican immigrants and U.S-born Mexican Americans. They found from their primarily qualitative data that recent immigrants often have a "dual frame of reference." Such a frame of reference enabled the immigrants to believe their lives in the United States were markedly better than the lives they left behind. U.S.-born Mexican Americans who didn't have this dual frame of reference saw themselves as marginalized from the dominant culture so they strived to identify with the "dominant American paradigm of adolescent ambivalence." This resulted in recent Mexican immigrants being more achievement oriented than U.S.-born Mexican Americans.

In other words, striving to become "Americanized" resulted in lower academic achievement.