Report shows Somali kids test kindergarten-ready: Why?

[Constantine MMX]

Interesting report:

Report shows Somali kids test kindergarten-ready: Why?



By Cynthia Boyd | Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2011

Ask educator Bill Wilson why Somali students do well in school and he'll answer with authority: "Their families put so much value on education."

That's a question I felt compelled to ask after reading the "One Minneapolis: a vision for our city's success" report released last week by The Minneapolis Foundation.

Intending to follow up on the stats, I only touched on a finding that merits not only a "wow," but also a "why?"

Here it is: 76 percent of Minneapolis school children coming from homes where Somali is spoken test kindergarten-ready, not terribly far behind the 82 percent of English-speaking kids who are kindergarten ready, and better than some other groups. The graphs below reflect children’s literacy readiness as measured in the fall of their kindergarten year.

Factor in that many of these Somalis are immigrants and the inquisitive among us would ask: What's the secret of their success?

Some social-service providers hypothesize it's because Somali moms are home teaching their kids.

Others explain higher kindergarten readiness by saying many Somali parents arrived in the United States better educated than some immigrant groups and so are better able to teach their children. (A communications person with the Minneapolis Public Schools could not locate anyone able, willing or available to explore the numbers in detail.)

But many experts also argue the importance of early childhood programs for kids.

"The majority of [Somali] mothers are home," says Carolyn Smallwood, executive director of Way to Grow, an early learning program for kids of all colors and their parents. "The Somali moms are great. "

Still, she boasts her program pronounces 87 percent of all its kids are kindergarten-ready, regardless of their backgrounds, thanks to the curriculum of at-home and in-center learning.

Somali parents, Smallwood adds, also, rightfully, benefit from services focusing on new immigrants. I can understand that. A couple of years ago, Sketchbook featured the East African Women's Center, which offers services to these newcomers in conjunction with specialized English-language, parenting and preschool classes.

“I’m not sure if it’s their status as recent immigrants or if it is part of their culture,’’ says Ann Ruff, but educating their children is important to Somali parents.

“What we find,’’ she says, “is that the [Somali] parents are extremely focused on education. They will show up and bring their kids to our advantage centers for any program that will help their children be successful learners,’’ says Ruff, vice present of resource development for CommonBond Communities, the largest nonprofit provider of affordable housing with services in the Upper Midwest. Among those services are preschool programs, including Early Childhood Family Education programs provided by Minneapolis Public Schools.

“Somalis are very much involved with their kids…They really care about their kids,’’ affirms Omar Da’ar, a Somali father with children in Minneapolis Public Schools and an economist working for Wilder Research.

He and his wife agreed she’d stay at home to provide a “stable upbringing” for their four children, he says. The oldest two went to preschool and now are in grade school, a third is in pre-school and the youngest child goes to an Early Childhood Education class with mom.

Educator Wilson sums it up this way: "If parents value education, children value education."



And that's what he sees firsthand among his 700 students in the classrooms of Higher Ground Academy in St. Paul where he is executive director. These families — almost all Somali and many of them immigrants — from around the Twin Cities and suburbs, see education as their children's stepping stone to American success, he says. Consequently, they motivate their children to learn.

Afro-centric, the K-12 charter school he founded 11 years ago made AYP in 2010 (Minnesota's measure of academic quality), Wilson says, because his families — most of whom are Somali— and his school "really do a lot of motivating."

Families, he says, "make the effort" to prepare their children for school, buying or borrowing English language CDs, buying, borrowing from the library or obtaining free books for their children, thus instilling the value of learning. "A book in the home shows it's important. It's treasured."

"They encourage their children to read and they coach them," often learning English words along with them by using simple picture books, he continues. Or these parents sit and watch cartoons with their children, engaging them in conversation to use English and to get them thinking.

The children hear that "if they're going to make it" in America, they've got to get educated, Wilson says.

Families expect their older children to help teach their younger siblings, as well. Wilson says he used to see the same thing in Hmong families when he campaigned door to door for St. Paul City Council in the 1980s and '90s. Somali families also enroll their children in Head Start programs, adopting educators' suggestions for what families should do at home to encourage a child's learning.

At Higher Ground, parents are considered partners in their children's education with teachers, communicating with every family at least once a month, helping solve learning problems but also celebrating children's successes, Wilson says. "We tell them, 'Parents, you're a big part of this.' " - Source

[Camellete]

Interesting. Good post.

I think one factor they didn't really mention is how almost all Somali families put alot of emphasis and teach their children classical arabic from a very young age, as young as 2/3 years old, I think that plays a big part in their willingness to learn more later in life.

[Xusein]

Stories like these give me good optimism for the future of our community. Kudos for posting this.

[חבר1.0]

Congratulations, but we are talking about kindergarten here... Let's see how these people do in 20, 30 years...

[popa1980]

Originally Posted by חבר1.0

Congratulations, but we are talking about kindergarten here... Let's see how these people do in 20, 30 years...

True. I know in the UK at least black kids do relatively better in primary school then start slipping behind in high school (im assuming this is due to social factors that kick in at that age- girls, drugs, gangs, etc etc).

[Lailax]

Not that surprising.
Reading was a big thing in my family and I remember reading to my little brothers ... still do. Besides, your ass would get whooped if you did badly

[Constantine MMX]

Originally Posted by חבר1.0

Congratulations, but we are talking about kindergarten here... Let's see how these people do in 20, 30 years...

These are the kids of a Somali American generation that is better settled and better educated than their grand-parents. Most Somalis didn't come through economic channels or from wealthy families; their grand-parents/parents came with only their clothes on their backs, and their qualifications unrecognised. Not to mention they came from a country where the official language is a native African language rather than English/French, hence there was also a strong language barrier on top of that. Yet the pattern of Somali students performing well in high-school is evident:

Roosevelt Senior High School has the largest number of Somali
students in the state. Tables 3, 4, 5, and 6 show the following:
English Language Learners enrollment, high school dropout rate,
mathematics and reading scores among some racial or ethnic groups
in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Table 3 shows that the Somali
student enrollment is the third highest compared to Hmong and
Spanish speakers in Minnesota.

Table 4 shows that about 12.6 percent of Somali high school
students dropped out during the 2000 to 2001 academic year in the
Minneapolis school district; this ranked the group behind the
Hmong students but ahead of the Hispanic students.
As shown in Table 5, the math scores of 65 percent are good
because Somali students performed better than Hmong and
Cambodian students.

As shown in Table 6, Somali students performed better in
English reading proficiency than Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong
students. - Source

There are clear examples of towns and cities where Somalis settled that saw large increases in University enrollment, where it previously only saw a decline, case in point:

In early 2011, Michigan’s governor organized a program called “Global Michigan,” an effort to target international students and skilled immigrants in response to population decline. And for good reason. Back in 2002, the struggling mill town of Lewiston, Maine saw the influx of roughly 3,500 Somali immigrants—a population who not only opened new businesses and contributed to the local economy and job growth, but increased university enrollment by nearly 16% from 2002 to 2007. - source

The kids tested in this report have a higher proficiency in English than their parents, which gives them an advantage, and a better chance at success. These kids also come from a better economic upbringing, since as of now Somalis are the fastest group to climb the economic ladder, and get off welfare:

African immigrants set pace to get off welfare; State and county officials who run aid programs want to know why Somalis and others become self-sufficient more quickly than others.

Immigrants from Somalia and other African nations are making strong strides in Minnesota toward weaning themselves off welfare,helping to lend some urgency to statewide efforts to make sure that other racial and ethnic groups perform as well.

Research by state officials shows that, although African immigrants received more welfare assistance than U.S.-born blacks at the beginning of this decade, they now receive less.

"The truth is a little bit counter to expectations," said Chuck Johnson, assistant commissioner for children and family services in the Minnesota Department of Human Services. "We've always been concerned about immigrant communities, but we really found out when digging into it that the much bigger problems are in the African-American and the American Indian communities."

The state is asking counties to figure out why Somalis and other recent African immigrants are moving off welfare rolls faster -- which might lend clues to why other groups aren't.

Suburban counties in particular are seeing increasing numbers of immigrants and minorities.

"We're a rich suburban county with one of the lowest poverty rates in the country," Ruth Krueger, director of employment and economic assistance for Dakota County, told board members recently during a briefing. "We have not paid a lot of attention to minorities because the numbers have been so small."

On the state's so-called "self-support index" -- based either on working at least 30 hours a week or departing from welfare altogether --Somalis in Dakota County are earning a rating of 80 percent vs. 72 percent for whites, she said. - Link

Its only natural that these Somali kids; with no post-war emotional baggage, with a better economic upbringing, and raised from birth with a heavily American influenced Somali culture, and speaking perfect English, will do better in life than their predecessor-generation that has to deal with culture-schocks and other common factors usually seen in newly-established communities.

[alama]

This is great to know!!

“What we find,’’ she says, “is that the [Somali] parents are extremely focused on education.
They will show up and bring their kids to our advantage centers for any program that will
help their children be successful learners,’’ says Ruff

I think this also plays a huge role. The parents focus and support.

[HMS Swaziland]

Good luck to them. The factors Constantine mentioned seem to be indeed great omens for the future of the Somali community.

[Xusein]

Trolling deleted and thread cleaned. If you have nothing good to say, stay out, we want this to be a positive topic.

[EriFly]

I give props to the somali community and good luck

[Hersh]

Being that this concerns my hometown, I feel I can probably add some perspective.

These same stats also hold true to the Oromo population in the state as well, whose numbers are also significant. The one particular difference that unfortunately stands out between the two groups is that certain Somalis have adopted some negative cultural aspects of their adoptive country. There are no such things are Oromo gangs of any kind, but there are at least a handful of Somali gangs that continue to shoot each other over the silliest things.

That said, the good far outweighs the bad.

I remember in the 90's when I was in elementary, there were hardly any Somali kids. My friends were mostly Asians (Hmong and Laotian) and some black kids at the time. Then around the end of the 90's a boat load of them arrived in Minneapolis and pretty much took over the inner city schools, particularly Roosevelt High School, where my older brothers and sisters attended High School at the time.

Naturally, given that they were new immigrants, they brought a lot of difficulties to the district and that school in particular. As a result, state test scores for those schools deteriorated. A concerted effort was made by the district to meet the needs of these students and eventually as Somali school counselors and others in the community took an active role in these schools, things started to drastically improve.

By then my elder siblings had already graduated and I went to a High School in the inner suburbs where, by my last 2 years, Somalis had suddenly made their presence felt there as well. They were spreading like wildfire and making the presence known. And as such, the state increasingly made efforts to meet their ever growing needs.

The last decade had a rocky start for Somalis and Ethiopians in Minnesota but they have made commendable progress. The Twin Cities' various gentrification projects have been greatly aided by the business acumen of the Somalis. In particular, the Lake Street neighborhood in Southern Minneapolis, which had long been a hotbed of criminal activities, with various gangs situated there, where prostitutes and drug dealers freely roamed the streets.

A couple years ago, I drove across that neighborhood and was blown away by the change that had taken place. The area had largely been gentrified with repaved roads and various new business buildings and residential units; but what particularly took me by surprise was the near ubiquitous presence of Somalis roaming the streets. This was an area where in the past most people would be nervous to walk during the day, let alone at night.

But that was no longer what I saw. What I saw was a different Lake Street. Hijabi covered elder ladies going shopping, little kids playing in the renovated playgrounds, teenagers playing basketball at the nearby park (just about every other block has a park in Minnesota). It seemed peaceful and tranquil. A different world from the South Minneapolis I knew in the Early 2000's. All because of Somalis.

[Tom & Jerrii]

delted