Children of the road: Migrant students, our nation's most mobile population

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 2003 by Branz-Spall, Angela Maria, Rosenthal, Roger, Wright, Al

Children of migrant farmworkers, often called "children of the road," face many obstacles in their lives, including extreme poverty, geographic and cultural isolation, discrimination based on race, language minority status, and mobility. Congress established the Title I Migrant Education Program to enable them to meet the same standards set for other children. The states that oversee Title I migrant education programs have created innovative solutions to meet the challenges faced by these children. These models include an electronic interstate record transfer system, a distance-learning program specifically designed for migrant students, and a laptop computer project for secondary school migrant youth.

Migrant farmworkers1 have been called the poorest of the working poor. They often travel very long distances to work in extremely low-paying jobs and endure substandard and dangerous working and living conditions. Traditionally, there have been three principal migrant streams workers have followed in the East, Midwest, and West. Years ago, workers and their families would leave their home base to travel north as the crops ripened and then return to their home base when the work was done. In the East, the home base was generally Florida (and Puerto Rico); in the Midwest, the home base was Texas; and in the West, the home base was California.

These traditional migrant streams have fragmented, and today one can find migrant families from south Texas in Maine, Florida families in the upper Midwest and further west, and California families in both the Midwest and East. Further, many farmworkers have home bases or at least family members in Mexico or other countries.

The image many people have of migrant farmworkers comes from the Edward R. Murrow documentary, Harvest of Shame, first broadcast Thanksgiving 1960. That documentary showed the strife that was part of the daily lives of migrants, as well as how these hard-working people were not protected by federal or state laws. While some protective laws have been passed since the broadcast of that landmark documentary, farmworkers still are not covered by certain statutes. Generally, they are not entitled to overtime pay and are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act. In addition, government enforcement of the statutes is often spotty and ineffective. It is often up to significantly underfunded migrant legal services programs to attempt to obtain some enforcement of important protections.

The children of migrant farmworkers generally live in extreme poverty, increasingly in immigrant households where English is not spoken fluently. The children often work in the fields in order to ensure that the family has food on the table or clothes on their backs. Due to the low pay levels for migrants, the labor of every family member is needed. Most important, in many instances the education of migrant children is interrupted by their migrancy. In other situations, though their education may not be interrupted, their transience creates dislocation, disorientation, and significant educational disadvantages.

The U.S. Department of Education reports that there are 783,867 migrant children identified for participation in the Title I, Part C, Migrant Education Program (MEP; Henderson & Daft, 2002). Program eligibility is based in part on movement across school district lines in search of agricultural (defined as including dairies, meatpacking, and poultry processing) or fishing work. The study cited above reports the following demographic information: In the 1998-99 school year, 783,867 children were identified as being eligible for Title 1, Part C services. Of these students, 571,690 participated in programs during the regular school year, 318,785 participated in summer programs. Of the total number, 86% are Hispanic American, 8% are White, and less than 3% each are Black, American Indian American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Asian/Pacific Islander. The MEP served slightly more males during the 1998-99 school year (53%) than females.

Education for Migrant Students: How it Came to Be

Though it came into being almost as an afterthought, the federally funded Migrant Education Program was a direct consequence of President Lyndon B. Johnson's heralded "war on poverty." Title I of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 aimed to level the playing field in education for children impacted by poverty. It offered supplementary instruction, with an emphasis on reading and math, and an array of support services to help the children of poverty overcome the effects of cultural deprivation, inadequate medical care, nutritional deficiencies, and other ills. Ironically, however, ESEA Title I as originally enacted was unable to provide meaningful services to one of the most severely affected populations-the children of migratory farmworkers. They were generally unable to benefit from Title I services, which were school-based, because of their mobility and the frequent interruptions of their absence. They did not figure in a school's planning for Title I because they simply were not there, and when they entered the school, they were not likely to stay for any appreciable length of time. Many of them never enrolled in school at all, sometimes because they were not welcome, but more often because they worked in the fields alongside their parents.