Rationalizing Migrant Education

Recent research for an upcoming conference presentation led me to information on current practices and new programs for teaching migrant students. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, migrant workers are those workers that travel from one state to the next, depending on the season and crop. These workers often have children that were born in the United States, thus making them citizens entitled to an education. However, due to child labor and the family structure of these people, the child’s education is often given a low priority rating. This dismissal of importance is one of the key factors in the propulsion of these ill-paid and ill-managed jobs, which are also some of the most dangerous jobs in America.

While researching the education of migrant children, I came across an article in Education World titled Meeting the Educational Needs of Migrant Students located at http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr347.shtml This article told of a rare occurrence – the migrant school. Though well meaning, this type of school is not surviving, and I believe if we take a closer look at the organizational model of the school we may be able to understand why this failure is occurring.

The migrant school in this article was called San Jose School (La Escuela de San Jose). Sister Gaye Moorhead was the director of this school and of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas. The school accompanies the families as they migrate from Ohio to Florida. The children’s attendance at school was sometimes sporadic depending on demands of the children, which can be caused by a need for translating for parents, taking care of siblings, or working in the fields.

Clearly the foundations of education have been set in the Rational Model. Education has also always been a very fixed mechanistic organization with a hierarchical, centralized, and formalized component. When applying this type of model to an organic and unstable organization in an ever-changing environment, such as that of migrant education, a disconnect occurs. These migrant educators are clearly able to define the SWOT, which is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (Hatch, p.107) that accompanies the Rational Model, and they are more than capable of using success factors and competence to derive a possible strategy for educating these children. However, in such a fluid organization as that of the migrant works, the social responsibility of these workers and the managerial values of the educators do not flow through to an implementation because one set strategy can never be agreed upon. Most of these workers do not understand the need for education. Instead they see education as a source for lost income that the child could be earning for the family. The social responsibility of the parent to educate their child is lost in cultural differences between the organization of educators and the organization of workers.

Perhaps these educators should take a closer look at the emergent strategies researcher James Brian Quinn has labeled logical incrementalism (Hatch, p. 113). This theory would enable educators to take proposals from the parents regarding their child’s education and transform those into broad goals and policies that could be guided to suit the purposes of the educators. As Hatch states, “In Quinn’s view, strategy emerges within the general outline of a strategic plan, but from a foundation of activity taking place throughout the organization and according to a pattern of trail-and-error learning.” (Hatch, p. 113).

I truly believe that only by amending a flexible emergent strategy with a trail-and-error learning approach such as Quinn’s logical incrementalism will a migrant school like San Jose survive. I also believe that if we are striving towards the metaphoric collage of the Post-Modernist we must be sure to include such diverse information dissemination tactics as that of the migrant school.

It is important to consider how, as information professionals, we might impact this organization in the future. Emerging technologies might provide us the opportunity to put information stations with digital library access along the paths of these migrant workers in an attempt to help support these educators. We must be open to new ideas that will allow us to bridge the cultural gap so that we can provide a true service to our nation’s newest and perhaps most hard working members.