Transnational Strategies for Children's Schooling: Implications for Teachers of Immigrant Children⁽¹⁾
Anna Chee (University of Souther California), Marjorie Faulstich Orellana (UC Berkeley), and Barrie Thorne

Our focus on children and families engaged in transnational schooling strategies is one strand of a much larger study of childhoods, the daily lives of children, and unfolding of pathways of development in three communities in California that have large numbers of immigrant families. One of the important findings from the ongoing study is that in order to understand many Californian children's lives, we need to consider families' active movement across national borders (Orellana, Thorne, Chee, and Lam, 1997). In this paper, we focus on families' maneuvers to seek educational opportunities for their children. We also explore how ideas about schooling practices are imported, focusing in particular on the recent expansion of Korean Learning Academies in the U.S.

The data for this study are drawn principally from fieldwork in one of the three communities being studied in the larger "California Childhoods" project (Thorne and Cooper, 1995) -- that of the Pico Union area in central Los Angeles, where many immigrants and children of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Korea reside. They include over 1,700 pages of field notes from participant observation in homes, classrooms, and after-school programs; transcriptions of focus groups with parents and children, and of interviews with community leaders, children, teachers, and parents; and children's drawings and stories. In order to fill out our understanding of different ways children and families deploy transnational strategies for schooling we also interviewed several Korean immigrant children who live outside the Pico Union area, in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Our aim is to explore the complex factors that shape families' transnational search for children's educational options, by attending to issues of social class, and the contingencies of resources and obstacles in relation to changing sociopolitical circumstances.

Active Transnational Strategizations for Children's Educational Options
In other work (Orellana, Thorne, Chee, and Lam, 1997), we describe different patterns of immigration involving children, and children's active participation in these processes. We explore how families are able to spread risks and seek resources by maneuvering in more than one political and economic context, and how families stay connected across the distance and time that separates them. In this paper, we focus on aspects of this maneuvering that are directly related to children's schooling. We focus on several types of transnational schooling strategies used by immigrants and their children in the Los Angeles area. They include:

"Parachute kids"
One of the most active or deliberate strategies involves what are sometimes referred to as "parachute kids." These children (many from Korea, ranging in age from 9 to 16) are sent to the U.S. to attend school with the ultimate goal of acquiring U.S. educational credentials. Through interviews and home observations, we identified three distinct patterns of living arrangements for these children: those living on their own (the high profile cases described in recent news articles) (Hamilton, 1993); those living in boarding homes, established as business deals; and those living with relatives in the U.S. We describe these arrangements and how children experience them.

"Sending kids back"
Many immigrant parents hold out the option of sending their children "back home" to be cared for by relatives, in order to avoid the perceived dangers of junior high school in the U.S., or to help straighten children out when they appear to be falling into trouble. Others find themselves forced to consider this option due to policy changes, such as Proposition 187 or the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. For example, the mother of an U.S. born child in Pico Union was considering sending her daughter to live with her sister in Mexico, so that she could secure work as a live-in domestic worker, rather than continue collecting AFDC for her child. Still other children are "sent back" due to changes in global economic relations (as in the fall of the Korean won and unstable Korean economy in recent months).

Maintaining two households
Some families who engage in transnational educational strategization maintain two households (Seo, 1993; Skeldon, 1996), and actively move back and forth between their two nations. This practice fosters children's maintenance of two languages and cultures and affords participants more social, political, and educational options. Skeldon (1996) observes that "We have entered into an era of global networks through which individuals flow to take advantages of opportunities in several places, thereby reducing the risks inherent in basing oneself in any single place" (p. 152).

Transnational Movement of Ideas, Beliefs, and Cultural Practices Related to Schooling
In the communities where immigrant children settle, one finds the migration of not only the children and families, but also of ideas, beliefs, and cultural practices of schooling from the countries of origin. The Korean case is a dramatic one and it illustrates this point powerfully. A full page advertisement for the "Harvard Excel Educational Center" in The Korea Central Daily (June 18, 1997, p. 6) reads, "We have produced 1600 perfect SAT and PSAT scores." It goes on to post the names and scores of individuals who attend this center. Along with the migration of people, migration of educational practices occurs across national borders.

Observations at local Leaning Centers in Los Angeles reveal that many of the assumptions and practices found in these private institutions have their roots in educational practices of Korea. For example, instructors in these learning centers emphasize repetition and practice at specific skills with the goal of studying past the students' grade level. Some of the private educational centers such as "Jaeneung (gifted) Educational Institute" and "Noon Nope Hee" (above your eye level) in Southern California are in fact branches of those in Korea. Many Korean students at our Los Angeles site either go to these local learning centers or have a tutor come to their house several times a week for English and math. We draw from interviews and observations to describe this transnational schooling phenomenon.

Transnational Schooling Strategies: Contingencies of Socio-Political and Global Economic Relations
Specific transnational schooling strategies used and thus immigration patterns and family structures found in Asian and Latino groups appear to be distinctive. However, the varied patterns of transnational schooling strategies are similar in that they are contingencies of immigration policies, social relations and structures, educational opportunities, and global economic relations.

Educational, social, and economic situations in South Korea are some of the factors that trigger transnational schooling strategization. Rapid increase in land and housing costs in the 1980s has shattered many middle class dreams for Koreans in Korea (Yi & Kim, 1991). Moreover, aspects of class and status in China (Ong, 1992) and Korea (Abelmann & Lie, 1995) are taking on transnational qualities. For example, U.S. educational credentials and international material goods are increasingly becoming the markers of class and status. Graduation from the prestigious universities is considered a prerequisite to success in Korean society. An affiliation with the "right" college, church, and class affords one multiple channels of mobility (Cho, 1995, p. 148; Kim, 1988). The Korean educational system is a harsh one in which the majority is destined to fail. Many who are poor in academic performance easily become delinquent students, while passive ones become more passive (Cho, 1995, p. 152).

The cost of educating a child up to college is also much less in the U.S. when compared to that in Korea. It is commonly believed that elementary and secondary students need lessons from private instructors in order to have an edge on the competition. The cost of taking tutors for 2 or 3 subjects from an average tutor in Korea is about $3,000 a month per student.

In the Korean case, deployment of transnational schooling strategies is a deliberate attempt at creating a more hospitable educational environment through migration. Abelmann and Lie (1995) observe: "For [the rich] the United States affords a way of sparing their children the rigors and trauma of the South Korean examination system. It also provides an escape hatch for any less able children who, even with the finest of tutors, are unlikely to gain admission to elite colleges in South Korea" (p. 72).

Other families engage in transnational schooling strategies that are less deliberate. Families who "send their children back home" -- especially the Central American and Mexican families in our field site -- are driven to do so by the contingencies of political and social policies, and/or by economic conditions. These "reverse migration" patterns counter the image of undocumented immigrants "taking advantage" of schools paid for by U.S. taxpayers. In transferring this cost of reproductive labor (the labor involved in caring for, schooling, and "raising up" the children of U.S. workers) abroad, the exploitation of wageworkers in the U.S. is effectively increased (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1995).

Implications for Teachers of Immigrant Children
In our paper, we explore implications for the teachers of immigrant children. First, teachers may benefit simply from an understanding that their immigrant children may not see themselves as firmly based in the U.S. The uncertainty children may feel about their futures may make it more difficult for them to establish long term goals. They may also feel torn in their allegiance to their two nations. Teachers might build into their curriculum ways to validate children's transnational experiences (e.g. by comparing and contrasting their experiences with schooling in each country, and/or with the experiences of other children in the class; and keeping records of their trips abroad). They might also encourage children's development as bilingual and bicultural persons, better able to survive and to thrive on both sides of these national borders.

References
Abelmann, N. & Lie, J. (1995). Blue dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles riots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cho, H. (1995). Children in the examination war in South Korea: A cultural analysis. In S. Stephens (ed.), Children and the politics of culture. (pp. 141-168). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hamilton, D. (1993). "A house, cash, and no parents." Los Angeles Times, June 24.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (1995). "Women and children first: New directions in anti-immigrant politics," Socialist Review, 25: 169-190.

Kim, E. M. (1988). From dominance to symbiosis: State and Chaebol in Korea. Pacific Focus, 3, 105-121.

Ong, A. (1993). On the edge of empires: Flexible citizenship among Chinese in diaspora. Positions, 1:3, 745-778.

Ong, A. (1992). Limits to cultural accumulation: Chinese capitalists on the American Pacific

Rim. In Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton, (eds.) Toward a transnational perspective on migration, (pp. 125-143).

Orellana, M. O., Thorne, B., Chee, A., & Lam, E. (1997). Transnational childhoods: The deployment, development, and participation of children in processes of family migration. Paper presented at a meeting of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood, Berkeley, CA, March 5.

Seo, D. (1993). L.A. threatens, Seoul beckons: South Korean emigration to the U.S. has reached a turning point. Los Angeles Times, Aug. 15, p. 14.

Skeldon, R. (1996). Hong Kong in an international migration system. In M. K. Chan and G. A.

Postiglione (eds.), The Hong Kong reader: Passage to Chinese sovereignty. England: M. E. Sharpe.

Thorne, B., & Cooper, C. R. (1995). "California childhoods: Institutions, contexts, and pathways of development." Proposal to the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood."

Yi, K., & Kim, T. (1991). Ttang. Seoul: Pibong Chool-pansa.

1. 1 The research on which this paper is based was funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood. For help in gathering and thinking about data in the Pico Union site, we would like to thank Lucila Ek and Arcelia Hernandez; for their contributions to research in the Oakland site, we would like to thank Wan Shun Eva Lam, Nadine Chabrier, Ana Gonzalez, Eileen Mears, Gladys Ocampo, Allison Pugh, and Hung Thai. We have also benefited from on going conversations with many friends and colleagues, including Catherine Cooper, Jill Denner, Hanne Haavind, Nery Orellana, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Finally, we are grateful to the parents, children, teachers, school personnel, and community program leaders for their cooperation with this project.