PARENT INSTITUTE FOR QUALITY EDUCATION
San Diego, CA
By Mary Jo McConahay

Hidden from the glitter of this city’s yacht basins and fine homes, communities of low-income immigrants raise children in scrappier pockets of the greater San Diego area, often befuddled or intimidated by an unfamiliar system of education. Most poor youngsters simply don’t make it to college, and many fail to finish high school. Aiming at deep social change, in l987 founders of the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE) began providing tools for connecting immigrant parents to adolescent children and their classrooms, demystifying education in America, and insisting that schools, parents, business and community must act as equal partners in the education of every child. Today PIQE is a statewide program in California, and in 2003 expanded to Texas and Arizona. More than 300,000 parents and more than 1,000,000 youngsters have been served, one child at a time.

Emilia Garcia and her husband Reyes lived with her parents in Mexico, growing tobacco, corn and watermelon, wondering whether their small children would ever advance beyond the low levels of schooling they themselves had: Emilia, fourth grade; Reyes, grade 2. Years later, when she looked around the family’s new home here, a second-floor, small 2-bedroom apartment near a roaring freeway, Emilia felt she might have jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

“I came with my eyes covered,” Emilia Garcia recalls of those days in the l990s. The four girls could sleep in one room, and their son could sleep in the living room, on a sofa which remains to this day the boy’s bed at night. The tiny kitchen would do. But school? “I knew nothing. How to enroll the children? What will I do with a 4th grade education and no English?”

Emilia’s stress reflected the collective of anguish of thousands of immigrant parents who arrive in California each year. Surveys show education is the issue of prime concern among first and second generation Hispanics, for instance, ahead of health care and jobs. But research also has shown that the newcomers regard schools as impersonal and insensitive to their needs, so that they approach teachers fearing embarrassment or inadequacy, when they approach them at all. It’s a gut feeling that often may be correct: other research shows many teachers aren’t trained to work with families, and some assume immigrant and poor parents are a greater impediment to kids’ progress than help.
Emilia Garcia still worries about her children – the youngest, 15-year old Reyes Jr., needed some special attention recently and a change of schools to progress. And she still does not speak English comfortably. But today Emilia can sit at her kitchen table, palm branches scratching gently at a window in the breeze, and gaze at a family portrait with five children, four in college or college graduates, and the fifth doing well in high school.

“I wasn’t going to parents’ meetings when we first arrived here because they were in English and I didn’t know what was happening,” Emilia remembers. “Then someone called and said, ‘Come – it’s a parents’ meeting and it’s in Spanish. It’s so kids can go to college.’”

In Mexico, elementary school students pay for books and supplies, which eliminates many from continuing -- as Emilia and Reyes had been eliminated -- when they barely learn to read. If kids fall behind, help may be difficult to come by. And the idea of parents actually participating in the education of their children – what the phone caller from the Parent Institute for Quality Education (PIQE) promised – had sounded other-worldly to Emilia. “In Mexico you leave the children at the door,” she recalls. “They go in like ants, and no parent enters.”
What the Garcias encountered at PIQE was a way of looking at education born of the idea that teachers and immigrant parents – even those who do not speak English well – can work as partners to improve the students’ performance, and aim at college from an early age. The first of a new nine-week series of meetings began at an El Cajon middle school recently, at a convenient after-work evening hour with child care provided, where parents were greeted by the recruiters who sometimes had made multiple phone calls to get them to appear. After a quick welcome, groups broke into classrooms by language: Spanish, Arabic, English.

“Anybody know what a GPA is?” asked one facilitator, and when not a single hand went up, she helped parents “do the math” with letter grades and numerical equivalents. In another room, a facilitator addressed two dozen parents, many African American, huddled in desks at the back of the room. “Look at where you’re sitting then look around and think about where your child should sit in this room. Then move up front.” The first handout described planning for college, even though these were parents of 6th graders. A lively, interactive discussion unfolded about adolescence as a time of change, and the need to “be on hand” to support kids, along with talk of resources to call upon if waters turn rough. There is an announcement about workshops on financial aid. There is an assumption in the air from the beginning that these are parents of children who will go to college – almost all of them would be the first in their families to do so – and that these parents have the right and even the obligation to provide the home workspace, attention to grades, and expectations to make it happen.

The Spanish-speakers’ room is most crowded. “When we come from another country it’s not that our children are behind in education – they’re more advanced,” insists the facilitator. “It’s just that here it’s a different system, and it’s a matter of learning how the system works and being part of it.” For the first time many parents hear that the fact their children already speak another language, Spanish, will be an advantage for them, not a liability, as they prepare for admissions to colleges, which require foreign language facility. They could be trilingual by then. “Take French,” she advises.

Because the PIQE facilitators and recruiters, like the person who first phoned Emilia Garcia years ago, are themselves community members who have gone through the course and months of follow-up “coaching” calls, barriers begin to fall early. “These parents who have experienced the program are key to its success – they become ‘cultural brokers,’” says PIQE President David Valladolid. “If parents don’t hear their own voices in the discussion they won’t come back.”

Teachers take PIQE workshops too: PIQE operates only on school campuses where it is invited, because the method depends on full support from administration and teachers. Emilia Garcia took off work to spend days at a desk in young Reyes’ classrooms when his grades were slipping, an event precipitated by the boy’s “getting in with bad friends,” Emilia says. “Why does the teacher let you in?” the boy asked grumpily at first. Things improved. Emilia kept in touch with counselors. “I know you’ll be coming if I’m not doing well,” Emilia says Reyes told her recently. “My teacher sends his regards.”

Valladolid points to a PIQE goal even beyond getting kids to college: developing confidence and tools among the immigrant parents themselves so they can attempt personal and social change. Techniques may feel more like community organizing than simple parent education. Some parents work in school associations. Others are preparing to run for Board of Education offices. “I found my spirit and resisted abuse and had my husband arrested,” said one participant. Two of Emilia Garcia’s daughters have worked at voting tables in national elections. “I tell them, ‘Go -- you can help the Mexican Americans who come to vote,’” she says.

On another side of San Diego, Raul and Marta Serrano remember the days when they too felt “outside one’s system,” when they didn’t know how to read report cards or track classroom progress. “For the first five years we were here, nobody. Then someone called,” said Marta. “They said the group was called the Parents’ Institute, and they will answer my questions.”

When son Raul Martin eventually was accepted to Dartmouth, Raul Serrano felt proud but bewildered. “I didn’t know this school existed or where it was. New Hampshire? So far away?” he said. Raul decided to “figure out how we can all go” to deliver his son to the college life they had all anticipated for so long. Mother, father, sister and brother went together. “It was beautiful,” said Raul.