East Caribbean immigrant students in the United States Virgin Islands public high schools

Twenty-four years ago the United States District Court in the Virgin Islands made a landmark decision in Hosier v. Evans (1970) which allowed immigrant students from the Eastern Caribbean to attend Virgin Islands public schools for the first time, rejecting department of education argument for not allowing them admission because of lack of funding. This study investigates the achievement performance of a sample of that population for a specified period, achievement being defined as performance on standardized tests. Answers to four specific questions were sought: (a) How are the immigrants performing academically when compared with their native counterparts? (b) Is there a relationship between their grade placement at time of migration and their performance later in high school? (c) What learning deficits, if any, do they bring with them? (d) What discipline problems are they causing in school? A two-stage random sample of 861 students in grades 9 to 12 was chosen from two area high schools. These were placed into two groups of natives and immigrants based on place of birth extracted from their records. An immigrant was defined as one who was born in the Eastern Caribbean, started school there, and later migrated to the Virgin Islands to continue school. From this sample a further selection was made based on whether their cumulative files contained any records of tests written during high school. This yielded a net sample of 129 students from both high schools. The native sample was similarly selected using only one quarter of their files that had tests. This yielded 136 native students. Tests used in the study were the Metropolitan Achievement Test, Sixth Edition (MAT 6), the Pre-Scholastic Achievement Test (PSAT), and the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT). Additionally, interviews were conducted with parents, students, and education personnel to situate the study and gauge their perceptions of the education system. There was a significant difference in science on the MAT 6 only, favoring native Virgin Islanders. No other significant differences were found in any of the other tests involving these two groups although there were significant differences in sub populations of the sample.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio