Changing school with the season

Twice her family has made the journey from Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican border, through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon, to settle in eastern Washington's verdant Yakima Valley.

The first time, back in 2001, they came so Marie's husband, a migrant farm worker, could harvest hops - the bitter plants used to make beer. Last year they came again looking for work. And in this town of 8,000, nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, they began picking apples.

It took five days for the family of seven - Marie, her husband, Armando, and their five children - to reach Grandview. They'd planned to drive straight through, but ran out of money along the way. Each night, they slept together in their silver minivan.

Now they describe it as an adventure: Christina, the oldest, dubbed the van their "five-star hotel." Marie remembers glimpsing the Hoover Dam. Press just a little, though, and Marie will admit that enduring a trip of more than 1,500 miles, even twice, has been two times too many for both her and her children.

It's a passage that hundreds of thousands of migrant families make round-trip year after year. Armando is just one of more than a million farm workers who move as crops ripen and seasons turn.

But for Marie, ya basta. Enough. "I don't plan on moving no more," she says, her round face turning uncharacteristically somber. "My kids suffered the most, and that's not fair."

Marie completed elementary and high school in the small Texas town where she was born. She hopes to give her children the same opportunity.

Because Armando is an illegal immigrant, he and Marie asked that their last names not be used in this article. About half of the country's migrant farm workers are undocumented. Marie and four of their children are US citizens.

Children of migrant farm workers like Christina, Jorge, Raul, Mickaela, and Juana occupy a shadowy place in the education landscape. As they slip between schools and states their progress - and setbacks - are extremely difficult to gauge.

"Migrant kids are often the forgotten kids," says Roger Rosenthal, executive director of the Migrant Legal Action Program in Washington, D.C., who for more than 25 years has worked as an advocate for migrant children.

They have been called an "invisible minority." Hard to identify, obscured within another struggling yet more prominent demographic - impoverished Latinos - migrant students face the same obstacles as other low-income minority children. According to the Labor Department's National Agricultural Workers Survey, their families earn less than $10,000 a year. On average, farm workers have six years of formal education. Most don't speak English.

But migrants must also grapple with farm injuries and pesticide exposure; juggle school work with field work; and learn to navigate a world that is constantly in motion. With each interruption to their schooling, they risk falling behind. Just one move can increase the likelihood that a student will drop out or repeat a grade, studies show.

In his 1960 documentary "Harvest of Shame," chronicling the plight of migrant workers, Edward R. Murrow suggested that the US government was better at counting migratory birds than migrant farm workers. It's an aphorism that applies to migrant students as well. Data on everything from their numbers to dropout and graduation rates are often rough, or culled from antiquated research.

"They're a subpopulation that really isn't studied because they're a marginalized population," says Roberto Treviño, a professor at the University of North Texas in Denton, whose research focuses on achievement in low-income Latino students. "They're off on the fringes."

With states now required by federal law to track and report how historically ignored groups of students - including migrants - fare in such areas as reading and math, this is sure to change. But will it also translate to a fuller education for America's nearly 900,000 migrant students? While schools may be taking more note of the migrants in their midst, the same laws that require better tracking urge tougher academic standards - without necessarily creating additional support for a vulnerable group already struggling to keep up.

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