Bryant Jensen, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Brigham Young University. His work seeks to improve learning opportunities for minoritized children, particularly those from Mexican and Central American immigrant families. His work addresses cultural dimensions of social and academic learning, home-school collaborations, teacher-child interactions, mixed methods, and design-based approaches. Bryant has worked as a school psychologist in urban schools in Arizona, and studied literacy learning in different communities and school types in Mexico. Previously he was a research associate for the National Task Force on Early Education for Hispanics, a Fulbright scholar in Mexico, and an Institute of Education Sciences postdoc fellow at the University of Oregon. His work appears in various research journals, and in 2013 he co-edited Regarding Educación: Mexican-American Schooling, Immigration, and Bi-national Improvement (Teachers College Press, Columbia University).
PB#02: A portrait of U.S. children of Central American origins and their educational opportunity
Educational opportunity—access to high quality schooling—is a critical aspect of social mobility and integration in the United States. This policy brief provides a demographic portrait of children with Central American heritage, with a focus on educational opportunity. We describe educational outcomes as well as some institutional conditions and family circumstances associated with opportunity and we offer four recommendations to improve educational opportunity of Central-American-origin children.