Resumen de Taking a closer look at Latino parents at one Spanish–English two-way immersion charter school

Erin Whiting, Erika Feinauer, Douglas VanDerwerken

• Scholars who work with Latino/as in the USA have long been calling for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of the US-based Latino population. Two-way Immersion (TWI) bilingual education programmes are an interesting context in which to examine the Latino parent communities in the USA. Overall, the language enrichment nature of TWI programmes attracts diverse parents from across many different demographic groups, and for a variety of reasons. This study uses an innovative application of cluster analysis to examine the parent population at one TWI Spanish–English elementary school. Survey questions asked were: parents’ income, educational achievement, ethnicity, language spoken at home, religious affiliation, country of origin and residential distance from the school. Our analyses reveal that parents in our sample can be classified into four distinct groups based on the combinations of included characteristics. Our analyses show the emergence of three Latino parent clusters and one Caucasian parent cluster. These analyses show how accounting for the different social dimensions of these parents’ lives simultaneously can provide a more nuanced understanding of the Latino parents at this school.