Migrant Children

The Department of Education's Migrant Education Program (MEP) and the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Migrant Head Start Program (MHS) provide a range of health, educational, nutritional, and social services to migrant children. MEP's primary goal is to give the children of migrant crop workers a chance to meet the same state educational standards as other children. Its services vary across states, districts, and schools. MHS funds infant and preschool centers that serve the preschool-age children of migrant crop workers. MHS's narrower population definition results in service gaps for some preschool children and for children of different ages in the same family. A broader definition would mean that MEP and MHS could work together to provide more orderly transitions for children moving from MHS into school and greater service coverage for all the children in a family. Analysis of the adequacy and the targeting of MHS's resources and federal leadership to develop a system for each program to support the exchange of essential student information and coordination of services are needed. Neither Education nor HHS has measured how well the two programs are achieving their goals. GAO believes that it would be economically feasible to include a sample of migrant children in ongoing national data collection efforts. GAO recommends that the types of activities included in MHS's definition of agricultural work be expanded to harmonize with those included in MEP's definition. GAO also recommends that both Education and HHS develop nationwide systems to transmit children's tracking information and that they include studies that measure MEP's and MHS's outcomes in their research and evaluation plans.

GAO noted that: (1) MEP and MHS was created to provide assistance to migrant children by providing a wide spectrum of health, educational, nutritional, and social services; (2) MEP's major goal is to ensure that migrant children have the opportunity to meet the same state educational standards as other children, a goal geared to the needs of elementary and secondary school students who constitute about 82 percent of its participants; (3) MEP serves children of workers engaged in crop and a variety of agricultural activities; (4) MEP services vary across states, districts', and schools and are provided in accordance with state and district standards; (5) in contrast, MHS' primary goal--to promote school readiness--reflects the needs of the preschool children it serves; (6) to achieve this goal; MHS provides funds to grantees to establish infant and preschool centers that provide comprehensive and uniform services for eligible migrant children up to 6 years of age of crop workers only; (7) MHS provides prescribed health, nutritional, social, and educational services according to federal standards; (8) neither Education nor HHS has a system to transfer participant information between different locations within each program, despite the need to transfer key information in a timely way as students move around the country; (9) although some states and grantees have designed their own systems to track students who move within their boundaries, none supports student information exchange on a national level; (10) during GAO's site visits, some officials said that federal leadership is needed to develop two national systems--one for MEP and one for MHS--that could support the exchange of essential student information on a national level and that could also help increase coordination between migrant student service providers at the state and local levels; (11) although both Education and HHS have collected substantial data for MEP and MHS such as numbers of participants and services, the data do not enable either department to evaluate program outcomes and determine the extent to which the program goals are met; (12) this is partly because of fundamental measurement problems associated with collecting outcome data for these programs; (13) as noted in the performance plans required by the Government Performance and Results Act, both Education and HHS intend to expand their data collection efforts to include some outcome data in the future; and (14) however, the usefulness of these data to describe MEP and MHS outcomes on a national level is likely to be limited because, for example, MEP data will not be comparable across states.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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