“drop Out” Factors Of Students From The Federated States Of Micronesia And The Republic Of The Marshall Islands: The Stories That Have Not Been Told

Abstract

The high school dropout problem in the U.S. has been studied extensively; however, the dropout of English Learner (EL) students is an underreported phenomenon. This study sought to understand the lived experiences of EL students from the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) who attended high school on the Westside of O‘ahu, in the state of Hawai‘i and what contributed to their decisions to discontinue their high school education. The study used a phenomenological approach (Reiners, 2012; van Mannen, 2016) to understand the participants’ experiences with the schools and data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 18 EL Indigenous alumni and elders from the FSM and RMI regions. Factors that impacted the discontinuation of high school education for EL alumni from the FSM and RMI included personal care, the impact of school personnel, language discrimination, policy inequities, and invisibility. Other themes that emerged from the participants' lived experiences included the strength of character, poverty and transience, and other forms of discrimination such as microaggression, racism, and bullying. These findings indicate the critical and most significant need for parent engagement at school, instead of parent involvement, having own-race teacher representation, a student cultural club, and culturally sustaining and translanguaging pedagogies. Other essential implications include teacher training on unconventional means of assessing EL students, adding additional years for EL students to complete their high school education, and for researchers to stop the perpetuation of deficit labels of Indigenous people in their research.