A school for East Africans, above, and the Hmong Academy allow immigrant children in Minnesota to maintain their traditions.

By SARA RIMER

MINNEAPOLIS - Fartun Warsame, a Somali immigrant, thought she was being a good mother when she transferred her five boys to a top elementary school in an affluent Minneapolis suburb.

“Immediately they changed,”Ms.Warsame said of her sons.“They wanted to wear shorts. They’d say,‘Buy me this.’I said,‘Where did you guys get this idea you can control me?’”

Her sons informed her that this was the way things were in America. But not in this Somali mother’s house. She soon moved them back to the city, to the International Elementary School, a charter school of about 560 pupils in downtown Minneapolis founded by leaders of the city’s large East African community. The extra commuting time was worth the return to the old order: five well-behaved sons, and one all-powerful mother.

Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, were conceived as a way to improve academic performance. But for immigrant families, they have also become havens where their children are shielded from the American youth culture that pervades large district schools.

The curriculum at the Twin Cities International Elementary School is similar to that of other public schools with high academic goals. But at Twin Cities International the girls say they can freely wear head scarves without being teased, the lunchroom serves food that meets the dietary requirements of Muslims, and in every classroom there are East African teaching assistants who understand the needs of students who may have spent years in refugee camps. Twin Cities International students are from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan, with a small population from the Middle East.

Amid the wave of immigration that has been reshaping Minnesota for more than three decades, the International Schools are among 30 of the state’s 138 charter schools that are focused mostly on students from specific immigrant or ethnic groups. To visit a half-dozen of these schools, to listen to teachers, administrators and parents - Somali immigrants who are relatively new to Minnesota, as well as the Hmong and Latinos who have been in the state for decades - is to understand that Ms.Warsame’s high educational aspirations for her children, and her fears, are universal.

“The good news is that immigrant kids are learning English better and faster than ever before in U.S. history,”said Marcelo M.Suarez-Orozco, the co-director of immigration studies at New York University and co-author of“Learning a New Land - Immigrant Students in American Society”(Harvard Press, 2008).“But they’re assimilating to a society that parents see as very threatening and frightening. It’s anti-authority, antistudying. It’s materialistic.”

Some critics argue that these kinds of charter schools run counter to the longheld idea of public schools as the primary institution of the so-called“melting pot,”the merging of cultures that forges a common American identity among immigrants from many countries.

But Dr.Suarez-Orozco says the reality is that most new immigrants become isolated in public schools, and that large numbers of them become alienated over time and fail to graduate.

Ali Somo, a 70-year-old father of three children at the International Schools, said:“We bring our children here because we want them close to us so they don’t get lost.”

It was a weekday morning, but Mr.Somo and Ms.Warsame and a group of other parents were squeezing in a meeting in the school library.

Getting lost in America, Mr.Somo explained, means losing your culture, your language, your identity. It means acting like the teenagers the parents see on the street - wearing baggy jeans, smoking, using drugs, disrespecting elders.

“I have been in America, and I have observed,”Mr.Somo testified. “I have seen children with their pants falling off. I have seen them doing drugs.”

The parents around him nodded.

Some teenagers complain that their parents worry too much.

“I can at least account for more than 200 lectures I’ve had from my mom and dad about American culture here,”said Omar Ahmed, a 14-year-old eighth grader.“Every time my mom sees something bad about teens in the news,”he said,“there’s another lecture on that subject.”