Chapter 4: Immigrant Newcomer Populations, ESEA, and the Pipeline to College: Current Considerations and Future Lines of Inquiry

Abstract

T he year 1965 was a watershed for K-12 education in the United States. The signing of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by President Lyndon B. Johnson was unique in several aspects: It was the first and largest federally funded K-12 education legislation of that era, and, in Title I, it addressed the issue of equity by targeting the educational needs of children from low-income families and improvements in the schooling they received. Designed as a compensatory education policy, ESEA was grounded in part in a discourse about cultures of poverty that could create generational disadvantage and consequently had as its main beneficiaries children from school districts with concentrated poverty. That same year, the passage of the Immigration Act reopened large-scale immigration to the United States after more than four decades of a closed-door policy. The lifting of racial and ethnocentric barriers to immigration, partly as a result of the civil rights movement, would have unforeseen implications for the K-12 student population (Alba & Nee, 2003;Bean & Stevens, 2003).Today we are at a crossroads with the legacies of both pieces of legislation: The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the most recent reauthorization of ESEA, has linked achievement gaps among students from different socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds to school accountability mandates and parental choice of K-12 schools. Meanwhile, the new immigration has complicated existing racial, ethnic, and social class categorizations in the United States, giving rise to unprecedented racial/ethnic diversity in our nation's schools (Olsen, 2000;Rong & Brown, 2002). In the United States, 20% of young people less than 18 years of age are children of immigrants, both U.S. and foreign born, and 25% are from low-income families. By 2015, it is projected that they will make up 30% of the nation's K-12 population.In this chapter, I discuss immigrant newcomer populations and their experiences with K-12 schooling in preparation for and access to postsecondary education. How are immigrant newcomer students distinctive from and similar to native children 1 in terms of the pipeline to college? Much attention, for example, has been paid to the concept of immigrant optimism, namely, that immigrant parents are optimistic about

Navigating the Path to College: Latino Students’ Social Networks and Access to College

“…Children from immigrant families navigate multiple cultural expectations, social norms, and languages, which affects their educational decisions. The intersection of ethnicity, culture, and socio-economic status is important to consider in understanding students' experiences with college-going (Louie 2005). The eight students in this study were not only the first in their families to attend college, but they were often the first in their extended families and in their communities to navigate successfully through schooling in the United States and to enroll in college.…”

Building a Multicontextual Model of Latino College Enrollment: Student, School, and State-Level Effects

“…Demographic factors taken into account were gender (with males as the reference group), ethnicity (Cuban, Puerto Rican, Central and South American with Mexican as a reference category), and immigrant generational status. This last variable comprised three categories: (a) first-generation (foreign-born), (b) second-generation students born in the United States with one or two foreign-born parents, and (c) third-generation, with both parents born in the United States (Louie, 2007;Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). We distinguished between second-generation and third-generation students because students with foreign-born parents might have had different exposure to the U.S. education system or have received different types or amounts of cultural and social capital (observable and unobservable) from their parents than their counterparts with U.S.-born parents.…”

Table of Contents

“…An immigrant family's socioeconomic background, as measured by parental income, education, and occupation, has a powerful eff ect on that student's academic ability, educational outcomes, and occupation (Louie, 2005). Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), Borjas (2011) reveals that about one-third of the children of immigrants (including fi rstand second-generation immigrants) live in poverty-15 percent more than native children.…”