Educating Immigrant Students: What We Need To Know To Meet The Challenges

The authors summarize current information on socioeconomic, demographic, linguistic, and educational characteristics of immigrant students aged 5-18 to help you better assess the impact of these diverse groups on your school or district. This book identifies potential problems and challenges associated with educating our immigrant students. It considers the educational implications surrounding these questions:

• Who are the current immigrants?
• How are they different from previous immigrants and from one another?
• What is their level of English language acquisition?
• How does the educational achievement of immigrants, their native-born children, and their grandchildren compare with that of native-born American students?

Rong and Preissle examine immigration and how it interacts with race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, social class, and residential location, as addressed by schooling theories and practices. The authors assess the effectiveness of today′s policies and present conclusions and recommendations with implications for future policy and practice. This book is a valuable resource for anyone involved in making education policy. It offers crucial insights for all educators working with immigrant students.

Xue Lan Rong, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a first-generation immigrant whose native language is Chinese. As a classroom teacher, teacher educator, and educational sociologist, she has more than 25 years of teaching experience in public schools at various levels in the United States and China. She obtained her research experience via sociological, demographic, and pedagogical training. She has continually published in major sociological and educational journals and presented at national conferences on the topics of generation, race and ethnicity, national origins, gender, social class, and educational attainment and achievement of immigrant children since 1988, when she finished a dissertation on immigration and education at the University of Georgia.

Judith Preissle, a professor at the University of Georgia, is a teacher educator and an educational anthropologist who brings a dual insider-outsider perspective to issues of education and immigration. She is a native-born citizen of the United States whose forebears arrived on the continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is also one of the many internal migrants of the 20th century, who grew up moving around the country and attending schools in six different states. Beginning her educational experience teaching social studies and language arts to 12-year-olds, she has worked at the University of Georgia since 1975, teaching the social foundations of education, qualitative research methods, and educational anthropology to an increasingly diverse population of graduates and undergraduates. She has published widely in these areas with special concentration on research design and ethics and on gender and minority education. She is a graduate of Indiana University.