Educating Immigrant Students in the 21st Century

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.

"Rong and Preissle have again done an impressive job of combining current census and other data to paint a detailed picture of immigration to the U.S., and of making the case for an equitable approach to schooling all of America’s children. They provide practical recommendations for teachers and administrators on how to use this knowledge to make informed decisions about programs and practices, especially in the area of assessment and other accountability measures."

• AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorsIntroduction1. Immigration and U.S. Schools2. Immigrant Children, Their Families, and Environment3. Learning English and Maintaining Heritage Languages4. Educational Attainment5. Immigrant Children From Asia6. Immigrant Children From the Caribbean and Africa7. Immigrant Children From Latin America8. Immigrant Children From Middle Eastern CountriesSources of InformationReferencesIndex