Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. Stacey J. Lee. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 143 pp.

Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth.

Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation By Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee January 2006

/pdf/racial-transformation-and-the-changing-nature-of-segregation-bvcgjt7bm7.pdf

Racial Transformation and the Changing Nature of Segregation - eScholarship

Children of Latino immigrants, many of whom live in “mixed-status” families, are a rapidly growing group in the United States. It is widely accepted that their development is affected by multiple a...

/pdf/the-impact-of-detention-and-deportation-on-latino-immigrant-46vgrnc7kz.pdf

The Impact of Detention and Deportation on Latino Immigrant Children and Families: A Quantitative Exploration

The Impact of Detention and Deportation on Latino Immigrant Children and Families

Immigration to the United States presents both challenges and opportunities that affect students' academic achievement. Using a 5-year longitudinal, mixed-methods approach, we identified varying academic trajectories of newcomer immigrant students from Central America, China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico. Latent class growth curve analysis revealed that although some newcomer students performed at high or improving levels over time, others showed diminishing performance. Multinomial logistic regressions identified significant group differences in academic trajectories, particularly between the high-achieving youth and the other groups. In keeping with ecological-developmental and stage-environment fit theories, School Characteristics (school segregation rate, school poverty rate, and student perceptions of school violence), Family Characteristics (maternal education, parental employment, and household structure), and Individual Characteristics (academic English proficiency, academic engagement, psychological symptoms, gender, and 2 age-related risk factors, number of school transitions and being overaged for grade placement) were associated with different trajectories of academic performance. A series of case studies triangulate many of the quantitative findings as well as illuminate patterns that were not detected in the quantitative data. Thus, the mixed-methods approach sheds light on the cumulative developmental challenges that immigrant students face as they adjust to their new educational settings.

/pdf/academic-trajectories-of-newcomer-immigrant-youth-1tfv73n9bj.pdf

Academic Trajectories of Newcomer Immigrant Youth.

This study aims to increase understanding of factors that account for academic English language proficiency in a sample of 274 adolescent first-generation immigrant students from China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Central America, and Mexico. Previous research has shown the importance of English language proficiency in predicting academic achievement measured by GPA and achievement tests. The present study describes the academic English language proficiency of immigrant youth after, on average, 7 years in the United States and models factors that contribute to variation. Findings show that although differences in individual student characteristics partially explain variation in English language proficiency, the schools that immigrant youth attended are also important. The amount of time that students spent speaking English in informal social situations is predictive of English language proficiency. These findings demonstrate that social context factors directly affect language learning among adolescent...

Explaining English Language Proficiency Among Adolescent Immigrant Students

Although migration is fundamentally a family affair, the family, as a unit of analysis, has been understudied both by scholars of migration and by developmental psychologists. Researchers have often struggled to conceptualize immigrant children, adolescents, and their families, all too often giving way to pathologizing them, ignoring generational and ethnic distinctions among immigrant groups, stereotyping immigrants as “problem” or (conversely) “model” minorities, and overlooking the complexity of race, gender, documentation, and language in their lives. In addition, contexts other than the family remain understudied. In this afterword, the authors examine these issues, the contributions of the chapters in this volume to understanding them, and their implications for research and theory within the field of developmental science. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Afterword: new directions in research with immigrant families and their children.

n 2000 there were 2.84 million foreign-born U.S. residents under the age of 18 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). Although many common themes are embodied in the immigrant experience, enormous diversity exists among newcomer families with important implications for the development and adaptation of youth. Immigrant youth come from dozens of countries for different reasons, follow different paths of migration, and once in the U.S., they encounter vastly different circumstances. The public debate about immigration has largely failed to notice the children of immigrants and the fundamental differences within this group. While some immigrant youth outperform their American-born peers in educational achievement, health, and happiness, many struggle to thrive in schools and communities that do not provide the resources they most need (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco & Todorova, in press).

Avary Carhill

Papers

Explaining English Language Proficiency Among Adolescent Immigrant Students

Afterword: new directions in research with immigrant families and their children.

Understanding and Responding to the Needs of Newcomer Immigrant Youth and Families