Coming of Political Age: American Schools and the Civic Development of Immigrant Youth

7. Conclusions and Implications: Adolescent Children of Immigrants and Their Schools

chapter 7 Conclusions and Implications: Adolescent Children of Immigrants and Their Schools I think the problem with getting more civically conscious—it’s not something that can be tested . . . taxpayers don’t care about that [civic development ] at this point. I mean, ideally they’d like to see . . . would they like to see everybody vote? . . . [Well,] that’s up for grabs. —Mr. Tomasi, world history teacher, San Diego We began this study with the premise that high schools are important venues for adolescents’ political development, providing experiences that help them become active in our nation’s democratic process. Schools not only prepare young people for labor force participation but also socialize them in important ways to become independent adults who contribute to their communities and the larger society in both thought and action. We hypothesized that children of immigrant parents find their school experiences particularly salient; that they typically embrace school opportunities; and that exposure to new ideas through social science and politics coursework resonates for them as they navigate the dual cultures of family and community. Indeed, many of the teachers we spoke with described their goal of conveying a sense of opportunity and empowerment to their students, and students, in turn, often described their favorite teachers as those who gave them a better sense of what was possible. Our empirical data support these hypotheses about the role of high school in shaping the early adult political activity of students, especially children of immigrants. We argue that schools may matter now more than ever before. In chapter 1, we illustrated the nationwide demographic and geographic shifts driven by the young and growing population of children of immigrants. We argue that these changes have implications for the political future of the United States, and our focus on schools and schooling directly addresses one critical point in the future of the nation: political engagement. More specifically, our work reveals the significant, positive relationship between social science coursetaking and voting among children of immigrants. This finding speaks to the Callahan.indb 121 2/4/2013 12:16:15 PM 122 Coming of Political Age potential incorporation—or disenfranchisement—of a growing segment of the American population. Immigrant young adults coming of civic age in our nation’s high schools constitute the heart of America’s democracy. Importantly, social studies coursework appears to promote voting among children of immigrants independent of the well-documented relationship between educational attainment and voting; thus, the political socialization of children of immigrants becomes all the more relevant, especially with the immigrant diaspora in recent years, documented in chapter 1. Children of immigrants are now represented in schools, districts, and states across the nation , and our findings suggest that schools can and do directly promote political participation among this growing population of children of immigrants through social science course-taking. Access to the social science curriculum and content has become a question of enfranchisement of youth across a variety of sectors of our society. Local constituencies hoping to maintain their political representation will do well to ensure access to the social science curriculum and content for their growing populations of children of immigrants, the voters of tomorrow. Unlike racial and ethnic minorities, we found that children of immigrants as a whole do not demonstrate any particular political partisanship. Rather, they vote along family, ethnic, and community lines. Much of the immigrant literature focuses on family and community; we chose to explore a relatively less well documented context, the school. Although ultimately their schooling predicts whether children of immigrants will vote, how they might identify politically appears to be more a function of their community and ethnic identification. For example, Latino and black immigrants tend to identify as Democrat, as do their third-plus-generation peers. Children of immigrants and children of native-born parents may approach the process of party identification quite differently. Hajnal and Lee (2011), for instance, in their examination of partisan identification among adult voters, demonstrate that Latinos and Asians respond quite differently to identity, ideology, and information than black or white Americans: for Latinos and Asians, the decision not to identify with a specific party may be a rational response. Our findings about immigrant students’ political identification aligning with their community and ethnicity are consistent with the more general observation that culture and ethnicity matters, and indeed matters more than immigrant generational status, for shaping many dimensions of adolescents’ development, including identity (Kasinitz et al. 2009). How the process of party identification functions among...