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

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments The ideas for this study were first articulated and fleshed out during a series of walks around Town Lake in Austin just south of the Texas state capitol, later named in honor of Lady Bird Johnson and her work for the community. Later, we solidified the plans on a walk around the grounds of the 9/11 Monument in Washington, D.C. Although these walks involved significant symbolic backdrops for our study—Texas was in the process of becoming a Latino -majority state as the politicians at the state capitol are keenly aware, and our nation’s understanding of global issues and peoples were transformed at the turn of this century—we were pondering the implications of our work on immigrant high school students’ course-taking. When we first joined forces, Rebecca Callahan had come to work with Chandra Muller on her Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA) project (funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD R01 HD40428-02S1) and the National Science Foundation (HRD-0523046). The study was investigating how education and the high school context shaped adolescents’ transition to adulthood. The project focuses on the use of high school transcripts to quantify students’ experiences in academic subjects. Callahan had a background in English language learners and English as a Second Language (ESL) issues and with the support of an American Educational Research Association/Institute of Education Services (AERA-IES) post-doctoral fellowship led a component of the AHAA that used high school course-taking records to understand the experiences of English language learners. Drawing on our individual areas of expertise in this early collaboration, we developed a series of studies exploring the processing of immigrant, language minority students in U.S. high schools. This early collaboration was instrumental to our present work as it allowed us to investigate how schools processed immigrant, language minority students relative to their native-born, native-English-speaking peers. xiv Acknowledgments Following our collaborative work investigating the academic experiences of children of immigrant parents, we were eager to consider other aspects of the high school experience. Muller brought a focus on civic development to the table, and Callahan an interest in immigrant incorporation. As a K-12 educator, Callahan observed firsthand the engagement of immigrant youth in the social world of the high school. Her work as a teacher suggested students ’ formal and informal school experiences might play differently based on parental nativity. These early discussions just south of the capitol brought us to consider the other aspect of schools and schooling in the United States, the civic development of youth. Specifically, we began to ask how high schools might prepare children of immigrants for citizenship in young adulthood. Muller’s expertise in school context and the math and science pipeline, combined with Callahan’s linguistic focus, allowed us to question whether and how children of immigrants might interact with different school and community contexts to engage as young adults in the civic lives of their communities. The Add Health/AHAA dataset with its early adulthood indicators was perfectly poised to allow us to ask and answer these questions. We are deeply indebted to the Russell Sage Foundation for the opportunity to pursue this line of inquiry (RSF Grant #: 88-06-12; The Roles of Language and Education in Adolescent Immigrants’ Civic Integration during the Transition to Adulthood). Specifically, we would like to thank Suzanne Nichols for her consistent, clear support and encouragement throughout this project, Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation , Aixa Cintrón-Velez, our initial program officer, the Russell Sage grants board, and the very patient and diligent editors, Cindy Buck and Jean Blackburn . The Language and Education study built on prior research exploring issues of assimilation—language in particular and family in general—and school context. To our surprise, however, our preliminary civic models produced largely null effects. Although the literature on immigrant adults’ civic engagement highlights the importance of the home language in access to information , the same pattern did not hold true among adolescents. Primary language use relates to achievement and course-taking among immigrant youth, with little to no association with civic and political behaviors during early adulthood. Similarly, extracurricular involvement and volunteering shapes adolescents’ social experiences, but does so for all adolescents, regardless of parental nativity. Instead, our findings suggested that high school social studies in particular may influence the civic and political behaviors of children of immigrants in a way it does not for their native...