Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education - Softcover

Lander, Jessica

 
9780807013359: Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0807013358 ISBN 13: 9780807013359
Verlag: Beacon Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the 2024 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, given by the National Council of Teachers of English

"Making Americans shines a light on the barriers that immigrant students in the US face—and shares some inspiring stories about students who have overcome them" —Bill Gates

A landmark work that weaves captivating stories about the past, present, and personal into an inspiring vision for how America can educate immigrant students

Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the reader on a powerful and urgent journey to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans. A compelling read for everyone who cares about America’s future, Making Americans brims with innovative ideas for educators and policy makers across the country.

Lander brings to life the history of America’s efforts to educate immigrants through rich stories, including these:

  • The Nebraska teacher arrested for teaching an eleven-year-old boy in German who took his case to the Supreme Court
  • The California families who overturned school segregation for Mexican American children
  • The Texas families who risked deportation to establish the right for undocumented children to attend public schools

She visits innovative classrooms across the country that work with immigrant-origin students, such as these:
  • A school in Georgia for refugee girls who have been kept from school by violence, poverty, and natural disaster
  • Five schools in Aurora, Colorado, that came together to collaborate with community groups, businesses, a hospital, and families to support newcomer children.
  • A North Carolina school district of more than 100 schools who rethought how they teach their immigrant-origin students

She shares inspiring stories of how seven of her own immigrant students created new homes in America, including the following:
  • The boy who escaped Baghdad and found a home in his school’s ROTC program
  • The daughter of Cambodian genocide survivors who dreamed of becoming a computer scientist
  • The orphaned boy who escaped violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and created a new community here

Making Americans is an exploration of immigrant education across the country told through key historical moments, current experiments to improve immigrant education, and profiles of immigrant students. Making Americans is a remarkable book that will reshape how we all think about nurturing one of America’s greatest assets: the newcomers who enrich this country with their energy, talents, and drive.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Lander is a nationally recognized teacher and the author of the 2024 George Orwell Award–winning book Making Americans. Conferred by the National Council of Teachers of English, the Orwell Award recognizes writers who have made “outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.” Among other honors, Jessica was named the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year and one of the 2023 Top 10 National History Teachers of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She has spent much of the last decade in the classroom, teaching high school history and civics to recent immigrant students.

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***
The sun had yet to surface when Lídia and José Lopez gently shook their five children from their slumber, dressed them in their Sunday best, and tucked the family into their white Dodge Monaco. The sedan was piled high with books, clothes, pots, even the family’s small TV, but the Lopezes were not embarking on a road trip. Their destination was a mere two blocks away, at the federal district courthouse in Tyler, Texas.

Alfredo, nine and the oldest, remembers little. It was a Friday, the week after the start of school, the year 1977. The little black-haired boy should have been entering second grade, his sister should have been starting first. But just as classes were set to resume, their parents received a letter informing them that tuition was required if they wished their children to study in the public schools. For the Lopez family, the fee was unaffordable.

Just over two years earlier and more than two hundred miles south, in Austin, the legislature had revised the state’s education code. But before the final vote was cast, the border city of Brownsville slipped in a provision that, at the time, went largely unnoticed. Going forward, public schools would no longer be obligated to educate their community’s undocumented children. and, the state would contribute no funds to support those children’s academic futures. Public schools were left with a choice: cover the cost themselves, charge tuition, or exclude such students altogether.

In the blistering summer heat of 1977, the Tyler school Board, arguing that the city was on the precipice of becoming “a haven” for undocumented families, voted to charge tuition for every student who could not prove legal residence—one thousand dollars per child, roughly one-fourth of most undocumented texans’ annual income.

The city of Tyler, in the eastern corner of texas, was founded in the mid-1800s, built by enslaved Black Americans, and named for a Us pres- ident who initiated the annexation of the Lone Star State. Surrounded by vibrant blooms, it was a city that proudly proclaimed itself the “rose capital of America.” and it was here, in 1969, where José Lopez found work tending rosebuds after crossing the southern border. Within a few years he sent for his wife, and then for his children, who left their home in the small Mexican city of Jalpa and traveled hundreds of miles north to reunite.

On arriving in the United States, Alfredo was enrolled in elementary school and attended dutifully until, in the summer of 1977, the school board changed its policy. of the city’s nearly 16,000 students, less than 60 were undocumented, and they were suddenly ineligible to study in the city’s schools.

Growing up in Mexico, neither José nor Lídia Lopez had been able to stay long in school. Their families needed them in the fields. But, for their children they wished for a different future. And so, a week later, a little before 6 a.m., the Lopez family pulled into the parking lot of the federal district courthouse, the sky just beginning to bloom pink. There they met three other undocumented families. Together they had made the perilous choice to sue the city’s schools. It was a decision the parents made knowing what might happen. That was why, the night before, Lídia and José Lopez had packed the Dodge Monaco to the brim. as Lídia would recall years later, in walking into the courthouse they were prepared to be immediately arrested and deported. But for their children, it was a risk they chose to take…

***

…The judge assigned to the case was William Wayne Justice. As the Washington Post would write of Justice a decade later, “Justice in Texas is not an abstraction, but flesh and blood and, as only real life can render it, a federal judge.” The descendant of Norwegian immigrants and confederate soldiers, Justice was born in east Texas at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. He grew up destined for a career in law. His father, a lawyer, left little to chance, designating his son his official legal partner when Justice was just seven years old. A child of the Great Depression, Justice credited his father with teaching him the essence of his name. As Justice would recall, for his father, “a farmer in bib overalls was entitled to no less dignity than the president of a bank in a pinstriped suit.

Decades later, President Kennedy appointed Justice as a US attorney, and then President Johnson appointed him a federal district judge. He joined the court two months after reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and arrived in Tyler to a segregated city firmly rooted in the Deep South. Two years into his tenure he definitively ordered the desegregation of Texas schools. When he ordered the city’s own Robert E. Lee High school to take down its profusion of confederate flags, incensed white students took their flags and circled the courthouse shooting epithets. As one student would recall, “Justice was blamed for everything.”

In Texas, Justice was hated and revered. A shy, slightly stooped, bookish man, Justice spent a lifetime, as he would share years later, trying to live up to his name.
On Friday morning the families filed into Judge Justice’s court. They were joined by the state’s bleary-eyed assistant attorney general, sporting blue jeans; she had arrived in the wee hours of the morning and the airline, she apologized, had lost her luggage. (As Justice would recall twenty-five years later, “she plainly thought that the whole proceedings were insane, being there early in the morning like that and being confronted with these extraordinary allegations, that the children of illegal aliens would be entitled to a public education. She obviously thought that was such a ridiculous proposition and it really didn’t deserve her appearance there.”)

As the Tyler parents offered testimony, their children, four-year-olds, six-year-olds, eight-year-olds, watched silently. Their lawyer, Larry Daves recalled, “They were the cutest, quietest, most unbelievably disciplined children I’ve ever seen. They were probably mystified, but they sat for hours, quiet as mice, watching the proceedings.” It would be the last time Daves would see the children at the center of his case. While the full trial would not take place for months, following the Friday hearing, Judge Justice ordered the schools, in the meantime, to readmit their students. The following Monday, Tyler’s undocumented children were back behind their desks. They had missed only a week of school…

***

…Alfredo Lopez, who had been set to start second grade when he sat in Justice’s courtroom, had just begun third grade when Justice handed down his ruling in September 1978. “Already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of English-speaking ability, and undeniable racial prejudices,” wrote the judge, “these children, without an education, will become permanently locked into the lowest socio-economic class.” as both sides affirmed, “The illegal alien of today may well be the legal alien of tomorrow,” acknowledging that many undocumented immigrants might eventually be granted permanent residency. Of the school district’s argument that its policy would discourage migration, the judge was dismissive: such a plan was “ludicrously ineffectual,” he wrote. Justice was disdainful too of the district’s attempt to slim educational costs by “shav[ing] off a little around the edges.” It was a policy, the judge openly suggested, that might have been made because the “children of illegal aliens had never been explicitly afforded any judicial protection,...

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Verlag
Beacon Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0807013358
ISBN 13 
9780807013359
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
376
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Beacon Press
https://www.beacon.org/Assets/ClientPages/History.aspx

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