Laurie Olsen "Immigrant Students and the California Public Schools. Crossing the Schoolhouse Border." A California Tomorrow Policy Research Report.
This book tells the story of immigrant students as they learn about the United States and being American in school. It also tells the stories of the teachers who teach them, the educators who have shaped their educational program, and their English-speaking, U.S.-born schoolmates. These stories are told in the context of an urban high school in California in an increasingly multicultural community where the promises of diversity are only on the surface. In many ways, the researcher used standard ethnographic methods in the study of this school over several years. Three formal journals recorded the researcher's roles as storyteller, anthropologist, and advocate, respectively.
At this school, students who can not speak English are shut out of opportunities to learn and make contact with their schoolmates, and students are sorted by skin color and class into programs that prepare them for very different futures.
Most of the educators at the high school believe in integration, fairness, and equal opportunity. They want to believe that all students are free to participate in school, but they do not see the active process of exclusion and sorting that goes on in the school's programs and practices. The story of this high school reveals the perpetuation of an unequal society, but it also shows the possibilities for change and a very slow but determined change process. The following chapters are included:
(1) "At the Crossroads"; (2) "The Maps of Madison High: On Separation and Invisibility"; (3) "We Make Each Other Racial: The Madison High World as Perceived by the'American' Student"; (4) "Learning the Language of America"; (5) "To Find Your Race and Your Place: Race Tracks at Madison High"; (6) "Love and Marriage: How Young Immigrant Women Negotiate the Terrain between Cultures"; (7) "Creating a Support Place for Immigrants"; (8) "Adults in the Crossroads" ; (9) "A Different Voice, a Daily Struggle"; (10) "Madison High, the State, and the Nation"; and (11) "Conclusions: What Futures Will We Choose as a Multicultural Society?"
Publisher:‎ California Tomorrow. 1988.
Paperback.
New book. Book in excellent visual and technical condition.