National Bureau of Economic Research
Public Policy Institute of California, Visiting Fellow
Gersh@newschool.edu

This work is part of the study New York and the New Immigration: The Incorporation of Recent Immigrants into the New York City Economy, a project sponsored by the International Center of Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship, New School University, & funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. Support from the Public Policy Institute of California is also gratefully acknowledged. This work has benefited from the comments of participants at presentations at the Baruch School of Public Affairs, the meetings of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, The Kaplan Center for NYC Affairs, and the Public Policy Institute of California  The author thanks David Howell, Judy Baker, and Deborah Garvey for helpful comments and Jesse Wolovoy for able and eager research assistance.

“Many people say that previous immigrant groups [earlier in the century] were more successful, but that is not so true. Many failed to graduate high school, but they opened up a shoe store on Houston Street or worked in a ribbon factory. Well you can’t do that so easily now. We can’t be America and continue to take immigrants and then not serve them. We have to figure out how to get them high school degrees and get them to college.”
     --ESL teacher in a New York City high school

Introduction
At the time of the last census in 1990, there were over 600,000 students in the U.S. who had immigrated within the past three years, so called “recent immigrants.” An additional 1.5 million students were designated as limited English proficiency (LEP). Seventy-five percent of the recent immigrants resided in five states California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Thus, while the numbers were not large nationally, they have a very significant impact on a few areas. New York State had over 100,000 students who had immigrated in the last three years, or seventeen percent of the national total.1  The State’s recent immigrant population is concentrated in New York City; thus, they made up about 9 percent of the City’s total public school enrollment in 1996-1997.2 About 17 percent of the City’s school children were designated as limited English proficiency (LEP), or now called English language learners (ELL) in New York State. Fix and Zimmerman (1993) report that the nation’s LEP student population grew 52 percent between 1986 and 1991 while the total school population grew 4 percent. These large recent immigrant and LEP populations pose challenges to a public school system. And it is clear that trends that begin with Federal policy have a large effect on a few states and urban areas.
At the same time, school systems across the country are undergoing reforms to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of schooling services to all students. State and local school systems are developing new (and supposedly “higher”) standards, experimenting with school based management (SBM), encouraging parent and community participation, considering and adopting various forms of school choice, and many other changes in school governance. Clearly these reforms are impacted by the nature of the students served in those school systems, and thus systems with high proportions of immigrants must be aware that this is one factor that must affect the structure and implementation of the governance reforms. Of course, students and families are affected by changes in governance, too; thus changes in governance will affect immigrant populations. So, what are the City, State and Federal governments doing to address the needs and issues of the immigrant student population in the City? What programs and reforms seem promising and what are the unaddressed gaps in service? How do the programs fit into the larger school reform trends in the City and the State? These are the big questions that this chapter asks. The answers, of course, are too complex to be solved in one chapter or one book. But we seek to provide insight to the issues policymakers, educational and immigrant service providers and advocacy groups, and policy scholars should consider.
This paper outlines the major recent governance trends in New York State (NYS) and New York City (NYC) and attempts to map immigrants onto the changing school governance landscape. We also provide a concise summary of programs and policies in place and use qualitative interviews to discern promising directions for future reform and research efforts. Though the findings are exploratory, through defining the issues for both immigrants students and the school systems that serve them, we develop areas for future research that appear fruitful for improving educational outcomes for both immigrants students and the natives that learn beside them.
Methodology
We obtained and analyzed academic literature; popular literature and newspapers; publications by immigrant advocacy groups and the documents they produce for distribution to immigrant students, parents, and school staff; and official documents from the NYC Board of Education (BOE) and the NYS Department of Education (SED). From these sources, we discerned broad trends in immigrant education and school governance.
We then performed a series of qualitative interviews with district officials at the NYC Board of Education (BOE), school-level staff at four schools, and community-based organizations and advocacy groups that support immigrants in navigating the public school system. We interviewed six relevant officials at the BOE and one state-level official. We also interviewed eight representatives of key advocacy groups for immigrants,3 five members of the New York Urban League, and four school principals. In-depth school-level interviews were performed at four school sites.4 In total, we interviewed 58 individuals.
All interviews followed the model of qualitative interviews described in Rubin and Rubin (1995)5, particularly the chapter called “interviews as guided conversations”.6 Interviews were largely unstructured with primarily open-ended questions. The interview data were coded and analyzed using methods described in Rubin and Rubin (1995: 226-56)7 We used this analysis to discern the key trends and issues discussed below.
Immigrant Students and Education Policy: Federal, State, Local and School Levels
 Despite all the attention being paid to immigrants and education, in policy circles the attention is mostly indirect. Most states do not have any significant, coherent education policy strategy for immigrants, particularly new immigrants, and the same can be said for the Federal Government and local school districts. The policies in place that impact immigrants, such as bilingual education, are aimed at LEP students and are focused almost exclusively on teaching them English. While this strategy addresses one critical issue relevant to immigrants and education, it may not be focused enough to optimize the myriad strategies for teaching new immigrants, other LEP students, and native students. As Schwartz and Gershberg (2000) show, there is far from complete overlap between the immigrant and the LEP student populations, with only about two thirds of the recent immigrants being LEP. In fact, the recent debates in New York City have focused almost entirely on the proper mix of Bilingual Education, ESL, and English immersion.8 This echoes the debates nationally, most recently in California and Arizona. In this study, we attempt to remain agnostic on this set of issues while introducing and highlighting other potentially important issues and debates.
 The Federal Government’s Emergency Immigrant Education Program (EIEP) provides largely discretionary grants to states and localities with large immigrant student influxes, but the funding in 1999 was only $150 million nationally. In addition Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) funds education for LEP students through project grants. Total funding available to state and/or local education agencies through Title VII in 1999 was $190 million. These funds are for direct provision of bilingual education, training of bilingual teachers, developing innovative bilingual education programs, and other bilingual education activities.9 Since 1990, Federal funds for bilingual education have not grown much in real terms, while funds specifically for immigrants have nearly quadrupled in real terms. Nevertheless, the assertions of advocates like those in Stewart’s (1994)  “Immigration Laws Are Education Laws Too” appear to have some foundation: The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 is the Federal legislation with perhaps the “most effect on American institutions and agencies of education in the past several decades.” And this questions if  the Federal Government is helping sufficiently to pay the costs of this national immigration policy.10  Public schools are required to accept all students of legal school age regardless of their legal residency or status, and the budgetary implications of these policies are explored further below.
 Regarding state-level policies, McDonnell and Hill (1993: 24) summarize vividly:
“The most notable characteristic of immigrant education policy at the state level is its total absence, aside from programs for LEP students. Across the six states we studied [including New York], there are no policies specifically targeted to students on the basis of their immigrant status. Rather, state policy focuses on students with limited English-language skills, whether they be immigrants or native born.”
 New York is similar to other states in this regard. The state school finance formula for school districts gives an additional weight for each LEP student of 0.15 of average daily attendance (ADA). Despite the fact that 14% of immigrants in New York State in 1990 came from English-speaking countries, McDonnell and Hill (1993: 26) cite a state education department official in New York:
“When you ask policymakers about immigrants, they will respond in terms of those who are LEP. Yet, we have English-speaking immigrants from the West Indies who have special needs…. These students have minimal educational backgrounds; their spoken English is different from either American or Standard English; and they come from a very different cultural environment.”
The headline to a 1992 New York Times article is telling: “Caribbean Pupils’ English Seems Barrier, Not Bridge.” Sontag (1992) reports that in 1992 “students from English-speaking Caribbean countries make up 21 percent of the new immigrants enrolled in New York City schools.” Yet while she reports that few question that these children “need more help in adjusting to American schools,” the current policies make channeling resources to them difficult. As we will see below, the EIEP is a very small piece of the budget, and most other funds are targeted exclusively for ESL or Bilingual Education programs.11 Despite potentially large language issues because of the native dialects they speak, English-speaking Caribbean students do not qualify for any of these programs. Sontag (1992) chronicles one program in one school that focuses on helping these students, but  this “makeshift class for Caribbean students depends upon [the principal’s] jiggering of his budget and the good will of his superintendent.”
The larger point is not simply that there is a significant number of English-speaking immigrants. The fact that there are nearly twice as many English Language Learners (ELLs) in New York City primary and secondary public schools as there are recent immigrants implies the need for more nuanced policy approaches than we have seen. Below, we use our interview data to explore what and how. Recent experiences with public schools, such as Newcomer Schools, that focus on serving recent immigrants highlight this fact. But these schools have arisen as local, isolated, almost organic responses to dire need (especially overcrowding concerns), not from any organized City, State, or Federal initiative. Disentangling the two issues, immigrants and LEP, is important because the challenges of each group are different in some areas. Unfortunately, disentangling the two is difficult due to inadequate data collection in most states and poor public understanding of the issues. (See Schwartz and Gershberg, 2000).
Brief Summary of ELL, ESL and Bilingual Education Policy in New York
In the New York City public school system, there are two programs that serve LEP students, officially called English Language Learners (ELL) in New York: Bilingual Education and Freestanding ESL. Both are authorized through the State’s Part 154 of the regulations for Pupils with Limited English Proficiency. The State’s programs relate only to English language instruction and instruction in a student’s native language.
Freestanding ESL offers ESL classes as well as some classes in what is known as English Language Arts (ELA), which is essentially the curriculum that every student must master to graduate from high school. Most subject classes aside from ELA for students in Freestanding ESL programs are taught in English. Bilingual Education, on the other hand, offers the ESL and ELA classes, and in addition offers subject areas such as math, science and social studies in both the native language and English.
 Students are identified as being eligible for ELL services through the Language Assessment Battery (LAB) and the Home Language Identification Survey (HLIS). If the HLIS indicates that English is spoken in the home, for instance by Caribbean immigrant parents, then the student is not eligible to take the LAB and may not be classified as ELL.12 If a language other than English is spoken in the home, the student must take the LAB. Students scoring below the 40th percentile on the English LAB are classified as ELL and are eligible for ELL services.13 This selection method means that there is not currently a criterion-referenced standard for English proficiency in the testing process to determine a student’s categorization as ELL. Forty percent of each year’s LAB test-takers will, by definition, be labeled as ELL.14 Schools that have 20 or more ELL students speaking the same language in the same grade must technically offer a Bilingual Education program.15
Table 1 provides the breakdown of the most common languages for which ESL services must be provided and programs in which these ELL students are served. For instance, we see that about 97,000 ELL students have Spanish as their native language. This represents 65.5% of all ELL students. Of the 97,000, 61,000 are in Bilingual Education, and the remainder are in Freestanding ESL.16 In addition to the data in Table 1, about 51.8% all ELL students are in Bilingual Education.17 About 73.4% of ELL students are in elementary or middle school and of these about 48% are in Bilingual Education. 62.2% of high school ELL students are served in Bilingual Education. Thus, Bilingual Education is more “popular” among High School ELLs than those in Elementary schools.  INSERT TABLE ONE ABOUT HERE
Funding for ESL and Bilingual Education in New York City
INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

 Figure 1 shows the funding sources for ESL and Bilingual Education programs in NYC. Federal Funding accounts for about 11% through EIEP, allocations from the larger Title I total for poor students, and allocations from the larger Title VII project grants total.18 The City itself pays nearly half the total (NYC Tax Levy), and the remainder comes from the state—Part 154 is a state program specifically for ESL and Bilingual Education; Pupils with Compensatory Education Needs (PCEN) serves all disadvantaged students; and Dual Language funds a small number of competitive project grants aimed at programs native Spanish and native English speaking students whose parents would like them to be fluent in both languages.  Performing a rough calculation, we estimate that the total funding of $261,234,951 yields about $1400-$1600 per Bilingual/ESL student. During our interviews, some actors indicated that this sum was not enough to pay fully for the programs that schools are required to provide Bilingual/ESL students. One example of a funding shortage would be if a school were required to provide a Bilingual class but the class was the smallest qualifying size (15 to 20 students). In this case, the class uses one full teacher unit but does not receive the equivalent dollar amount in funding. When shortfalls occur, schools may use other flexible funds—such as Title I funds intended for poor, English-proficient students—to make up the difference. In addition, these funds are not guaranteed from year to year, but depend upon the exact count of ELL and immigrant students after the school year starts, a fact that makes long-term planning and hiring difficult. The larger points are that (1) the City is bearing much of the financial burden of providing these programs; (2) the Federal Government set immigration policy but does not provide a large portion of the educational resources needed to educate immigrants; and (3) funding may not be sufficient to finance the state’s mandated policies. Schwartz and Gershberg (2000) provide results that in fact immigrant students may be in schools that receive less money than the average.
General Issues and Key Trends for Immigrant Students in NYC
The overwhelming concern vis-à-vis immigrants and education concentrates on the challenges they pose to educators and education systems.19  If immigration swells enrollments, schools may become more overcrowded. Even if overcrowding is not a concern, or not a direct result of immigration patterns, immigrants often do not speak English proficiently, an issue that may require additional public funds to address.20 Moreover, immigrants speak many different languages and come from many different cultures. Perhaps this cultural and linguistic multiplicity makes schools less efficient. Many immigrants are poor, move often, come from war-torn or other difficult home country situations, and come from countries with deficient education systems—all well-accepted challenges to effective public education.
 These issues all have salience in New York City. Rivera-Batiz (1995: 5) asserts that the entire growth in student enrollment between 1989 and 1995 was attributable to the influx of immigrants. In addition, he provides rough estimates that the number of immigrant children in the school system, if measured properly, would be over 30%. This would include only children born in foreign countries, not children born in the U.S. to foreign-born parents. Finally, Bogen (1986) suggests that if Puerto Rican born students were included, the figure would approach 50%.  Thus, the overcrowding that has caused great public concern over the past decade is in no small part attributable to new immigrants in the school system.
 This growth in the number of immigrant students has been mirrored in the growth of the City’s LEP population. In 1989-90, there were 110,245 LEP students enrolled, and by 1995-96 this had grown to 167,602. Interestingly, since 1995-96, this figure has declined each year and in 1998-99 there were 148,399 LEP students.21
 Immigrant students have special needs and challenges that require both resources and skills to address properly. English proficiency is one of these needs, but so are high rates of residential mobility, emotional stress, acculturation difficulties, health issues transported from their home countries, and poverty. Naturally, non-immigrant students may encounter these same challenges, but the perception among most of our interviewees is that these are particularly prevalent in the immigrant community, or at least the means for dealing with these challenges are different for immigrant and non-immigrant disadvantaged students. In particular, immigrants experience high rates of separation from their families, which may lead to a loss of a sense of community or other emotional problems.22
For immigrant students, every aspect of their lives, including recess, may pose a challenge. A BOE official responsible for supporting Asian immigrant parents and students said,
“Adjustment is a big issue. How do children from different cultures play together? Some cultures do no allow boys and girls to play together. Or a kid playing with a turban on his head can be stigmatized.”
In addition, when students do begin to adapt, this may lead to increased tension at home with their parents. For better or for worse, since schools are the institutions charged with educating immigrant students, they are also likely to be the institutions that benefit most from successful strategies and programs supporting immigrants in their adjustment processes. One guidance counselor, who works two days a week at a Newcomer school and three at a school he described as serving a highly disadvantaged but largely non-immigrant population, said the following:
We [at the school] need to get rid of the ‘kids are to be seen and not heard’ ethos [among many immigrant parents]. This is not possible with the threat of violence and drugs on the street. Kids need to be able to have open communication with their parents.”
This guidance counselor—along with several other teacher and principal interviews—mentioned the need to improve the training of non-ESL teachers who increasingly find ESL students in their classrooms. While this “mainstreaming” of ESL students may have some advantages, the interviews said that non-ESL teachers were not prepared to handle the this challenge adequately. They said the training should include both pedagogical techniques and cultural awareness.23
Immigrants are also far more likely than natives to have had interrupted schooling. The current system places immigrants in the school system primarily by age, regardless of how much formal schooling they may have had in their homeland.24 Many immigrants come to New York City from rural areas. Aside from the generally lower quality of rural education in developing countries, simply adjusting to an urban environment, especially a city as large as New York, presents a series of adjustment challenges.25 It stands to reason that the better the school system supports immigrants during their adjustment period, the better they will perform in the long run. An additional concern is the “over-referral” of immigrant and LEP students to special education classes. The U.S. Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights found that in NYC “ELL students are 2.12 times more likely to be referred to special education than are non-ELL students.” Reported in NYIC (1999: 12) The same report states that while ELLs constitute 16% of the students in 1997-98, they were 21% of special education students and 26% of the referrals for consideration for special education.
 As mentioned, Newcomer Schools are one of the few policy responses that recognize this wider variety of needs by immigrant students and attempt to provide support services along as many dimensions as possible. Students may only remain in these schools for one-year (except in exceptional circumstances).26 The schools are generally smaller (below 500 students) which, according to interviews with school staff, allows them to provide a more supportive environment for students experiencing adjustment problems, though there is no indication that the cost per student is higher.27  While it is beyond the scope of this current study to assess the impact or quality of Newcomer versus non-Newcomer schools, we believe that this would be a very fruitful area for future research, and the potentially positive impact of Newcomer schools was echoed in nearly all interviews.28
 In addition to the general concerns discussed above, we explored in our interviews three of the most prominent trends in, and debates over, the State and City’s education reform agenda: Standards and Accountability, School-Based Management and Parental Participation, and School Choice. We now relate these trends to what we learned about immigrant education issues.
Immigrants, the New Standards and the New Accountability
 In 1996, the NYS SED released a new set of graduation and promotions standards that are generally designed to raise the level of learning and knowledge that all students must achieve. The high school graduation standards are being phased in, and will be fully implemented for the class of 2005. Prior to 1996, there were two separate sets of graduation assessment tests. Students chose which set of tests to take, and passing either would qualify them for a high school diploma. The two sets of tests were the Regents Competency Test (RCT) and the Regents Exam (Regents), the latter of which is considerably more demanding. Students take five tests—in English, Math, Science, and two in Social Studies.29 In 1996-97 only 22% of all graduates qualified for Regents diplomas and in 1998 only 10% of eligible ELL students even took the English Regents (NYIC, 1999: iii).30 BOE (2000) details that seven times as many ELLs took the English Regents in 1999 as in 1998, while the three times as many English-proficient students took it in 1999 as in 1998. In 1999, 75% of English proficient students taking the Regents English test received graduation credit (down 1.4 points from 1998) while 36.1% of ELL students taking the Regents English test received graduation credit (down 4.0 points from 1998).31 Thus, it is clear that the short-term impact has been fewer ELLs passing and doing “well,” but also many more of them taking the test.32
 Interestingly, interviewees were split regarding the long-term benefits and pitfalls of the new standards. While nearly all agreed that additional resources were needed, some felt that some immigrant students, particularly late arrivals (e.g. fifteen year-old newcomers), should still be given an alternative means to earn a high school diploma; that is, a system similar to what was in place before with two different diplomas with two different criteria.33 Others felt the new standards were an important benchmark and goal, and that they were necessary for students to achieve the skills needed in our current economy.34 One teacher said of the fact that the new standards were forcing ‘teaching to the test:’ “For some of my colleagues, well, at least they have to teach to something now.” Some teachers pointed out that there was, in fact, another option for some of these student—the GED, or general equivalency diploma.35 Clearly more research is needed to track the accomplishments of immigrant and LEP students in meeting the new standards. 36
 Wyckoff and Naples (2000: 306) state that New York’s standards are the fifth toughest among all 50 states, while the standardized test scores indicate the state’s student body is “roughly in the middle of all states.” They state further (p. 307) that  “Equity demands that districts be provided with sufficient resources such that if the resources are effectively employed, students could be educated to meet the learning standard.” They indicate that the state is not fully calculating the additional environmental costs of helping students who are costly to educate meet the new standards and they cite LEP students as one of the high risk groups not receiving sufficient resources. An ESL teacher at a Newcomer school added the following opinion and insights:
“We need better alternatives for our kids, not just plans that apply sink or swim: ‘These are the Regents and you need to pass them by your twenty-first birthday and that’s it.’ We need increased number and quality of vocational programs, which have been gutted. The City and the State need to face up to reality. The Regents are for college-readiness. Well, some of our kids are not going to college so we need alternative programs for relatively newly arrived kids that apply different standards. We have vocational programs, but with no ESL support.”37
Overall, there is no conclusive evidence, but it appears likely that more resources (and more creative programming) are needed to meet the new state standards, and some of these resources should be directed at supporting immigrant students.
School-Based Management, Immigrants and Parental Involvement in School Governance
 Parental involvement in minority and disadvantaged children’s education and schooling has long been advocated by a range of practitioners, scholars, and advocates (e.g., Cummins, 1986). More recently, the trend has been to involve parents in the actual governance of schools through membership on school-site councils (Gershberg, 2000). New York State is no exception, and the most recent development is the School Leadership Team (SLT). These school-site councils, now required in every school in the state, are advisory in nature, but are intended to play an integral role in school-level budgeting, personnel and curricular decisions.38 They generally have 12 to 18 members and are technically required to have 50% of the members be parents. The remaining members are the principal, teachers, staff, and potentially students and other community members.
 It is beyond the scope of this paper to evaluate the success and true functions of the SLTs at this stage. In fact, given the nascent stage of the reform, it is likely too early to do so. Instead, we begin from an assumption that the State and City intend them to be an integral part of school governance in the future. Both have invested considerable time and resources to implement and support the SLTs. Thus, we consider the apparent and potential relationship of immigrant parents to the SLTs given this assumption.
 One of the most intriguing practices of the Newcomer schools in NYC is the training they attempt to provide new immigrant parents to participate in SLTs after their children move on to mainstream schools.39 No detailed information is available regarding how well these parents go on to achieve this goal, but clearly if the SLT is going to play a major role in school governance, and parental involvement is so important to the SLT, immigrant parents must learn to participate as members of SLTs if these governing councils are going to serve the needs of immigrant students.
 Teaching immigrant parents to participate, and supporting them as they begin to do so, is important and difficult. Many immigrants come from cultures in which it is not proper to interact with school teachers, who are viewed and even revered as authority figures. Thus, being involved in their child’s school on any level, let alone participating on a school council, is a new and potentially uncomfortable experience for these parents. One telling remark from an interview with a guidance counselor was “It is inconceivable that an immigrant parent would go to a teacher and say ‘you are not stimulating the creativity of my child.’” An advocate at a CBO captured a broadly-held sentiment among all our interviews: “Most [immigrants] come from cultures where you just trust the teachers and leave them alone.” A school principal said, “immigrants are intimidated by the school as an institution.” Finally, an ESL teacher at a Newcomer school said that parents needed training to know how to be involved and “how not to be intimidated by teachers or the principal.”
Of course, the time constraints of long work hours pose another obstacle to parental participation. In fact, even without language and cultural barriers, it is probably not realistic to expect high levels of immigrant parental involvement at schools for this reason alone. One teacher in a Newcomer school said that for this reason it was, for instance, most difficult to get Chinese parents involved. But, the teacher added:
“This year there was a change. We had more participation than ever because we had a very persistent person calling, waking them up on Sunday, explaining clearly [in Chinese] how to participate. The quality of the staff [doing the outreach] is very important and this is a low-paying job. This year we just happened to have a good one and we have three Chinese parents on the School Leadership team.”
Nevertheless, if the SLT is being given an important role in school governance, then an argument can be made that the BOE and the State have an obligation to make outreach efforts more consistent and better supported across schools and over time. One method that several school-level interviews cited as effective in improving immigrant parent participation is adult literacy and ESL instruction at the school. In addition, advocates claimed in interviews that there are schools that do not want to have immigrant parents participate, and intimidate them from doing so. One district-level official said, “We know there are schools that don’t want immigrants and they don’t get the immigrant parents on the school leadership teams or involved in the PTAs.” An advocate said, “The SLTs are puppets of the administration and the parents that do participate have a monopoly on what really happens.”
Immigrant parents have fears surrounding their legal status that impact their willingness and ability to participate effectively. This is true despite the fact that no one we have interviewed knew of a single incident in which immigration law, the Immigration Naturalization Service (INS) or the legal status of an immigrant parent has been raised or otherwise adversely impacted by school staff. One teacher told us not to underestimate the fact that the first person parents see when they enter a school is a uniformed guard or police officer, and that immigrants (legal or illegal) from authoritarian regimes may naturally try to avoid notice from officials. A legal advocacy group also told us that schools often (illegally) ask for proof of legal guardianship if immigrant children are living with a relative and that CBOs can play a critical role in the realm of legal issues since they often are trusted by the immigrants themselves. Several advocacy CBOs we interviewed had informative material in relevant languages teaching parents about their legal rights, the school’s expectations of them as parents, and the importance of their getting involved. In fact, most CBOs we interviewed named training parents to participate in their children’s schooling as one of their chief goals and activities. In addition, most referrals to advocacy groups that support immigrants with legal claims against the school system come through a local, ethnic-based CBO.40
 Perhaps the single most important issue in school-parent relations is the translation of materials sent by the school into the appropriate language. This was mentioned in nearly every interview with advocates, the BOE, and school staff. Much material is not sent home in any language other than English. When it is translated, this is done on an ad hoc basis by bilingual teachers themselves. This is less of an issue for Spanish speakers, and obviously gets more difficult as languages get more obscure. In many cases, the children themselves are asked to translate for their parents, a clearly problematic situation. While not translating notices about PTA meetings and other events is one issue, failure to translate notices regarding a student being held back or experiencing other difficulties at school is even more problematic. A particularly poignant example is the story of a Chinese student in Los Angeles who, in a meeting between the school principal and his parent, was asked to translate the fact that he was being suspended from school. He said, roughly, “because I have been so successful in school, I am being allowed to take some time off.”41 For another example, a Legal Advocacy NGO representative told us:
“Chinese are the second largest immigrant group, but there are no translation resources for them at schools and no possible communication with parents. The best that school staff do is usually a notice in the home language saying, ‘This is important. Please get it translated.’”
Translation is one area where exploring centralized solutions could prove fruitful because of economies of scale in the translation process and the severe resource constraints at the school level.42 For its part, the BOE does recognize the translation issue. The major documents outlining strategies for improving parental participation in the SLT’s refer to the need to translate materials and pursue other strategies to increase the involvement of immigrant parents.43 But advocates and school level actors indicate that this is not done sufficiently in practice.
 Training and technical support for the SLTs is another important issue. The BOE has contracted the New York Urban League (NYUL, 2000) “to help parents become better informed and learn how to be effective participants in [SLTs].” The NYUL is doing this in partnership with several interest and advocacy groups, but the only immigrant-related one is ASPIRA of New York, a Latino immigrant organization with an emphasis on Puerto Ricans. Several interviews revealed that this has caused tension with other immigrant groups who wish to be included. Nevertheless, NYUL (2000) contains some encouraging language in this regard.44
 Finally, parental-school relations can be very important factor in mitigating some of the adjustment issues that affect immigrant parents, students, and the relations between the two. For instance, several interviews mentioned that many immigrants come from cultures in which corporal punishment is not only tolerated at schools, but expected and encouraged. Several teachers told stories of being encouraged by immigrant parents to hit their children. It may also occur with greater frequency in some immigrant homes, and school and social service agencies often find themselves having to intervene. Another commonly mentioned example in our interviews is that U.S. culture encourages students to be more assertive in interpersonal relations than many of the cultures from which immigrants arrive. On the other hand, becoming more assertive can cause tension between parents and their children.45 Navigating such difficult waters and teaching parents what it will mean as their children assimilate is a critical role that schools can play, if they manage and encourage relations with the parents in effective ways.
Immigrants and School Choice
NYC does not have a system of school vouchers or other policies typically associated with the concept of school choice. However, as with most systems, there is a considerable amount of parental choice between different schooling options. The city is divided into 32 community school districts. Elementary and middle school parents may send their children to any school within their district and may apply for variances to send their children to schools in other districts. High schools across the city are open to students from any district. Some high schools have specific entrance criteria ranging from standardized test scores to ability in music or art. In addition, there are magnet schools and a few charter schools that organize around particular themes or teaching philosophies and to which parents are free to apply to send their children. These schools must have clear, supposedly non-biased, entrance criteria. Newcomer schools themselves are an “opt-in” program, that new immigrant parents must choose. Some parents find out about the Newcomer schools through word of mouth, while others are referred to them by their zone schools or other guidance officials. Some individuals at the newcomer schools felt that other schools were “good” at referring students to them when that are over enrolled, and much less so when their enrollments were low. A Newcomer teacher added “Lately [other] schools are only sending us children with the least schooling.” These examples emphasize the key role that information dissemination plays in any aspect of parental choice, and clearly the information challenge is great with immigrant parents.
While we do not have sufficient supporting data, anecdotal interview data seem to suggest that, in general, immigrants are more likely than natives to send their children to the closest neighborhood school. School-level actors indicated that they did not believe parents were aware of the choices available to them and that the concept of school choice was foreign to many immigrant groups. 46 Interestingly, this appears to be less true of students leaving the two Newcomer schools we studied. Intensive guidance seems to support students in their efforts to find the best match for them at both the middle and high school levels.47 Guidance counselors also said they helped teach parents how to apply for a variance for their child to attend a school outside of their zone or community district.
It is also possible that schools that do not want immigrant students discourage them from attending or even make variances difficult to obtain if the school is not in the student’s community school district.  Certainly, the increased emphasis on school-level test scores provides an incentive for some schools to try to keep low-scoring students out, and some schools may perceive immigrants as potential low-scorers. As one teacher from a Newcomer school noted: “Other schools feel much greater scrutiny of their graduation rates and pass rates [than we do], so [our] kids look like a bad risk.”48 Several interviews mentioned what they felt was undue difficulty that the most talented immigrant students have gaining entry to gifted and talented programs, and three separate teachers mentioned that the City’s elite public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science have no capacity or classes for supporting ELL students.49
The Board of Education publishes annually a “Directory of Public High Schools,” which provides detailed information for students and parents on all the high school in the City. The 2000-2001 version is nearly 400 pages long and is available in both English and Spanish. The BOE does publish a version that contains translations into four other languages; it is about one quarter the size for all four languages combined. Obviously, this has an impact on the schools immigrant students are encouraged to attend and may serve as a sorting mechanism. Immigrant-oriented CBOs can play a role in helping parents choose schools well and several that we visited had literature in appropriate languages to help immigrants understand how to choose schools. Newcomer schools appear to play an important role in this regard, “often encouraging [students] to enroll in schools outside their neighborhoods.” (Schnur, 1999)
Overall, the quality of the choices made by immigrant parents and their children depends upon the nature and quality of the information available. This is equally true for all disadvantaged students, including non-immigrants, but for immigrants there is often the added challenge of understanding the language and culture of the school system. Since nearly every interview mentioned translation of school information and communications as a top concern, we can only assume that the BOE needs to improve the means by which immigrant parents and students receive information. This is especially true given two new policy emphases that the State and City are supporting: (1) the increased importance of the parental involvement in the School Leadership Teams, discussed above and (2) the recent moves to require parents of ELL students to choose more actively the curricular track their children will follow.50
Policy Implications for Supporting Immigrant Students & Directions for Future Research
 The above discussion touches upon several potentially fruitful directions for policymakers and researchers to better support immigrant students. In this final section, we summarize and synthesize the most important concepts that emerged from our interviews and supporting research. We also attempt to place any potential policy developments into a realistic policymaking and political landscape so that this analysis, and the discussion it generates, may prove operationally useful for the many interested parties—education policy analysts; Federal, state, and city government education officials; immigrant student and education advocates; and even school staff to some extent. One organizing concept, thus, is the assumption that the New York City and State education systems operate with resource and bureaucratic constraints that make it problematic, or at least difficult, to argue either for large increases in overall spending or for significant changes in the way current resources are allocated across programs and student populations. That is, while we do not assume that school finance is a zero-sum game as currently played, we are aware that in the short term it may be close to zero-sum.
In fact, it will be very important in both policy and political circles to clearly outline immigrant issues and delineate them as different from issues that impact all poor or “disadvantaged” student populations, a significant portion of whom are immigrants. Furthermore, NYC and NYS policymakers should differentiate the potential impact of various policies (such as the impact of new standards) on (1) all weak students, (2) weak  immigrant students, and (3) strong immigrant students. This third group is important, too, for it is the group policy should be sure to avoid hurting. Reports that immigrants incur great difficulties in gaining access to gifted and talented programs even when they are qualified are, thus, troublesome. We conclude our discussion by summarizing the key issues and finding that emerged from our research.
Immigrants, the New Standards and the New Accountability
 New York State has clearly raised high school graduation and other standards over the past half decade. It is also clear that there is apprehension on the part of school staff, advocates, and administration officials regarding the impact this will have on immigrant schooling. While the state has articulated a plan for supporting English Language Learners (ELLs) in their pursuit of meeting these standards, it is not clear that they have provided the necessary funding or other support necessary to achieve their stated goals. Since student experience upon entry into the school system likely has a strong impact on long-term outcomes, it seems reasonable that policymakers should be exploring programs for recent immigrants that have the potential to support these students in their transition into the school system (and the society) in which they hope to succeed. In addition, since more ELLs are taking the Regents and the initial results are not promising, the BOE and SED must track carefully these results and continue to explore means for improving the results—and perhaps developing different graduation standards for certain ELL students and immigrants.
School-Based Management, Immigrants and Parental Involvement in School Governance
Immigrant parents in U.S. public schools are generally expected to be more active and more involved in their child’s school experience than in countries from which they come. In addition, parents in New York State are being encouraged to take an active role in school governance through School Leadership Teams. Immigrant parents face many of the same challenges as other poor and disadvantaged native parents, but they have the added challenges of language, cultural difference, and a lack of institutional knowledge and information. The New York Urban League, a large nonprofit organization, has been contracted to support all parents in their participation in the School Leadership Teams, and they have paid attention to the special issues of recent immigrant parents. Some schools, in particular Newcomer schools, have developed their own means for supporting parental involvement and participation. However, we need to know much more about the means for fostering participation by immigrant parents and the long-term benefits that doing so brings. Government, philanthropic, and  advocacy organizations should sponsor relevant social science research, and monitor closely the nature of participants in the School Leadership Teams.
Immigrants and School Choice
 Like all parents, immigrants help choose the schools for their children implicitly or explicitly through where they live and the choices within the public school system that they choose to (or try to) exercise. As with school governance, immigrant parents often come from countries where this kind of relationship with the school system is unfamiliar. The school system needs to redouble its efforts to provide immigrant parents and students with the information they need to make most informed choices possible. Community-based organizations and advocacy groups play an important role in information dissemination and informing immigrants of their rights vis-à-vis the public school system. The NYC BOE is aware of the importance of such issues, but perhaps could do more to support immigrant parents in making the choices within the school system. This is particularly important since school reforms that rely more heavily on effective parental choices—such as charter schools and magnet school—are on the rise. In addition, recently proposed changes in the way ELL students choose from among the programs available to them (e.g., Freestanding ESL, Bilingual Education, Dual Language programs) will place more responsibility on parents to make active choices. (See Zehr, 2001b)
Newcomer schools and programs
 Newcomer schools serve exclusively recent immigrants during their first year in the country. They aim to concentrate teaching and support services in a focused manner on a wide range of adjustment issues that staff we interviewed feel are common to most newly-arrived immigrant students. They also attempt to create “safe spaces” where students of many different cultures can learn in a smaller school environment.51 In addition, our interviews revealed that school staff at Newcomer schools are thinking deeply about the different issues faced by different immigrant groups. There is some disagreement over the social costs and benefits of students spending a year in an all-immigrant environment, with presumably less contact with native students. The time is ripe for rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of Newcomer schools, so that the BOE can determine if it should support this form of school in a more organized manner. Currently, there are only seven Newcomer schools (high schools and middle schools), and these arose largely out of concerns for overcrowding.
Immigrant-oriented private, non-profit organizations and the public schools
There are clearly a large number of nonprofit organizations (both faith-based and secular) that have the service of recent immigrant students and parents as a primary or integral part of their missions. These organizations impressed us with their sensitivity to the nuances of how to effectively support immigrant students and their families. In addition, they provide support in areas where school-based guidance counselors may not be as culturally knowledgeable or perhaps where they may not have the time or community connections to support certain problems and needs.
It is instructive to examine the categories of services that one such organization we studied provides.52 This nonprofit organization focuses on immigrant students from countries of a particular geographic region. It provides services both at its home center, which serves as a form of community center, and at various school sites. It does not have a formal contract with the NYC BOE because “reporting is a big drain [with BOE contracts]” and because the organization fears the potential limitations and boundaries that working closer with the BOE might impose.53 This organization focuses on three areas: (1) academic preparation; (2) Leadership development;54 and (3) Sports and other cultural development, which it calls “creating safe spaces.” The organization provides the following services: Case management of students with social service needs and one-on-one counseling; coaching and other support for parents to promote parental participation  and involvement in their children’s schools; discussion groups for girls who culturally face perhaps the biggest adjustment issues for those immigrants from this geographic region;55 training for guidance counselors. In particular, they provide cultural sensitivity training for guidance counselors who deal with immigrants from the geographic region that is their constituency. In the words of the NGO staff: “We build capacity of the schools to better serve.”
Aside from the more typical complaint that disadvantaged students of all kinds do not get sufficient support from the public school, the officials at this organization observe:
“Schools have trouble providing needed support to all students, but it is worse for immigrants because of the language and cultural gap. Schools approach parents as if they must understand how the U.S. system works.”
This quotation concisely summarizes a great deal of information. Perhaps it is time that the City, State, and Federal governments explore funding more pilot projects aimed at evaluating the impact of improving or increasing the formal involvement of the nonprofit sector in supporting immigrant student populations.56 Our interviews suggest that there are many promising organizations and that bringing their efforts to scale may merit government consideration on strict cost effectiveness grounds. The services such organizations provide may look similar to those provided to all disadvantaged youth, even natives, but it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the manner in which to do so successfully differs for immigrant, recent immigrant, and native “disadvanaged” students.  Almost by their very nature, traditional government bureaucracies have a difficult time basing interventions on culturally sensitive priorities.
Final Considerations
New York City and New York State have virtually no organized policies to support immigrant education aside from those policies aimed at English proficiency and/or Bilingualism. City and State funds are targeted toward supporting language instruction, but some school officials believe that the high costs of these programs are subsidized by other funds in their budgets, such as Title I funds targeted to poor children.57
Training of ESL and Bilingual teachers must improve, but schools must also consider training non-ESL teachers in methods to help ESL and former-ESL students such teachers are likely to find in their classrooms.58 Finally, translation of myriad forms of schools communication emerged as perhaps the most commonly-mentioned issue among our interviews. There are opportunities worth exploring for matching policy responses, at all levels of government, to the policy needs of the immigrants, English-language learners, and native born children alike.
 Why worry about immigrant students, particularly recent immigrant students? In order to justify our focus on recent immigrant students, we must recognize that many of these students face similar challenges as many non-immigrant “disadvantaged” students: most notably poverty. In fact, with 66.3% of the total NYC public school population qualifying for the Federal free or subsidized lunch program, it is clear that many non-recent immigrants and native students in the public school system face the challenge of poverty. Our research presented above indicates, however, that providing effective support for recent immigrants may require different strategies than for other “disadvantaged” student populations. And the number of recent immigrants (about 9% of the student population) appears sufficient to explore opportunities to develop cost-effective programs to support them and help foster successful educational outcomes for them.59
The findings presented here are preliminary, but suggestive regarding several issues outlined above. Immigrants face many challenges in coming to the United States and entering and succeeding in school. This is certainly true for New York City in particular. Part of this challenge stems from the need to learn English, but this is not the only challenge nor should it likely be the only policy response. There are, in fact, significant differences between the performance and treatment of recent immigrants, English Language Learners, and native disadvantaged students. While additional resources are directed at schools serving ELL students, school resources do not appear to depend upon the representation of immigrants (Schwartz and Gershberg, 2000), and Wyckoff and Naples (2000) indicates the potential need for increased resources to meet the new State standards.  The implication is that there are few additional resources or innovative programs available to provide the supplementary services that recent immigrants might require—either arising directly from language issues or due to the myriad other intricacies of leaving a homeland and starting a new life in a foreign country—to succeed and meet new graduation standards. Thus, immigrants are not necessarily receiving the kind and level of attention that would prove most equitable for all individuals served by the public school system, or the taxpayers who fund it. If additional resources are not immediately available or politically feasible, the City and State could start with innovative programs.
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_____ (2001b). “New York City Modifies Bilingual Education,” Education Week, January 17.

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 Table 1: Predominant Languages of ELL Students in NYC, 1998-99
Language Number of ELL Students Percent of Total ELL Students Number of Students in Bilingual Progs.
Spanish 97,203 65.5 61,342
Chinese 15,395 10.4 6,979
Russian 5,365 3.6 1,024
Haitian (French/Creole) 4,656 3.1 1,735
Bengali 3,768 2.5 271
Urdu 3,087 2.1 118
Arabic 2,580 1.7 150
Korean 2,447 1.7 674
Punjabi 1,895 1.3 56
Polish 1,419 1.0 172
Source: BOE (1999)