Beyond Academic Achievement Outcomes: The Impact of School on the Immigrant Political Incorporation of Undocumented Latinx Youth

Abstract

The immigrant political incorporation scholarship tends to stress the positive role that schools play in integrating undocumented Latinx youth. Yet, the racialization in school literature indicates that school is often a disempowering place for students of color. This study helps to explain this divergence. It draws from a case study of a struggling high school undergoing state-led reform in a new immigrant destination and analyzes data from school ethnography and student interviews. Deploying the concept of “critical bureaucratic incorporation,” this study explores how school reforms emphasizing high-stakes testing affected the students’ political incorporation. The findings show how these reforms disproportionately negatively affected the Latinx students, nearly all of whom were undocumented immigrants. The results suggest that future studies of immigrant political incorporation consider the case of struggling schools and insights from average students; and that the racialization in school literature address how school reforms affect students beyond academic achievement outcomes.

Keywords

ethnography race/ethnicity Latino education political behavior immigration

Introduction

An increasing amount of immigration scholarship analyzes how immigrant youth become politically incorporated (e.g., Bloemraad et al., 2016; Humphries et al., 2013; Kasinitz et al., 2008; Okamoto et al., 2013; Reyes, 2015), and much of this work focuses on undocumented Latinx youth (Nicholls, 2013; Terriquez, 2017; Terriquez & Kwon, 2015). These types of studies tend to stress how the school experiences of Latinx immigrant youth help to predict their political participation as adults, including nonvoting activities like participating in public meetings or demonstrations, becoming members of political organizations, as well as working or volunteering for campaigns (Tran, 2017). A note on language, I use the recent term, Latinx instead of Latina/o because it is gender-inclusive, encompassing women, men, transgender and genderqueer.

The immigration literature tends to argue that schools ultimately have a positive impact on the political integration of Latinx immigrant youth (Callahan & Muller, 2013), including undocumented students (Marrow, 2009). Strikingly, this finding is similar for schools located in big cities like Los Angeles that have long been home to immigrants (Gonzales, 2015), as well as cases where the presence of a large immigrant population is recent (Jones-Correa, 2008). These types of studies examine if students get access to school services and if administrators and teachers treat them as deserving. Overall, they find that schools promote positive political integration for undocumented Latinx immigrant students through inclusive policies and practices (e.g., Silver, 2018, p. 26). Yet, the finding that K-12 schools have a positive impact on the immigrant political incorporation of undocumented Latinx immigrant youth contrasts with the large racialization in school literature documenting patterns of schooling injustice for Latinx students (e.g., Alonso et al., 2009; López, 2003; Nolan, 2011; Valenzuela, 1999). These divergent findings are consistent with the tendency in immigration studies to emphasize patterns of inclusion and for race studies to stress exclusion (Valdez & Golash-Boza, 2017).

The framework presented in this article helps to explain the opposing findings in these two sets of literature. This study develops the concept of “critical bureaucratic incorporation,” which includes investigating students’ experiences with access to education, education quality, and the messages they receive about their value and rights along the way. It does this by speaking to students themselves as well as by observing their daily interactions in a specific “failing” school—the type of school that Latinx immigrant youth are most likely to attend (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). This type of school struggles to meet state standards for students’ academic achievement outcomes and is subsequently required to engage in state-driven reform (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2009). The findings reveal an overwhelmingly unfavorable picture of Latinx immigrant political incorporation in school, demonstrating how the key reforms for struggling schools have negative impacts on immigrant students beyond academic achievement outcomes. These results support the argument in the racialization in school literature that K-12 schools often produce disadvantage and marginalization for Latinx youth and also reveal overlooked adverse experiences particularly acute for Latinx undocumented students and additional harmful effects.

Struggling Schools and Undocumented Latinx Immigrant Youth

Since the early 2000s, the federal government has implemented sweeping new education policies schools directed at struggling schools—ones that it deems to have low student academic achievement outcomes—and labels them “failing” (Ravitch, 2016). One major example is the use of high-stakes tests; these tests dominate the learning environment and culture of many elementary, middle, and high schools today (Ravitch, 2016). These 21st-century state-mandated tests are high-stakes because they decide schools’ life spans, employees’ jobs, students’ graduation, and retention, and this is particularly the case for low-income high schools with many students of color (Lipman, 2011).

All schools do not struggle, but Latinx and Black youth are concentrated in schools with overall low academic performance outcomes as measured by standardized test scores and graduation outcomes (Kozol, 2005). This is because, U.S. schools are highly segregated by race and class and because academic achievement outcomes largely reflect racialized class inequalities (Reardon et al., 2017). Immigrant Latinx students also typically attend low-performing K-12 schools and this is particularly the case for undocumented Latinx youth and those living in mixed-status households (Gándara & Contreras, 2009; Oh & Cooc, 2011, p. 400; Yoshikawa, 2011). Schools are obligated to provide meaningful education to all students, regardless of their immigration status (Suárez-Orozco, 2017). Yet, undocumented Latinx youth are most likely to attend under-resourced schools with limited opportunities for engagement (Suárez-Orozco & Yoshikawa, 2013). This is also a sizable population. There are 1.1 million undocumented school-aged children in the United States, and nearly, three quarters of the undocumented population is Latinx (Migration Policy Institute, 2018).

Immigrant Political Incorporation

Immigration scholars largely identify K-12 schools as a positive effect on the political integration of Latinx immigrant youth (Bloemraad et al., 2016; Callahan & Muller, 2013). The definitions on what political incorporation means vary widely, from activism, to voting, to obeying the law (Hochschild et al., 2013; Plotke, 1999). Existing models include both civic and political participation: civic participation could be volunteering or solving a problem collectively in the community; political participation is action that affects government activities (Pérez, 2012; Terriquez & Kwon, 2015). The immigration literature examining undocumented Latinx immigrant youth political development in school tends to look at college students (Nicholls, 2013; Patler, 2018), as student organizations on college campuses are a key source of political development for undocumented youth (Hallett, 2013). Yet, only about half of undocumented Latinx youth complete high school (Covarrubias & Lara, 2014) and only about half of those graduates enroll in college (Flores & Chapa, 2009; see also, Ortega et al., 2018). Thus, it is crucial to investigate the role of K-12 schools.

To explain how Latinx immigrant students are politically incorporated in K-12 schools, some immigration scholars use a bureaucratic incorporation framework (Jones-Correa, 2008; Marrow, 2009). This broad conceptualization of political incorporation indicates when and how government services (like education) are provided for and whether the recipients are perceived as deserving of services (Lipsky, 1980). In studies of Marrow (2009) and Jones-Correa (2008), the analysis of “deservingness” of receiving public services relied on the viewpoints of teachers, administrators and parents, but not students. They argue that school professionals support undocumented Latinx students beyond the legal mandate to educate them. These scholars tend to focus on places where a great number of the Latinx immigrant population is undocumented.

Other immigration literature on undocumented Latinx youth also find that K-12 schools are an inclusive space for these youth, thereby fostering the social construction of citizenship even in unreceptive new immigrant destinations (Silver, 2015, 2018). The scholarship also argues that these youth are supported and included in high school and are, in effect, de-facto legal citizens (Gonzales, 2011, 2015). Yet, as Enriquez (2017) points out, these types of studies tend to focus on “high-achieving” students, often in honors courses where they receive more engaging curriculum and support. In contrast, Enriquez (2017) finds undocumented Latinx youth who dropped out of school faced a range of marginalizing experiences in their school institution from neglect to “anti-immigrant sentiment” (Enriquez, 2017, p. 14). Still, neither of these latter two studies examines a specific school context nor are their data from actual high school students, but rather young adults recalling the past.

The aforementioned immigration literature expands the political incorporation model to include the political dimension of everyday K-12 school life. Yet, it also tends to obscure the position of the students themselves as emergent political actors. And, while a number of the immigration studies have drawn attention to new immigrant destinations, the case of struggling K-12 schools remains overlooked. In particular, it is still unspecified in the immigrant political incorporation literature whether average undocumented Latinx immigrant high school students feel their school treats them as deserving of good educational services and how they themselves perceive the quality of the education they receive. Speaking to youth about education reform policies aimed to improve their academic achievement outcomes as they are implemented into schools can reveal if these policies are effective or generate new problems, such as engendering frustration among students (Kolluri, 2018).

On the contrary, there is a large literature on racialization in school arguing that K-12 schools tend to stigmatize and disempower students of color, including Latinx youth (Alonso et al., 2009; López, 2003; Shedd, 2015; Valenzuela, 1999). This literature is helpful to understanding youth political development in school. It is part of a tradition focusing on how students navigate unequal power relationships in daily school life, among school staff and students as well as between different students, to explain how school shapes working class students for low-wage work or prison (Anyon, 1980; see also, Cohen, 1972; MacLeod, 1987; Willis, 1977). Yet, this literature does not tend to address how young people are developing as political subjects in terms of incorporation.

Youth strategies to navigate schooling should be analyzed as signs of their political incorporation pathway and not just to show their resistance to socialization. Youth learn their roles in school not just as future workers or inmates but also how to understand themselves politically in relation to the state. Furthermore, versions of political navigation beyond open rebellion remain under examined. And, while much of the scholarship addresses how race and immigrant generation shape students’ resistance to ineffective educational experiences (Bettie, 2003; Rios, 2011; Valenzuela, 1999), this literature tends to overlook the experiences of undocumented youth.

The Present Study

This study offers a “critical bureaucratic incorporation” perspective to understand how public schools influence the political incorporation of undocumented Latinx youth. Critical bureaucratic incorporation analyzes students’ access (or denial) to school services as well as the quality of those services. And, it also includes how these experiences shape students understanding of themselves as political subjects. Including the students’ incorporation experiences reveals what youth learn about the state and their relationship to it in school.

The study argues that schools negatively bureaucratically incorporate immigrant students when: (a) schools deny students an education; (b) the education students do receive is poor; and, (c) school experiences teach students to be cynical about their education. Offering students a poor education and excluding some students from school entirely negatively shapes students’ sense of entitlement to a good education and undercuts their sense of political efficacy and rights. It sends the message to students that they are undeserving of a good education. As a result, young people experience poor bureaucratic incorporation not only when they receive poor education or are denied education entirely but also when they realize that their learning does not matter. Feeling entitled to good public services and learning to advocate for oneself are key features of positive political incorporation that are undermined through the new tools of testing.

Critical bureaucratic incorporation also includes “school type” in its framework for understanding the positive or negative roles of schools in immigrant political incorporation. It recognizes that undocumented Latinx immigrant youth typically have to confront “failing” schools and that this includes schools in low-income suburbs. Analysis of school type is explicit about how a struggling suburban school deals with the federal “test and punish” education policies summarized earlier in this article. These state-led school improvement efforts pressure “failing” schools to raise students’ test scores on standardized exams (Hursh, 2007; McLaren, 2015).

The analysis presented in this study helps to explain the impact of the intensive efforts by the federal and state governments to improve the learning conditions of Latinx and Black youth in terms beyond academic achievement outcomes. Schools are under state pressure to improve when their students have low academic achievement and the exclusion of many Latinx immigrant students can be an unintended consequence of these pressures. As a result of state pressure to produce certain test scores, schools act on the incentive to exclude them as potentially poor test-takers. This is one way that undocumented youth are often limited in their access to their education rights in practice even though they are legally entitled to a K-12 public education.

Case Study and Methodology

Data

The data for this article comes from a school ethnography I conducted from 2013 to 2015 of a struggling low-income suburban high school with many new undocumented Latinx immigrants that I call, “Sandhill High School” (SHS). (Like “SHS,” all places, people and names mentioned in this study are pseudonyms). SHS is located in a suburb of New York City with a population of about 30,000 people. About 30% of SHS students are Latinx and approximately 60% are Black. Nearly all of the Latinx students at SHS are immigrants from Mexico or Central America. I later learned from speaking to the Latinx students themselves, their families, and school professionals that most of the Latinx students were undocumented. In this article, I highlight the data concerning the Latinx immigrant students’ experiences. Table 1 below provides basic details about the characteristics of the Latinx immigrant students I formally interviewed.

Table 1.

Latinx student interview respondent characteristics.

% of total sample (n)	100 (26)
Foreign-born	81 (21)
U.S.-born child of immigrants	19 (5)
Age (in years), % (n)
14–15	38 (10)
16–17	50 (13)
18–19	12 (3)
Gender, % (n)
Male	55 (14)
Female	46 (12)
Country of origin (child or parent), % (n)
Mexico	46 (12)
Central America	27 (7)
Other Latin America	27 (7)
Time in the United States, % (n)
0–7 years	38 (10)
≥8 years	62 (16)
Education level (at time of interview), % (n)
9th grade	35 (9)
10th grade	23 (6)
11th grade	19 (5)
12th grade	23 (6)
School Status (in 2 years of study), % (n)
Graduated	<1 (2)
Left high school early	31 (8)
Still in School	65 (17)

I selected SHS as my case study using Census and National Center for Education Statistics data (NCES). Using these data, I identified SHS as a low-income suburban school with many new immigrant students from Latin America. I also reviewed the school’s more recent performance data from its state report card to select this case. This report revealed that SHS was not meeting the state’s benchmarks for students’ scores on the state exams and was thus under state pressure to improve its students state exam scores, or the state would close down the school.

SHS has been on probation for academic performance nearly every year since 2005. Yet, the state-led interventions have largely failed to help the students. As of 2019, still only about half of the students graduate and the school continues to be under state scrutiny as a “failing” school.

I selected this type of case because while struggling suburban schools with many new undocumented Latinx immigrant students are increasingly common, they still remain underexplored. There has been a large increase in low-income families in the suburbs since 2000, especially just outside of large urban centers (Shiller, 2016). Many of the new suburban poor are Latinx immigrants and a great number of them are undocumented. Like all districts in New York State except for those in the five largest cities, SHS’s local funding comes primarily from property taxes (New York State Education Department [NYSED], 2016, p. 5). Because of Crane’s high poverty rates and low property values, the tax base is low. With limited local revenue, SHS depends on state aid for more than two thirds of its total budget, which has shrunk in recent years and does not eliminate the funding gap between K-12 schools.

Until the 1990s, most immigrants lived in a handful of large central cities, but by 2010, more immigrants lived in the suburbs than in cities (Singer, 2013, p. 87). Immigration scholars refer to places where immigrant populations are new and growing as “new immigrant destinations” (Zúñiga & Hernández-León, 2005). These places also tend to be less favorable to Latinx immigrants than in places with long-standing immigrant populations (Abrego, 2014; Tran & Valdez, 2017). As well, a greater percentage of the immigrant population is undocumented in new destinations (Leerkes et al., 2012).

Procedures

I used two qualitative methods: in-depth interviews and over 300 hours of participant observation from volunteering and hanging out at SHS from 2013 to 2015. Participant observation methods allowed me to see the patterns of the school day and build trust and rapport for interviews. Building trust was particularly important because undocumented students and their allies understandably tend to be hesitant to disclose a person’s immigration status (Murillo, 2017). A note on my positionality. I am a White American, and therefore a cultural outsider to the Latinx students I studied. Although similar experiences can improve relations, understanding is achieved not ascribed (Sprague, 2018, p. 50). My rapport with students was likely influenced by my speaking Spanish, helping with coursework, significant time in the field and conveying support for immigrants.

In the spring of 2013, I contacted the school through their tutoring center. My primary role at the school was as a volunteer Spanish/English-speaking tutor and interpreter. I also attended various school events, student club meetings, special programs outside of school and simply wandered the halls. Like other school ethnographers studying youth experiences, I befriended many of the students and often just “hung out” (see, Bettie, 2003, pp. 16–17). I tried to establish myself with the students as a nonauthority figure, which included assuring students I would not “tell on them” when I saw them skipping classes. I introduced myself to students and the school as a graduate student writing about students’ experiences with school and their perspectives. This strategy allowed me to meet a range of students. The students I interviewed generally reported earning Cs and Bs but also struggled to pass some of their courses. As well, some of the students I interviewed no longer attended their classes but came to school to visit with their friends and several ultimately dropped out of school. When inviting students to do the interview, I emphasized it was completely voluntary and confidential. My interviews were intentionally open-ended conversations led by guiding questions on the broad topic of schooling experiences.

The bulk of the data I collected for this research is from formal interviews and informal conversations with SHS students, but I also spoke with school professionals and analyzed school documents. I formally interviewed 47 immigrant and U.S.-born Black and Latinx students, 25 boys, and 22 girls. I also talked informally with these students and countless other students during my fieldwork. In total, I interviewed 10 adults, eight who worked at SHS and two from community-based organizations serving SHS students. I had numerous additional informal conversations with other adults working with SHS students as well as with some of the students’ parents.

Analytic Strategy

To analyze how school shaped Latinx youth political incorporation, I examined patterns of students’ access to school, focusing on problems with push-out or other ways that students may be denied schooling. Then, I considered how the observed patterns of access to school and students’ quality of education could be linked to underlying institutional motivations. I also assessed how the students viewed their school experiences with a focus on their claims as students, sense of entitlement to voice, and self-advocacy. I analyzed the data using a semistructured approach. I developed analytic codes connected to my research questions and then revised my codes based on the themes present in the data (Huberman & Miles, 2002). Then, I coded the interview transcripts, field notes, school documents, and local news coverage of school events into the qualitative data analysis software program ATLAS.ti.

Findings

The state-led reforms SHS was undergoing to improve the students’ academic achievement had unintended negative effects on students’ political incorporation generally, but also had some particularly troubling consequences for Latinx immigrant students, especially for those who were undocumented. In effect, the pressures to improve students’ standardized state exam scores—which were also tied to graduation—incentivized the school to exclude academically vulnerable students. These students were especially susceptible to being pushed out of school and receiving poor education through rote standardized test drills. These experiences imparted to the students the message that school was not about their learning but rather about meeting state benchmarks to maintain the school’s solvency. SHS denied many students an education entirely, offered a poor education to those who remained and consequently engendered cynicism among the students about their education as Latinx immigrants.

Excluded Students: Enrollment Denial

One way that Latinx immigrant students experienced adverse political incorporation was being denied access to school entirely. All of the students at SHS struggled with school, but Latinx immigrant students were the most vulnerable to exclusion and some were denied school enrollment entirely because they could not produce a birth certificate. The state censures this practice, but it is not illegal. The only New York State requirement to enroll in a public K-12 is a confirmation that the student lives in the district—a rental agreement or recent utility bill would satisfy this requirement. Yet, like most schools, SHS also requires a birth certificate to verify the students’ age as a condition for enrollment. The school district’s website stated, “To register your child or children, please bring the following items with you, as we cannot process your registration without these documents.” The list of “Required documentation to present when registering” included “Proof of Birth for the student.” It stated, “Acceptable proof of birth is: birth certificate or passport.” (Readers may contact the author for an image of the policy). The educators I spoke to about this practice and its impact on undocumented Latinx students only identified birth certificates as an option. This is likely because these youth typically do not have passports. Many undocumented Latinx students could not produce a birth certificate and were consequently not allowed to register.

I learned about enrollment denial for undocumented Latinx youth at SHS from Jane (a tutoring manager for SHS’s immigrant students). Jane also described that until recently, SHS requested students’ social security numbers (SSNs). As undocumented students do not have SSNs, this practice excluded them from enrollment. She explained that New York State found out about the practice and sent a notice to the school to discontinue it. Yet, the school continued the practice of requiring a birth certificate to enroll. SHS undermined students’ political incorporation by choosing to use a clerical tool intended to confirm students’ ages and (for a time) by unlawfully requiring SSNs. Both practices denied immigrant students’ enrollment, thus preventing some undocumented Latinx adolescents from accessing their legal right to their resident public high school. I did not learn if the school administration intended these policies to limit students’ rights to access education, but that was the impact.

Denying undocumented immigrant students from enrolling in public K-12 schools is actually common. The 1982 Plyler versus Doe Supreme Court decision affirmed that undocumented students have the legal right to attend K-12 public schools (Plyler v Doe, 1982). Yet, schools have created barriers to enrollment or deterred their presence (Olivias, 2012). Schools often deny or delay the education of undocumented Latinx immigrant children by asking for documents like SSNs, or parents’ state identification (Mueller, 2015). In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Education issued a letter to school districts nationwide “reminding” them of their obligation to not discriminate against undocumented youth by deterring them from school enrollment (U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division & U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2011). This letter was issued in response to “discriminatory enrollment practices” that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, 2011) and other groups documented. Then, in 2014, (then) New York General Attorney Eric T. Schneiderman criticized school districts “across the country” for continuing to violate this law (Mueller, 2014).

Excluded Students: Forced to Drop Out

The undocumented Latinx students who did enroll (I can only assume they had the requisite records) faced distinctive pressures to withdraw from school related to the fact that they were still learning English and had gaps in their educational history (a result of their migration pathways). Thus, many of these students were also denied an education at SHS entirely because the school pushed them out. SHS administrators counseled low-achieving students to leave school at age 16, once New York State law no longer requires them to attend school. When a school administrator has these meetings with students, they counsel them to enroll in a General Educational Development (GED) program instead. By giving them this suggestion, the school does not have to count these students toward their dropout rate because they are “enrolled in an alternative education program” even if the student does nothing. None of the undocumented Latinx students I met who left school as a result of these meetings enrolled in alternative education programs.

Black and Latinx students both struggled with being pushed out of school. However, the school pushed out more Latinx students than Black students. This is the case even when only counting SHS’s official 4-year dropout rate. The last year of fieldwork for this project (2015), the dropout rate for Black students was 23%, while for Latinx students it was 33%; and for ELL students—nearly all of whom were Latinx—it was 50%. These differences were partly because of their immigration history. Many Latinx students had been out of school for a while, lacked school credits, school records, and/or other forms that the school wanted. As Jane, (an SHS educator working with Latinx immigrant youth) stated, one of the reasons the school pushed these students out was because the school is aware that many of the Latinx immigrant youth arrive with no credits whatsoever, and a lot of them have been out of school for 4 years or more, so they are “starting from scratch.” Lucia was one of these students. Lucia was a 16-year-old student from Nicaragua I met in an advanced English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) class.

I learned from several of Lucia’s teachers that due to her immigration background, Lucia started at SHS with no credits. She had no school transcripts and had been out of school for over 4 years. During my informal conversations with her, she described how she cared deeply about her education, that she had worked hard to learn English, and was trying her best to get good grades so that she could get into college. One afternoon during afterschool tutoring, she expressed that she was “proud” of me and another tutor, “because you are college students and I want to be like you someday.” Yet, I learned from Lucia’s teacher that SHS administrators told her that she had no chance of graduating and had been pressuring her to drop out. In effect, SHS informed her that her commitment to school did not matter. SHS’s efforts to persuade students like Lucia to leave the school illustrate negative immigrant political incorporation. Lucia’s immigrant experience presented a challenge for the school to teach her. And, SHS decided not to work with Lucia to provide her with her right to education at SHS. Schools can choose to work to accommodate students like Lucia, but SHS decided to exclude them instead.

Rubén’s story illustrates negative political incorporation in school for immigrant Latinx students both in terms of attempts to exclude and his subsequent feelings of rejection. Rubén was even more academically successful than Lucia and he was also being pressured to leave school. SHS took measures to exclude Rubén by pressuring him to leave school for reasons shaped by his migration experience. During an interview, Rubén revealed that he walked alone through the desert to get to the United States and had large gaps in his educational history because he had been out of school for a while. Even with this challenge, he had still managed to learn English, become a high school senior and pass all of his classes. Yet, I learned from an informal conversation with one of his teachers that because he could not pass the state exams, SHS was urging him to leave school for a GED program. Thus, was no flexibility even for students like Rubén.

Rubén also interpreted his experience at SHS as one of being rejected due to his status as a Latinx immigrant, racialized as undocumented and therefore treated as undeserving of educational access. Rubén explained in his interview how SHS discriminated against Latinx students in general and it demoralized him. He stated,

When you tell people you are going to the United States, everybody think the United States has beautiful things, but you come here and you see the real-life; people discriminate who you are. I work very hard to be good at school. It was very hard for me, I was in the desert, I didn’t go to the school in my country because I worked.

He explained that this school did not support its Latinx students because the school administration was anti-Latinx. Rubén blamed the principal in particular. As he put it, “Ms. Jade, she doesn’t like Spanish people.” Rubén was receiving anti-Latinx messages in school, and he also felt that the school perceived all Latinxs as undocumented immigrants. As he put it, the perspective of the adults and non-Latinx students at the school was “If you Latino, you doesn’t have papers.”

The Latinx students also struggled with the exams because most of them were still mastering English. The state’s solution was to provide the exam in Spanish. However, most of the students were not literate in academic Spanish, and the quality of the Spanish version of the exam was poor. As a Spanish teacher at SHS stated, “There are some words there that even I don’t even use in the Spanish version [of the state exam].”

The students whom the school labeled as ELL students (enrolled in ESOL courses) particularly struggled to pass the state tests and were a major subgroup of students for whom the state pressured SHS to improve test scores. So, the school simply decided that they should leave. Right before the “testing season,” SHS hosted large group meetings led by a school counselor in the library with mostly Latinx ELL students. Thus, students mostly likely to fail the tests would not take the exams and lower the school’s average test scores.

Both Zoe and Jane (SHS educators) described that it was mainly Latinx students in these meetings. As Zoe stated in an interview, SHS “rounded up” sophomores to tell them they are “missing a lot of Regents [state exams], like half of them, so it doesn’t look like you’re going to graduate and they should really consider going to a GED program.” Zoe expanded, “The school lets them know they have no chance of graduating and that they should drop out, so they won’t fail the test.” Jane explained in an informal conversation that most of the Latinx students who used to be in her tutoring program had left school as a result of these meetings.

One of the ELL students who was told he needed to leave school was Felipe. As he put it, “Ahí fácilmente nos dijeron que no volviéramos a la escuela. . .. que ya es tiempo perdido que ustedes estén viniendo a la escuela porque ya no se van a graduar.” (Simply stated, they told us to not come to school anymore . . . that you’re wasting your time here because you will not graduate). The school told him to leave several times, but he kept coming to school anyway. He wanted to stay in school for several reasons. He wanted to improve his English and he also knew that a high school diploma was needed for the career he wanted. Felipe was undocumented and hoped to join the military if he got his immigration papers. Furthermore, his immigration lawyer told him that if he were still enrolled in school, it would improve his immigration case to regularize his status.

Felipe was undergoing adverse political incorporation because of the pressure he received from SHS to withdraw from school. Previously, he saw himself as entitled to receive an education, yet SHS taught him that he was unqualified to do so. Felipe described that coming to school had made him feel encouraged about his future, but they took away from him when they told him not to come to school anymore. He was critical that there were only Latinx students and no American students at the meeting. Felipe stated that this experience of being pushed out of school along with other Latinx immigrants taught him, “El país es de los gringos y de los que nacen aquí.” (This country is for White people and people who are born here). Felipe’s case illustrates directly how the experience of being pushed out of school taught lessons in racialized citizenship. This type of school experience was part of how new Latinx immigrant youth became disillusioned about their rights and argued it was a race and citizenship issue. Students like Felipe learned that the school could pressure him to leave even though he was fully legally entitled to attend school. Most students who the school counseled to leave did ultimately drop out. By the end of my fieldwork, nearly all of the students that I knew who received pressure to leave school had dropped out.

As a result of being counseled to leave school in large groups, Latinx students felt this exclusion and push-out as anti-Latinx, anti-immigrant and some associated it with their undocumented status. The school counseled Latinx immigrant students to leave the school so much that these students described it as something that “just happened” to Latinx students here when they were about to become juniors. As Hector described it, immigrant Latinx students were told to drop out at meetings that happened in the school library, “There were like fifty kids there . . . they tell them that they should stop coming, that they have to stop coming . . . mostly Latinos . . . most of them were not born in the United States.” He highlighted his classmate Isabel, who had left SHS as persuaded by the school. He explained, “She got told that she needs to leave too.” He stressed, “She was smart . . . I think she could do it, but they didn’t give her a chance.” Hector’s story illustrates the way that Latinx immigrant students were being denied a chance at an education. And, it also highlights how this experience, including knowing it happens to your peers, sent a racialized marginalized citizenship message to Latinx immigrant students. This practice sent a broad message of racial hostility to the Latinx students even when they personally were not advised to leave. As Hector put it,

My feelings toward school, is that they need to change the school. The adults need to stop being racist . . . [I’m not a junior yet but] if I was a junior and told to leave, my mom would fight for me and my rights.

Limiting access to enrolled Latinx students seemed clearly motivated by SHS’s situation as a struggling school under state pressure to improve students’ academic performance outcomes.

SHS needed to increase the students’ test scores and the Latinx immigrant students were a major subgroup of students for whom the state pressured SHS to improve test scores. Jane, from the tutoring staff, described that Latinx immigrant students experienced pressure to leave the school as a result of the testing pressures. As she put it, “ The school can’t figure it out [how to get the test scores up] and they are looking for a scapegoat . . . . they are really looking for somebody to blame for the struggles of the school.” She described that they tried to place this blame on the ELL students, who were nearly all Latinx immigrant students. To illustrate she recounted, “So there was a document on the district website that the ELL population is a target population and their struggles were bringing down the school.” And, the students also got the message that the school wanted them to leave. As Jane described, “I think they definitely feel there are negative feelings toward them from people within the school definitely as immigrant students.” She illustrated,

I’ve had students say “my guidance counselor doesn’t want me here,” “the assistant principal doesn’t want me here,” “they want me to leave,” “they think I’m not going to finish and that I’m going to drop out eventually,” “they don’t see the point of me being here.”

As Rubén (a student) summarized,

I think that high school discriminates people . . . ayudan otros estudiantes (they help other students) . . . And I’m very serious, everybody (Latino) can tell you . . . I think it’s everything about Latinos . . . “they are bad” whatever.

School policies and practices both denied access to education for many Latinx immigrant students and also communicated to them that they were undeserving political subjects. This contributes to a process of negative political incorporation. The way SHS excluded many of undocumented Latinx immigrant students was an unintended consequence of the testing regime. The state pressed SHS to produce certain test scores and the school acted on the incentive to exclude them as potentially poor test-takers. Given that the majority of the Latinx immigrant students were also undocumented, these findings show one way that undocumented youth are limited in their access to their education rights in practice even though the 1982 Plyler vs. Doe Supreme Court decision affirmed they are legally entitled to a K-12 public education (Plyler v Doe, 1982).

Poor Education

Latinx students also experienced negative political incorporation even when they did receive academic instruction. In particular, my ethnographic classroom observations illustrated how state reform mandates encouraged low-quality education for this group especially. The state evaluated the school’s quality principally by its students’ test scores. Thus, to improve their education, SHS used a state-approved plan designed to get students to produce higher state test scores, purchasing and implementing additional standardized tests for practice and more evaluation as well as bombarding students with the school data. Yet, this seemed to diminish students’ quality of education rather than improve it.

As a struggling school, the teachers and the school generally were under a lot of pressure to improve these students’ test scores. Thus, the education offered to them was largely rote preparation for the state exams. This preparation seemed especially onerous and intense for the beginner ELL students, as they struggled the most to pass the state exams. Even recently arrived students with scant English language skills endured nonstop practice for state exams in English well beyond their proficiencies. Notably, studies consistently find that over-testing deprives ELL students of effective instruction to master English (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2009). In contrast, best practices include project-based learning and portfolio assessment (Suárez-Orozco, 2017).

In the 2 years I spent at SHS, I volunteered 1 to 2 times per week in a beginning ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classroom. About 80% of the time, I was there when the students were preparing for state tests. A typical day in class consisted of using a textbook or worksheet to prepare for the ESOL state exam. For one assignment that was test-practice, the students were supposed to answer questions using complete sentences about a picture of a woman in a lab holding a test tube. “What is the setting, what is she doing, what might she be thinking?” When I sat with students, most of them could not read the instructions, let alone craft written answers the questions. To begin, one student asked what the word “what” meant.

The beginning ELL students, many of whom were recently arrived were supposed to read whole sentences and answer questions in complete sentences in English. Many of the students tried to avoid the assignment by falling asleep. The teacher explained that she wanted to prepare them because they had 6 weeks of testing, where they would be getting pulled out at different times. For another test-prep, the students had to listen to a tape that had different words, and match them to the pictures on their worksheets. The words included were complex, such as “defibrillator.” The teacher commented to me that she only knew that word because she was a medical assistant. Other complex words were “Marsupial.” At one point during the exercise, the teacher stammered to me quietly, “I hate this.” The students were clearly checked out and spent the class mostly pretending to do the work.

On more than 1 day, the students saw what they were supposed to do and told me that they simply could not do these same exercises anymore. One day, several students exclaimed to me in Spanish, “Oh no, we’ve been doing this all week, no more.” It was a worksheet practicing the same sentences for an entire week. One sentence was, “I like to use my cell phone for texting.” The students were supposed to add to that sentence. There were six pages of these statements and they had also done this exercise for an entire week prior. Several students in the class put their heads in their hands and told the teacher, “We can’t do this anymore.” In response, the teacher firmly shook her head and told them that they must. The students continued in chorus, “This is terrible, we can’t do this anymore.” During this conversation, another teacher came in looking for kids to pull out for a standardized test to prepare them for the state exams.

Thus, even though many Latinx immigrant students were provided with access to SHS (at least for some period of time), they were still experiencing negative political incorporation because the school did not seem to make any meaningful accommodations to support them. Why this school treated the Latinx immigrant students this way has much to do with the type of school SHS is. The condition of SHS is one of an under-resourced school under enormous state pressure to make significant improvements regarding students’ academic outcomes. Under these conditions, it is regrettable but not entirely surprising that SHS limited the curriculum to aggressive test preparation for its student population most challenged by the state exams.

Learning to Be Cynical About Your Education

Students come to understand their rights and value in school, which includes students’ political agency (feeling one’s participation can effect change, rights to voice and self-advocacy). For immigrant students, school is a key way they learn that the U.S. immigrant students lose political agency in school when they see themselves as unvalued and as a result become cynical about their education. This cynicism was similar across the SHS student population, but for immigrant students, it was part of their incorporation pathway.

The Latinx students’ experiences with endless test-prep taught them to be cynical about their education. The students found the exams, and the preparation for them, to be disconnected from their academic development. They thought they were ineffective and not designed to support their education. This negatively shaped their relationship to “the state,” because they were realizing that their learning did not matter. The students knew that regular practice exams for the actual state exams were supposed to help boost the students’ state exam scores. Yet, the students often told me, as Rocio did, “They don’t help at all. Honestly, I just [randomly] click.” Similarly, Paola explained,

They don’t prepare us for the future, they just prepare us for the test . . . So more and more tests that don’t really apply to the students and then they get frustrated and they just give up on the tests.

The students confused the different tests often because there were so many, mostly new and evolving tests to help improve the state exam scores, but also tests to test the technology for more tests as well as to create benchmarks for future tests. As Claudia put it, “What are we, test monkeys?” She explained, “We were reading a Shakespeare play and we had to stop it and do these computer [tests] . . . if it’s not for our education, then why are we doing it?” Hector also explained, “We were taking a test to test the computer, they were not a [state test] or nothing it was just to test the system.” As a result of the nonstop test preparation they experienced, they learned their education was not the point of school. Immigrant students like Hector, Claudia, Rocio, and Paola realized that it did not matter that practicing for tests did more harm than good. Thus, the education reform strategies had a negative effect on the immigrant students’ political incorporation because it taught students that they were unimportant.

The students got the message that schoolwork was something that was performed for the state instead for their learning. The school made students aware of the school-wide pressure to improve on students’ state test scores and the threat that the school could be shut down. As an SHS senior named Raul explained, “At some point, it just became about getting good scores on the state tests instead of trying to get the kids a good education.” He emphasized, “School isn’t about education . . . they’re just trying to get us to get [pause] I wouldn’t say good, but like the right score on the state tests so they don’t look bad.” Similarly, Martín stated, “Because the test scores . . . if we get that low the state will get to us and they will actually have to shut the school down.” The Latinx immigrant students at SHS were learning that the purpose of the school was to maintain the solvency of the school through its efforts to improve students’ state exam scores. The majority of these students were also undocumented.

State exams were an accessible but hollow means to “quick-fix” educational debts to students. The centralized system of education reform created a sharper link to the state for youth. The new high-stakes state exams are part of the move toward greater centralization. Students were critical of the state because of its exams and the pressure to improve student scores on those exams. They stated that the school simply tried to do what the state wanted, which was increase the scores. Thus, they learned that the school needed to produce test scores for the state instead of educating them.

The students I spoke to had a lot of criticism about their schooling experiences, so I asked them, “What can students do if something is not right at school?” Most of them said, “Nothing.” The students’ rationales for this “nothing” illustrated feeling cynical and that they could make demands that would be heard. Latinx immigrant students at SHS clearly saw their education as ineffective and exclusionary. The students also did not feel they had the right to refuse or otherwise challenge the testing regime. Their discontent was a collective experience that engendered a sense of shared struggle with school, increasing mutual social citizenship among each other. Yet, while they had a sharp critique of schooling, they also did not feel entitled to make demands or formally challenge the kinds of school services they received.

On one hand, students had a critical analysis and did not buy into the testing regime. On the other hand, they also did not feel they could do anything about it. As a result of these experiences, students learned that the schools’ efforts to improve the test scores were not for their benefit. Instead, they learned that the purpose of school was to satisfy state mandates and keep the school solvent. They were learning in school through the testing regime that their education did not matter. These findings issues speak to a problem of limited access to public goods and resulting disillusionment about the role of the state. The students saw the state as illegitimate; they resented it. In effect, the students did not see the state as a source of help or support, or even something that they could change for the better.

Implications and Conclusion

This study showed how school reform efforts to improve academic outcomes for students of color had an overwhelmingly negative impact on the political incorporation of Latinx immigrant students, most of whom were undocumented. There have always been tests in schools, but the new ones under current prevailing education programs for struggling schools are different. Struggling schools must focus their instructional time on rote test-prep to improve the students’ test scores to remain open. While this mandate undermined all SHS students, it was especially negative for the Latinx immigrant students. To improve students’ state exam scores, the school excluded poor test-takers and replaced instructional time with practicing standardized tests. As a result, they received a poor education, or were denied one entirely. These experiences, as well as knowing it happened to your peers, undermined students’ political agency (rights to voice and self-advocacy and being valued). It was a key means through which they learned that they were second-class citizens and thus not entitled to a good education, and a great number of Latinx immigrant students also interpreted these experiences as collective anti-Latinx and anti-immigrant messages.

The outcome of this study suggests the need to examine the quality of public services offered instead of the traditional bureaucratic incorporation view that students are successfully politically incorporated in school if they receive any school services at all. The “critical bureaucratic incorporation” perspective this study offers reveals how school engenders political marginalization, or even outright exclusion for some students. The study’s findings also raise questions about how new immigrant destinations shape immigrant youth’s experiences alongside shifting education policies. New immigrant destinations often need to grow the most to support children of immigrants. And in contrast to traditional immigrant gateways, these schools tend to be behind in supporting linguistically and culturally diverse populations. As well, many of the recent immigrant youth have an interrupted formal education.

Revealing patterns of negative political incorporation for Latinx immigrant youth shows how future investigations of racialization in school can examine the impact of 21st century education reforms on the schooling process beyond academic achievement outcomes. It also suggests that this literature take greater account of how these types of schools treat undocumented immigrant students in ways that may engender further marginalization and disadvantage. In addition, it indicates that this literature can look beyond large central cities to investigate the experiences of Latinx youth in neglected schools.

The study’s findings are also surprising, given that the immigration literature emphasizes K-12 schools as a positive influence. Both Marrow (2011) and Jones-Correa (2008) based their findings on interviews with school adults, and Callahan and Muller (2013) used national survey data to show that K-12 schools can boost immigrant youth voting participation as adults. Similarly, using interviews with young adults, Gonzales (2015) indicated that K-12 schools fostered social citizenship for undocumented immigrants. I suggest that drawing from different data sources largely explains this divergence. Populations may be different, but methods that emphasize adult-driven political rhetoric can unintentionally downplay the harm of a poor school context. Immigrant students have their own political positions and an analysis of immigrant political incorporation (IPI) in school without speaking to the actual students can imply an overly sanguine picture of their school experience and lead to assumptions that students are without agency. Perhaps studies finding that K-12 schools are a positive influence are relying too much on rhetoric from school professionals, underplaying the harms of school because it is less harmful than other contexts, or because they overlook the case of struggling schools.

The study findings also have implications for understanding the larger context of adolescent development. Barriers to political development for already disenfranchised adolescents do not bode well for their political participation as adults. Successful political incorporation of marginalized youth is crucial to their ability to combat an unjust society, such as through activism or membership in political organizations that advocate on their behalf. As the literature on undocumented student movements shows, the school context can be a wonderful place for encouraging a positive path of political development for this adolescent group (Nicholls, 2013; Patler, 2018; Suárez-Orozco, 2017). The importance of this group’s political incorporation is clearly underscored by the fact that this group has much to fight for in order to have full membership in the communities in which they live (Glenn, 2011). Schools can foster a sense of entitlement to good government resources for disenfranchised youth and encourage them to see the role of the state as a potential source of help or support, or even something that they could change for the better. Unfortunately, the dominant state-led remedies given to “failing” schools create incentives that erode their power to navigate their structural disadvantages.

Study Limitations and Future Research

Like most qualitative research, the generalizability of this study is limited. I studied just one school, so the patterns I observed may vary when compared with other similar schools. Yet, when considered broadly, the dynamics I detailed appear comparable to those reported in similar schools. Schools under state pressure to produce major improvements in student performance often try to push out poor test-takers from the testing pool (Gotbaum, 2003; Orfield et al., 2004) and conduct endless rote preparation for standardized tests (Fabricant & Fine, 2013). Thus, a qualitative case study reveals more unintended effects of implementing these policies on a particularly vulnerable and often invisible student population. Despite the lack of generalizability, qualitative methods can tease out themes that might be applied to future empirical work and point to new concepts that deserve further empirical attention.

Future IPI research can address how education policies impact the political development of immigrant youth with young people’s views and experiences at the center. They can do this work across the growing new immigrant destinations with under-resourced struggling schools. This study offers a model of these practices, which can be extended by groups of researchers working collaboratively to compare a range of different school case studies. Recent educational policies stressing academic improvement through “test and punish” seem to adversely shape how under-resourced schools serve immigrant students beyond academic achievement. There is more work to be done to understand the full range of the effects. And, putting young people’s views at the center of the analysis can shed light on the planned and unintended consequences of these policies.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the students, teachers and staff at “Sandhill High School” for participating in this study and sharing their time and knowledge with me. I would also like to thank Carolina Bank Muñoz, Celina Su, Veronica Terriquez, Anna Gjika, Ethan Higgins, as well as the editor and reviewers at Youth & Society for their helpful critiques of earlier drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Mellon Fellows Program / Inter-University Program for Latino Research and The Graduate Center, CUNY.

ORCID iD

Erin Michaels

Author Biography

Erin Michaels is an assistant professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research interests include immigration, education, race and ethnicity and political sociology.

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