Making Americans

An exploration of immigrant education told through key historical moments, current experiments to improve immigrant education, and profiles of immigrant youth and schools across the country

For more than a century, American public schools have been charged with taking children from across the globe and educating, integrating, and shaping them into our society while the country has continuously argued, fought, and experimented with how to do this task-including what it means to be an American. In Making Americans, journalist and educator Jessica Lander uses the past, present, and personal to provide a sweeping yet intimate look at how schools and society have grappled with immigrant education over the past 150 years.

Making Americans explores eight essential foundations for the making of Americans: new beginnings, community, security, the opportunity to dream, advocates, being valued, acceptance, and voice. Lander offers a comprehensive look into the realities of immigrant education through key historical events, innovative schools that strive to welcome and integrate newcomers, and personal accounts of young people who seek to understand their place in America today-from the parochial teacher in rural Nebraska who, after being arrested for teaching a ten-year-old boy in German, took his case to the Supreme Court to the California family who overturned school segregation for Mexican-American children and laid the foundation for desegregation nationwide.

Making Americans provides a clear vision for how schools can help instill a sense of belonging in newcomers and will unleash a catalyst for change through its portraits of innovative experiments across the country for reimagining education.