Public Education in the Dynamic City: Lessons from New York City

[...]Nonetheless, not all the news is bad. As we describe in detail,our work on New York City’s public schools—which includesextensive research on immigrant children—and our separate work on school reform offer several reasons for optimism.First, immigrant students, who might be viewed as amongthose most seriously at risk of failure, are doing quite well. Ourresearch suggests that although immigrants are somewhatsegregated from the native born, this factor has little impact onthe resources available in the schools they attend. Even more,immigrants in elementary and middle schools earn higherscores on average than do the native-born students who areotherwise similar to them, and the “immigrant advantage”increases over time, perhaps following the students’acclimation or acquisition of English language skills.[...]