Making the Mosaic: The Changing Face of NYC’s (Im)migrant Students
Elizabeth Debraggio, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel
IESP Policy Brief #04-11
Immigration and migration to New York City (NYC) collectively create a dynamic population of students. In this brief we use a decade of detailed, longitudinal data on NYC’s 1st-8th graders to explore both the stock of students enrolled and the flow of new entrants in each academic year. Together, these paint a portrait of how newly entering immigrant students shape the ever evolving diversity of NYC public schools.
Findings include:
- New York City’s elementary and middle schools receive between 20,000-30,000 new students in grades 2-8 every year.
- Roughly half of the new entrants in any year are native-born.
- The new native-born students differ from the new foreign-born, particularly in language skills and exposure to English at home.
- Over the past decade, the flow of new entrants has changed in composition.
- While exposure to peers in schools differs by nativity, there is no evidence foreign-born students attend poorly resourced schools.
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