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Exploring How High Schools Can More Effectively Serve Immigrant Youth

About the Internationals Network for Public Schools  

The Internationals Network for Public Schools (INPS) is a system of public high schools that serve recently arrived students with low levels of English language proficiency. INPS schools serve a diverse range of students—arriving from 119 countries and speaking more than 90 languages. These students have been in the United States for four years or less and face many challenges that are common among English learners. The majority of INPS students live in high-poverty neighborhoods.

INPS schools emphasize five core principles: heterogeneity and collaboration; experiential learning; language and content integration; localized autonomy and responsibility; and “one learning model for all” (see the INPS website for more information about each of these principles). The INPS approach aims to ensure that students receive social and emotional support along with instruction that promotes language development and academic skills.

About Our Study

The Research Alliance is working with NYU’s Metro Center to learn more about INPS schools and students, and to explore promising strategies to address the needs of recently arrived adolescent English learners across the NYC public school system. Our study will examine the academic achievement of students in NYC’s INPS high schools, compared to students with similar backgrounds who attend other public high schools in the City. The team will draw on these data to identify particularly high-performing INPS schools; we will document practices being used in these schools, and test the relationship between these practices and key student outcomes.  

The goal of this work is to identify promising strategies that INPS and other schools can use to better serve recently arrived youth.

This study is funded through the WT Grant Foundation.

Project Team

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng 程華宇

Vice Dean for Research and Equity; Professor of International Education

cherng@nyu.edu

Journal Articles

Villavicencio, A., Klevan, S., Patton Miranda, C., Jaffe-Walter, R., & Cherng, H. S. (2024, March). “The Freedom to Teach”: The Role of (Re)Professionalization in Cultivating Responsive Schooling for Immigrant Students. Educational Studies, 60(2), 156–176. 

Villavicencio, A., Miranda, C.P, Liu, J., & Cherng, H.Y.S. (2021, September). “What’s Going to Happen to Us?” Cultivating Partnerships with Immigrant Families in an Adverse Political Climate. Harvard Educational Review, 91(3), 293–318.

Jaffe-Walter, R., & Villavicencio, A. (2021, June). Leaders’ Negotiation of Teacher Evaluation Policy in Immigrant-Serving Schools. Educational Policy, 37(2), 359-392. 

Villavicencio, A., Jaffe-Walter, R., & Klevan, S. (2021, January). “You can't close your door here:” Leveraging teacher collaboration to improve outcomes for immigrant English Learners. Teaching and Teacher Education, 97.