Immigration and African American Educational Opportunity: Are Language Minority Students Transforming U.S. Schools?

This paper uses school-level data available from the Schools and Staffing Survey and the California Department of Education to assess the extent to which African Americans versus non-Hispanic whites attend schools with children with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). When examined at the national level, LEP students do not “crowd” the schools attended by most African American and non-Hispanic white children, nor has their presence in schools increased significantly in recent years. However, in states with large immigrant populations, African Americans are more likely to attend schools with LEP children than non-Hispanic whites. The relative autonomy between LEP and African American students at the national level can be explained by the fact that the two groups tend to live in different regions of the country. For non-Hispanic whites, the explanation has more to do with the fact that non-Hispanic white students are relatively unlikely to attend school with LEP students even in areas with large immigrant populations.