Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools. Laurie Olsen. New York: The New Press, 1997. 276 pp.

The recent battle over California’s Proposition 227 underscores the highly politicized nature of the debate about bilingualism and, the need for the reasoned clarification of issues and continued research to discover how our public schools might best serve students whose first language is not English. Laurie Olsen’s personal, powerful, and insightful look at the process of Americanization as it occurs in one California high school provides such clarification and research. While not minimizing the complexity of factors that combine to support or discourage the successful passage of immigrant students into U.S. society, Olsen’s account of the two and a half years she spent at "Madison High" presents us with stories rich in ethnographic detail, stories that allow the reader to view the challenges of living and working in an increasingly diverse community through the eyes of students, teachers, and administrators for whom such challenges are a daily occurrence. At times, it is a difficult book to read. The barriers faced by immigrant students at Madison High are formidable and largely unacknowledged by many who celebrate diversity yet resist programmatic and curricular accommodations required to equitably respond to a changing population. Teachers, who work closely with newcomers, observe firsthand newcomers’ conflicts and struggles as they find their place in a foreign land. But teachers also encounter barriers as they attempt to advocate for individuals who do not yet have the language or the voice to speak on their own behalf. This book is about much more than a single high school in a California community. In many ways it mirrors the larger struggle most recently manifested in the Proposition 227 debate, a struggle over the future direction of U.S. society and the role of schools in mediating diversity and preparing a heterogeneous student body to participate productively in a democratic social system.

Informed by theories of reproduction and resistance, Olsen, director of the nonprofit research and advocacy group California Tomorrow, framed her research to consider the conflicting concepts of schools as (1) sites of democratic inclusion and (2) institutions that reproduce current systems of power and hierarchy, especially in the areas of language, culture, race, and national identity. Her study provides a multilayered perspective on the complex interaction of individual circumstances and institutional concerns, which together affect student achievement, faculty involvement, and administrative support in schools attended by a high percentage of immigrant students. In its qualitative focus and attention to patterns of variability within groups, Olsen’s book contributes to the reconsideration of Ogbu’s immigrant/involuntary minority as it has been described by Margaret Gibson ("Complicating the Immigrant/Involuntary Minority Typology," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 28[3]:431–454, 1997).

Olsen describes a largely counterproductive Americanization process that marginalizes and academically separates newly arrived immigrants, discourages continued development of their home language, requires them to become English speaking with often inadequate support for so doing, and pushes them to formulate a racial identity that, although providing a "place" to belong, also limits possibilities for cross-cultural understanding and communication. At a time when all teenagers are negotiating issues of academic engagement, respect for authority, peer acceptance, dating relationships, and career decisions, the immigrant teen’s task is significantly more complicated. Students grouped in English-as-a-Second-Language or sheltered content classes find it difficult to make connections with their English-speaking peers, connections that could facilitate their learning of the language. Those who are placed without adequate preparation into English-only classes experience frustration, failure, and rejection by students and even teachers who misjudge their ability and motivation. At Madison High immigrants must negotiate a system that uses English-language fluency as the primary measure of academic ability while minimizing other key factors that affect participation and involvement.

Olsen also considers the role of faculty and administrators. Although diversity is spoken of as a valued commodity, many of Madison’s faculty see no need to accommodate their teaching to a changing student population. Rather, they resist suggestions that they become trained in sheltering techniques or in second-language acquisition, citing their unwillingness to provide potentially divisive differential treatment. The principal’s refusal to cater to "special interests" and his adamant assertion that "we treat all our kids the same" ignore the fact that treating all students the same when their needs are different results in unequal access and outcomes. Yet some teachers resist the reproduction of inequity, naming the racial and class sorting that occurs.

The ideology of meritocracy, individual choice, and a race-neutral tracking system persists in spite of convincing statistics to the contrary. The fears that bilingual education might foster segregation and that accommodating cultural and language diversity could threaten the very structure of U.S. society lead many to support initiatives (such as Proposition 227) designed to eliminate special programs for non-English-speaking students. Olsen entered Madison High in the middle of its "story" and left before she could see an "ending." She alludes to a future in which anti-immigration and multicultural forces wage war over schools as institutions of inclusion and urges us to consider our response to these debates by asking ourselves the question, "What kind of society do we want to be?" The passage of Proposition 227 suggests one answer to that question. We have the opportunity to provide others. Olsen’s book alerts us to the challenges and inspires us with the possibilities of working for a more just and inclusive America.

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