Diversity, Immigration, and the Politics of Civic Education

Rutgers University Classrooms across the nation have over the past two decades taken a diverse turn, most notably in the changing face of school children from predominantly white to increasingly multiracial and multicultural. Immigrants and their children now account for more than 20% of the U.S. population, and roughly a third of Americans consider themselves to be something other than white. The younger average age of immigrants and higher birthrates among these groups and minority populations more generally contribute to an even larger proportion of non-whites under the age of 30. In-migration of this magnitude is not unprecedented in the United States; an even larger share of the U.S. population was foreign born at the dawn of the twentieth century. During that period it was Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants rather than the Mexican, Chinese, and AfroCaribbean immigrants of today who faced political, economic, and social barriers in their racial classification as "less than" white (see, e.g., Jacobson 1998; King 2000). Indeed, there is a clear echo of earlier calls for schools to