The Forgotten History of Immigration

For Public Schools, the Impact Has Been Profound—and Positive

By William Celis

As school doors opened this fall, immigrant children once again made up the nation’s fastest-growing school population, a majority of them the children of Mexican immigrants. If history is any indication, these children will contribute as much as they learn.

But we have forgotten—indeed, if we ever really acknowledged—the immigrant’s contributions to American schools, a rich and vibrant history lost in the passage of time and the din of contemporary debates over immigration reform. From curriculum improvements, to the introduction of the trade school, to new ways to financially support public schools, the immigrant has helped propel some of the most significant and enduring changes in the last century in American public schools and in state and federal education policy, many of the changes made out of necessity.

Consider the last decade of the 19th century, a tumultuous time in national life, when a jittery nation faced the industrial age with a workforce ill-equipped to manage the wonders of new machinery. Though they taxed schools then, as now, immigrants also helped provide the answer. As more of them poured into the country at the turn of the last century, they brought with them models of the trade school, the forerunner of vocational training in schools today. In 1891, The New York Times , while often portraying immigrants as burdensome additions to society, nonetheless celebrated the idea they brought, proposing that the trade schools of France, Germany, and England be made part of...