Latino Immigrant Youth and Interrupted Schooling

Marguerite Lukes is the Director of National Initiatives for the Internationals Network for Public Schools and Assistant Professor at City University of New York's LaGuardia Community College. She is also Co-Chair of the Adult Literacy and Adult Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association and an Executive Board Member for the New York State Association for Bilingual Education. With almost thirty years of experience in the field, the primary focus of her research is education policy, particularly concerning the experiences of immigrant language learners from high school level and beyond.

Marguerite Lukes is the Director of National Initiatives for the Internationals Network for Public Schools and Assistant Professor at City University of New York's LaGuardia Community College. She is also Co-Chair of the Adult Literacy and Adult Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association and an Executive Board Member for the New York State Association for Bilingual Education. With almost thirty years of experience in the field, the primary focus of her research is education policy, particularly concerning the experiences of immigrant language learners from high school level and beyond.

Latino Immigrant Youth and Interrupted Schooling accomplishes the purpose of interrogating about current educational status of Latino young immigrants with interrupted schooling. Moreover it fills a gap in the literature of completions, dropouts, and discontinued education within migrant population. Lukes offers an enjoyable reading that describes individuals’ educational trajectories from their countries of origin to the US. In a simple and direct style, she achieves the goal of thickening the problematic issue of Latino young students who do not complete secondary school. Professional and lay readers will appreciate the up-dated information of a less explored subset of immigrants, adding voices and faces to the sheer numbers.

Frank Hernandez:

This book about Latino immigrant youth and interrupted schooling is both clear and scholarly, providing a broad overview of issues influencing this specific population of students—about whom we still know very little. Policymakers, K–12 school administrators, adult education administrators, nonprofits, faculty, students, and community leaders will find the substance of this book inspirational and insightful, and will be motivated to act on behalf of these valued young adults and the academic institutions that they attend.

Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania, USA:

Lukes offers compelling evidence that the barriers that Latino immigrant youth face in the United States have nothing to do with cultural deficiencies and everything to do with institutional neglect. She then offers a comprehensive blueprint for addressing this institutional neglect that is a must-read for anybody who is serious about improving the educational outcomes of Latino immigrant youth.

Carola Suarez-Orozco, University of California, Los Angeles, USA:

Wise and compassionate, Lukes provides unique insights into the dreams, aspirations, and resiliency of young adult Latinos who attempt to persevere through the US educational system despite all odds. A stellar contribution to the field!

Pedro Noguera, New York University, USA:

In this important new book Marguerite Lukes focuses on the educational needs and challenges faced by a population that is nearly invisible to the American mainstream: disenfranchised immigrant youth. Through her detailed analysis Lukes helps her readers to see beyond the one dimensional characterizations that typically appear in the media so that they can appreciate the grit and agency that many of them rely upon to survive. She also makes it clear why it is so important to their future and ours to address their educational needs.