Small Strangers or The School Choice Hoax

Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925

Author: Melissa Klapper

Children are the largely neglected players in the great drama of American immigration. In one of history's most remarkable movements of people across national borders, almost twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-from Mexico, Japan, and Canada as well as the more common embarkation points of southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were children. Together with the American-born children of immigrants, they made up a significant part of turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Small Strangers recounts and interprets their varied experiences to illustrate how immigration, urbanization, and industrialization-all related processes-molded modern America.

Garrett Berger - Virginia Quarterly Review

Small Strangers captures the essence of what it meant to be one of the many children whose families immigrated to America around the turn of the last century.

What People Are Saying

Roger Daniels
"Her culturally sensitive survey fills a gap in the histories of childhood and of immigration."--(Roger Daniels, author of Not Like Us)

Alice Kessler-Harris
"This small, provocative book is a gem . . . Small Strangers touches on an astonishing range of key issues...indispensable."--(Alice Kessler-Harris, author of Gendering Labor History)

Marilyn Irvin Holt
"[A] careful blending of personal accounts with the larger social issues and reform movements of the period."--(Marilyn Irvin Holt, author of Children of the Western Plains)

Kriste Lindenmeyer
"Skillfully shows how the experiences of immigrant children highlight the dramatic shift from farm to factory...[A]n engaging synthesis."--(Dr. Kriste Lindenmeyer, author of The Greatest Generation Grows Up)

Jonathan Zimmerman
"Klapper has written a brief gem of a book, examining immigrant children in all of their diversity, tragedy, and triumph."--(Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools)

Table of Contents:

Preface     xi
Acknowledgments     xvii
Childhood and Immigrants: Changing Ideas at the Turn of the Century     3
The Landscape of Early Childhood     18
At School, at Work, at Home, at Play     54
Adolescent Years     108
After the Door Closed: The Effects of Restrictive Legislation and the Depression     161
Immigrant Children and Modern America     177
Notes     183
A Note on Sources     195
Index     211

New interesting textbook: Ordinary Vices or Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism

The School Choice Hoax: Fixing America's Schools

Author: Ronald G Corwin

This book argues that the autonomy granted to choice schools has been a counterproductive dead end. Its authors see no proof that freedom has produced the outstanding results that charter school advocates promised. Nor has the competition from charter schools spurred the improvement in public schools that charter advocates predicted. Instead, charter schools and education vouchers promoted competition among schools that should be cooperating. Overburdened public school districts are faced with rivalry from schools that are merely duplicating conventional programs and competing for some students while ignoring others. Since choice schools are not meeting the expectations touted by their advocates, the authors maintain that they should be planned, monitored, and operated by school districts.