Asian Immigrant Children's School Performance: The Influences of Neighborhoods and Schools

Suet-ling Pong, Pennsylvania State University

Using data from the Adolescent Health Survey, we examine if neighborhood and school characteristics can explain Asian immigrant youth’s educational advantage. Although we found no significant SES disadvantage of foreign-born Asian students, and third-generation Whites are more likely than second-generation Asians to live in low SES neighborhoods and to attend low SES schools, immigrant Asian students are more likely than are native White students to live in neighborhoods with greater concentration of minorities, and with higher proportions of female-headed households and of women working full time. Foreign-born Asian students reported more negative school climate and larger class size. An advantage all Asian students have is that they are more likely to have school peers with high GPAs. These racial differences in neighborhoods and schools taken together, however, do not account for the performance gap between native Whites and Asian students of immigrants.