Chapter 7: Perceptions May Matter Most: A Comparative Examination of Teachers’ Perceptions of “Undocumented” Latino Students in Two High Schools

This chapter is a call for policymakers and educational administrators to move beyond official rules and policies about rights to educational services and think deliberately about how school culture and educators’ implicit biases can undermine immigrant Latino students’ educational experiences and outcomes. In a recent study, we conducted in-depth interviews with teachers in two schools in Illinois—one in a predominantly White rural city with an emerging immigrant Latino population (which we call Placid Lake), and the other in a suburban city that has recently become predominantly Latino but continues to have a substantial minority of high socioeconomic status (SES) White families (which we call Turbulent Waters). In Turbulent Waters, 46% of the students and 15% of the teachers in the high school were Latino, and in Placid Lake, 7% of students and no teachers were Latino.