Just 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade’s math exam, compared to 47 percent of Somali-speaking students. In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. And kids from Ethiopia and Eritrea scored even higher than the Somali students.11 A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Education found that although immigrants were just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for more than a quarter of the black students at the nation’s twenty-eight most selective colleges and
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