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Voices in Urban Education
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Educating Newcomers
VUE Number 15, Spring 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Immigrant Children in U.S. Schools
By Eugene E. García
Eugene E. García is vice president for education partnerships at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton College of Education.
> Author's biography
NOTE: This article is from Eugene E. García, Teaching and Learning in Two Languages: Bilingualism and Schooling in the United States. New York: Teachers College Press, © 2005 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
A close look at the research on immigrant children shows the challenges they face in schools and the challenges schools face in educating an incredibly diverse population.
The United States has long been a nation of incredible cultural and linguistic diversity. This trend of ethnic and racial population diversification continues most rapidly among its young and school-age children. The demographic transformation that has become more evident in the last decade was easily foreseen at least ten years ago. Our future student growth is as predictable: in a mere thirty-five years, White students will be a minority in every category of public education as we know it today.
Unfortunately, the students who form an emerging ethnic and racial majority continue to be "at risk" in today's social institutions. Much more eloquent than any quantitative analyses of this situation is a recent letter from a new high school English teacher in Los Angeles to a former colleague:
Hi. . . Here's the report from the Western Front. Please pass it around. What I initially perceived to be innovative use of year-round scheduling seems to be more mechanization run amok. Although they apparently were able to split the kids into three separate tracks with different vacations with little or no problem, the track system has virtually NO academic benefit, at least the way it operates here. There are about 600 9th and 10th graders per track and about 200 11th and 12th graders per track. Look at the dropout rate (near 50 percent if not more). And the school just received a 3-year accreditation rather than 7-year so things are pretty bad.
In short, this school and school district are nightmares.
Reading and writing levels are grotesque. I have only four students who are operating above grade level who could function in an honors program. That's out of 150 on the rolls.
The dress code is not enforced... gangster wear is the norm, not the exception... and the administration, besides making occasional announcements, does nothing... thus none of the teachers care to stir the pot by even trying to enforce dress codes. Tardies are not enforced. This is LA and despite that kids are wandering through the halls and all over the campus all the time. There is one computer lab for math, four or five computers in the library and that's about it. The textbooks left for me to use were 1980 copyright 10th grade lit books, and there were only enough for a classroom set. And, of course, all except one of the short stories was about teenage white (male) characters, and these kids Just Don't Relate to that. Plus, despite this being a major ESL school, no supplementary resources "enrichment" materials exist that I can find that contain black or brown or multi-national short stories or poems... They do know the main players in the OJ drama, but one must be careful here when making allusions to that. The Maya Angelou books were in pieces. The book accountability procedures here are non-existent.
Archives
Educating Newcomers
VUE Number 15, Spring 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Immigrant Children in U.S. Schools
By Eugene E. García
Eugene E. García is vice president for education partnerships at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton College of Education.
> Author's biography
NOTE: This article is from Eugene E. García, Teaching and Learning in Two Languages: Bilingualism and Schooling in the United States. New York: Teachers College Press, © 2005 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
A close look at the research on immigrant children shows the challenges they face in schools and the challenges schools face in educating an incredibly diverse population.
The United States has long been a nation of incredible cultural and linguistic diversity. This trend of ethnic and racial population diversification continues most rapidly among its young and school-age children. The demographic transformation that has become more evident in the last decade was easily foreseen at least ten years ago. Our future student growth is as predictable: in a mere thirty-five years, White students will be a minority in every category of public education as we know it today.
Unfortunately, the students who form an emerging ethnic and racial majority continue to be "at risk" in today's social institutions. Much more eloquent than any quantitative analyses of this situation is a recent letter from a new high school English teacher in Los Angeles to a former colleague:
Hi. . . Here's the report from the Western Front. Please pass it around. What I initially perceived to be innovative use of year-round scheduling seems to be more mechanization run amok. Although they apparently were able to split the kids into three separate tracks with different vacations with little or no problem, the track system has virtually NO academic benefit, at least the way it operates here. There are about 600 9th and 10th graders per track and about 200 11th and 12th graders per track. Look at the dropout rate (near 50 percent if not more). And the school just received a 3-year accreditation rather than 7-year so things are pretty bad.
In short, this school and school district are nightmares.
Reading and writing levels are grotesque. I have only four students who are operating above grade level who could function in an honors program. That's out of 150 on the rolls.
The dress code is not enforced... gangster wear is the norm, not the exception... and the administration, besides making occasional announcements, does nothing... thus none of the teachers care to stir the pot by even trying to enforce dress codes. Tardies are not enforced. This is LA and despite that kids are wandering through the halls and all over the campus all the time. There is one computer lab for math, four or five computers in the library and that's about it. The textbooks left for me to use were 1980 copyright 10th grade lit books, and there were only enough for a classroom set. And, of course, all except one of the short stories was about teenage white (male) characters, and these kids Just Don't Relate to that. Plus, despite this being a major ESL school, no supplementary resources "enrichment" materials exist that I can find that contain black or brown or multi-national short stories or poems... They do know the main players in the OJ drama, but one must be careful here when making allusions to that. The Maya Angelou books were in pieces. The book accountability procedures here are non-existent.
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