Thousands Of Students In Texas Classified "Limited English Learners"

Last month, the Dallas Morning News published a series about illegal immigrant Hispanic students at a Dallas high school. The stories are largely about the students' struggles to learn English, pass their classes and stay in school. Reporters Macarena Hernández and Gary Jacobson also provide an intimate and sympathetic view of the ups and downs students go through adjusting to new friends, parents they hadn't seen in a long time, and in some cases siblings they'd never met.

The stories make a compelling read, but they glossed over the more important story: thousands of students in the state of Texas who are classified as limited English speakers were born in the U.S. The majority of them are Hispanic children and low-income.

According to state education data cited in the series, the number of students in Texas that were classified as limited English learners more than doubled to more than 770,000 between 1991 and 2008--and "the overwhelming majority are U.S.-born children of immigrants in elementary school."

In addition, an analysis of state data by the Morning News showed that about 60 percent of Texas high school students who reportedly have limited proficiency in English "have been in U.S. schools five years or more."

In others words, they have been educated in English in U.S. public schools and they still aren't fully literate in the language at their grade level.

There isn't a magic bullet that's going to fix this problem, and it's going to take more than money to do it. This is not a task for the federal government, either. This is something that needs to be tackled at the local level, by state lawmakers, school district officials, teachers and parents.

For starters, state legislators and school district officials are going to have to take a hard look at the way bilingual education programs are being run. It's not just going to be about hiring better teachers, but about taking children who were born and reared in the U.S. out of those classes.

In Texas, bilingual classes are offered in grade school and are aimed to improve English-language skills of children whose native language is Spanish. In the early grades, students receive much of their instruction in Spanish, and then get incremental doses of English as they transition to higher grades.

The philosophy behind this teaching strategy: by shoring up their Spanish language skills first, the children are better equipped to pick up English than they would in an English-only class.
The reality is that these kids--many if not most of who were born here--are short-changed: they learn neither language properly.

Why are these kids in these classes? They watch "Dora the Explorer" and "That's so Raven." They know about Winnie the Pooh and Elmo. They're fans of "Hannah Montana." They may speak Spanish at home, but they're steeped in English-language pop culture. What they need is to be fully immersed in the language at school, not segregated.

Another thing school districts could do better is step-up their efforts to get parents more involved in their children's education. Though the perception is that Hispanics don't value education, many of those parents don't know how to speak English, don't know their way around the American public school culture and may feel intimidated by the system. If they are here illegally, they may fear even participating in school activities could risk deportation.

Still, the burden lies mostly and ultimately on the parents. More of them need to step up to the plate to help these kids succeed. For low-income Hispanic families, that's going to take a drastic change in the way they value education against their immediate financial needs. In many families, teenagers quit school to work to help support their families here and in their parents' home countries. This may help families in the short term, but not long term.

The Morning News series cited the following statistics that illustrate the economic impact of high school dropouts:

According to the Alliance of Excellent Education, a public policy group based in Washington, D.C., "the 1.2 million dropouts from the Class of 2007, over their lifetimes, will cost the U.S. nearly a third of a trillion dollars in foregone wages, taxes and productivity."

The problem has even broader implications. Students here aren't competing with fellow classmates for educational opportunities and jobs anymore, but also with children in China, Europe and Latin America that may have a better grasp of the language.

It behooves parents, teachers and legislators to help children master the English language beginning at an early age. The economic future of those children, and that of their cities, states and that of the country, are intricately tied to the quality of their childhood education.

Comments

[Jude2004]

I work a lot with ELLs. I've taught adults, translated for parents, and volunteered with all ages. My latest theory is that the most important thing you can do with parents is take them on a tour of the public library, get them a card, tell them in their own language about the importance of reading to their children, and if possible give them a few books to keep (in their own language) so they can read to their kids. Encourage them to have English-language TV stations on with closed-captioning in English so they're all reading along with the words (cartoons are especially good for this). And pre-teach every unit possible in school so that when a student encoutners a strange word, it isn't strange to them. When I translated at parent-teacher conferences this spring, I found out that one student missed a lot of school because he had asthma which had been untreated since the age of 3. His family was legal, but his parents didn't know about free medical clniics and low-cost insurance programs for kids. I probed, found this out, and gave them the information they needed to get him back on medication. It takes individuals reaching out to individuals as much as institutional programs.

[blindjester]

Absolutely terrible advice.

By the time Arizona voted to outlaw bilingual education, even the Arizona Republic (yes, they are that conservative) was writing editorials _against_ the proposition. _Supporting_ bilingual programs!

They initially supported the ban on bilingual education, assuming it delayed learning English. When they started to look at the research, it became clear even to lifelong conservatives that students in bilingual programs learn English faster than kids in ESL programs or so-called "immersion" programs. (And do much better in every other subject.)

But it was too late to make a difference, and the measure passed. Arizona's students learn less as a result, not more. These are tomorrow's workers, tomorrow's taxpayers, remember. They're still going to be here in 20 years, and in 40 years. Voters don't even have to care about those kids to care about how their education affects all of us.

Bilingual education is not the problem. The research is resoundingly clear on this subject. The best way to get immigrants and their children to "speak English because this is America!" is to support bilingual education.