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Immigration: Education Key to Assimiliation

By AlterNet Staff, AlterNet. Posted March 16, 2009.


In the last decade, record numbers of immigrants have fueled the greatest growth in public schools since the baby boom.

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The New York Times:

WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Walking the halls of Cecil D. Hylton High School outside Washington, it is hard to detect any trace of the divisions that once seemed fixtures in American society.

Two girls, a Muslim in a headscarf and a strawberry blonde in tight jeans, stroll arm in arm. A Hispanic boy wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt gives a high-five to a black student with glasses and an Afro. The lanky homecoming queen, part Filipino and part Honduran, runs past on her way to band practice. The student body president, a son of Laotian refugees, hangs fliers about a bake sale.

But as old divisions vanish, waves of immigration have fueled new ones between those who speak English and those who are learning how.

Walk with immigrant students, and the rest of Hylton feels a world apart. By design, they attend classes almost exclusively with one another. They take separate field trips. And they organize separate clubs.

“I am thankful to my teachers because the little bit of English I am able to speak, I speak because of them,” Amalia Raymundo, from Guatemala, said during a break between classes. But, she added, “I feel they hold me back by isolating me.”

Her best friend, Jhosselin Guevara, also from Guatemala, joined in. “Maybe the teachers are trying to protect us,” she said. “There are people who do not want us here at all.”

In the last decade, record numbers of immigrants, both legal and illegal, have fueled the greatest growth in public schools since the baby boom. The influx has strained many districts’ budgets and resources and put classrooms on the front lines of America’s battles over whether and how to assimilate the newcomers and their children.

Inside schools, which are required to enroll students regardless of their immigration status and are prohibited from even asking about it, the debate has turned to how best to educate them.

Hylton High, where a reporter for The New York Times spent much of the past year, is a vivid laboratory. Like thousands of other schools across the country, it has responded to the surge of immigrants by channeling them into a school within a school. It is, in effect, a contemporary form of segregation that provides students learning English intensive support to meet rising academic standards — and it also helps keep the peace.

In a nation where most students learning English lag behind other groups by almost every measure, Hylton’s program stands out for its students’ high test scores and graduation rates. However, at this ordinary American high school, in an ordinary American suburb at a time of extraordinary upheaval, those achievements come with considerable costs.

Read the entire article here.

 


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unfreeinus
Posted by: losingmyliberties on Mar 16, 2009 11:08 AM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What budgets,they just tax the slave citizens more.
Like I said before you want it, you pay for it.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Right, let's screw achieving students even more.
Posted by: johnwinthrop on Mar 16, 2009 3:24 PM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
In america's race to the bottom, why not mix nonenglish speakers with english speakers. first of all, as any english teacher knows, most students in lower income districts can't write and can't speak anything approaching "English" that foreign students in Japan or China, let alone upper middle class districts in America would recognize. Certainly they don't speak or write English that any employer could or would desire. Now we want nonEnglish speakers to dilute the quality of our already declining "regular" classes? Sure. If you are the Chinese Ministry of Trade or The Russian military you are delighted with this prospect. And what are nonEnglish speakers doing in our schools to begin with. Most "legal" immigrants speak some English because they are skilled workers whose families have been educated in China or India and have some English. Are we talking about illegals? Hello illegals. You want to be in the same class as English speaking Americans?

No, you can't. You need to go HOME. You don't belong. And we don't care if your feelings are hurt. You are not part of us. We are Americans and you are not. You will only screw up the efforts of America's already harassed teachers to bring US students up to world class levels to compete with China or Russia. Illegals, you don't know what I am talking about, do you? I don't care. Go away.

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School diversity
Posted by: Karina on Mar 17, 2009 7:11 AM   
Current rating: 3    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
"this ordinary American high school, in an ordinary American suburb "

I live near this area. The Washington DC suburbs are anything but ordinary. Our schools have children of all races from all over the world, and that diversity is not to be found in most of the US (urban areas aside). My child doesn't share class with Jane, Mary and David, but with Rassul, Hawraa and Ahenfua. They don't notice the different shades because that's how life is here. Take them another 100 miles from DC and it would be a very different story.

It is unfortunate that the girl mentioned feels isolated but that is necessary both for her education and others to be most productive. A class being taught in English to 25 English speaking children (especially with the unreasonably overloaded curriculum of NCLB) cannot be catered to 2 or 3 ESL students. That's the positive thing about access to ESL classes, not only teaching the same curriculum but including extensive language instruction as well with a student-teacher ratio of 6 or 7 students to 2 teachers. That's much better than the ratio for English speaking students.

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