Pelican Parts Forums - The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Quote:

Originally posted by RPKESQ
This is the direct result of "no child left behind". Pretty poor, in my opinion.

From an article concerning Latino immigration in Delaware. This is a small section of the article, but it is instructive concerning this thread.

Not left behind

Given their vulnerability, their high levels of illiteracy, and the language barrier, one naturally expects the children of these immigrants to be struggling a bit. They are not. They are doing extremely--almost shockingly--well. Latinos make up 40 percent of the student population at Georgetown North elementary school, and that percentage is steadily rising. They will make up 55 percent of the first graders who arrive on the first day of school next month. Thanks to No Child Left Behind laws, there is a bevy of data broken down all sorts of ways on school progress. Hispanics in the third grade at Georgetown North are outscoring both whites and blacks in reading comprehension.

This should not surprise us as much as it probably does. Obsessed as we are with upward social mobility, Americans harbor a sneaking assumption that only educated parents can have educated children. Learning, the thinking goes, is a matter of playing Mozart in pregnancy and keeping the Classic Children's Books strewn tastefully about the bedroom. This is quite wrong. You don't learn by aping the learned classes--you learn by taking the work of learning seriously. Latino children come to school as ready to work as their parents do at the plant. Asked if Latino parents did anything differently, James Hudson, the principal at North Georgetown, says, "The first question parents ask at parent-teacher conferences is not 'How are my child's grades?' but 'How is my child's behavior?'" "

There may also be a political factor behind young Latino students' success. In the early decades of mass immigration--say from the seventies through the nineties--a lot of the ideas about what makes a new community successful were simply borrowed from the utopian left of the civil rights movement. One great advantage of the Delaware immigration, it turns out, is that it happened after a lot of baseless nostrums of the caring professions were discredited. Institutions were built up in the more pragmatic spirit of Gingrich Republicanism, without any immigrants'-rights establishment protecting its entrenched programs and its turf.

Asked about bilingual education, Hudson gives a look as if he's never heard the term before. "The key is that all kids have access to the regular curriculum," he says. "You don't want to isolate them from what the other kids are learning." North Georgetown has three English-Language Learner teachers. One of them, Meg Lawson, says that her immigrant students are possessed of a great curiosity. "They like the nonfiction more than the fiction. That surprised me." Her second-graders last year particularly liked learning about hibernation and migration. What about teaching them about their culture? "I try to do different books that aren't about their own culture," she says. "They know their own culture. Some tests try to use more names like José or Juan. I don't think that makes a difference."

In rural areas, school systems are doubly important, because some of the work of assimilation that cities do automatically doesn't get done there. An urban immigrant has to know enough English to buy a subway token. A rural immigrant can disappear into a subculture as iso lated as that of the Amish. Such subcultures can be picturesque and upstanding, but it is probably a mistake to encourage them when the influx of immigrants is as large as it is today.