Teach Your Children Well

By Paul Gray

On a cloudy winter afternoon, Florann Greenberg, a teacher at P.S. 14 in New York City, noticed that her first-grade class was growing fidgety. One girl, dropping all pretense of work, stared at the snow falling outside the schoolroom windows. Annoyed, Greenberg asked her, "Haven't you seen snow before?" The girl whispered, "No." Her classmates began shaking their heads. Then it dawned on Greenberg: of course these children had never seen snow; almost all were immigrants from Colombia and the Dominican Republic. Immediately, she changed the lesson plan. New topic: What is snow? How is it formed? How do you dress in the snow? What games do you play?

Such moments of cultural dissonance, followed by attempts to learn and teach from them, now take place daily in thousands of classrooms scattered across , the U.S. The children of the new immigrants, often immigrants themselves, have been arriving at these classrooms in growing numbers, and more are on the way. They are placing unprecedented demands on teachers, administrators and already strained school systems. To a heartening degree, however, educators are responding with fresh, pragmatic methods of coping with these new demands.

Isolated numbers hint at the scope of the challenge:

Total enrollment in U.S. public schools rose only 4.2% between 1986 and 1991, according to a 1993 Urban Institute study, while the number of students with little or no knowledge of English increased 50%, from 1.5 million to 2.3 million.

In the Washington school system, students speak 127 languages and dialects; across the Potomac, in Fairfax County, Virginia, that figure is more than 100.

In California public schools 1 out of 6 students was born outside the U.S., and 1 in 3 speaks a language other than English at home. The Los Angeles school system now absorbs 30,000 new immigrant children each year.

Such figures, startling as they are, have stirred little national attention, in part because the new immigrant families have not spread themselves uniformly across the country. A recent Rand Corp. study found that 78% of school-age immigrants who have been in the U.S. three years or less live in just five states: California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois. Like most statistics, this one can be misleading if it is taken to mean that the surge of immigrant students is solely a big-state, big-city concern. In absolute terms, even a small number of such students can profoundly affect the way a school district goes about its business.

In Garden City, Kansas (pop. 24,600), a boom in the meat-packing industry that began during the 1980s continues to attract aspiring workers, principally from Mexico and Southeast Asia. Now, of the 3,666 children in Garden City's elementary schools, roughly 700 require special help because of limited proficiency in English. Lowell, Massachusetts, was a fading city of 19th century textile mills until 1985, when the Federal Government chose it as a resettlement site for Southeast Asian families. This year, aided by federal and state grants, Lowell spent $5.9 million on bilingual education; courses are offered in Spanish, Khmer, Lao, Portugese and Vietnamese. All communications between schools and parents are translated into five languages. At the Cary Reynolds elementary school in the Atlanta suburb of De Kalb County, Georgia, students from 25 foreign nations speak a medley of languages ranging from Mandarin to Farsi.

In practice, many teachers have begun turning the problems of ethnic diversity in their classrooms to educational advantage. Most elementary schools in Garden City celebrate different national holidays, including Mexican Independence Day, the Laotian New Year and Vietnam's Tet. Last year a class at New York City's P.S. 189, which is roughly one-third Haitian, performed a class project about Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the slave who freed Haiti from France. The exercise was consistent with both Haitian cultural traditions and the school's emphasis on maintaining harmony and diversity.

But the nation's school systems are not being swept by the kind of wholesale changes that traditionalists feared would result from such programs as New York City's controversial "Children of the Rainbow" curriculum and Portland, Oregon's baseline essays, which aim to reduce the perceived Eurocentric bias of U.S. education. The ideological debate about multicultural education, brewing for years on college campuses, does not seem to have leached into primary and secondary schools, where math, science, geography, etc., are still regarded as important. Nonetheless, vexing but essential questions prevail: How are students who know no English to be taught? Must they, in the process, sacrifice their ethnic or cultural heritage?

Surprisingly, most educators who work with the new immigrants believe competence in English and the maintenance of cultural identity are compatible goals. "I believe in language and cultural pride," says Martin Gross, a New York City elementary school principal, "but let's not forget the fact that these kids are in America. I think we should respect different cultures but not become factionalized." Claudia Hammock, a teacher at the Cary Reynolds school, agrees: "We do try to keep their native customs and try to show them we want them to remember. But we also want them to learn to function in an English-speaking world."

To reach that goal, teachers and administrators have, over several years of trial and error, evolved two different methods. In one, students are plunged immediately into intensive E.S.L. (English as a Second Language) instruction; the idea is to bring them up to the proficiency of native speakers at their grade level and get them into mainstream classes as quickly as possible. The other, bilingual, approach allows students to take courses such as math and history in their own language while devoting a certain amount of time each day to learning English. Once the new language has been mastered, the students can translate and build upon their earlier, non-English instruction.

Both techniques have proved appealing to students. Carol Ovndo, 12, arrived in Fairfax County from Guatemala three years ago without knowing a word of English. Her immersion in all-English courses rapidly enabled her to become a proficient speaker and reader. "It was scary," she recalls. "But my teacher showed me pictures, and my friends helped, and sometimes we just all acted things out." At the Bell Multi-Cultural High School in Washington, Nguyen Nguyen, 15, who arrived from Vietnam a year ago, takes courses in both his native language and English. "I have to understand in Vietnamese first," he says, "so I can translate it into English. I learn best this way."

Both techniques have their drawbacks. English-only works better for younger students but can prove too rigorous for older children, who may grow frustrated and disinterested in school as a result. Children who live in families and communities where a foreign language is spoken often take so long to master English that they lack basic factual knowledge once they enter mainstream courses.

Most teachers now prefer the bilingual method. Says Winnie Porter, a bilingual teacher at the Cesar Chavez Elementary School in San Francisco: "It's very simple. You teach children in the language they think in; then they understand the concepts. Once they understand the concepts, they can transfer these skills to a second language. I know it works. I've been doing it for 10 years and see the results." But many communities cannot afford or attract qualified bilingual teachers in all -- or any -- of the subjects students may need. Says Gloria McDonell, director of the Fairfax County E.S.L. program: "We don't teach bilingual education because it's impractical. It's hard to find someone who can teach math in Korean."

Unfortunately, the task of immigrant education occurs at a time when the budgetary restraints and cutbacks in American public schools are pinching resources for all students, native-born or otherwise. Immigration policy is made at the federal level, but the costs of educating the children must be largely borne by financially beleaguered states and municipalities. More than 65,000 immigrant children entered New York City schools from April 1992 to April 1993, arriving in a system whose budget has been reduced by more than three-quarters of a billion dollars since 1990. California's recession and fiscal crisis produced a 20% drop in school funding between 1990 and 1992.

Donald Huddle, an economics professor at Rice University, has studied the expenses incurred by the 11.8 million legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 1992. Out of a total $42.5 billion bill paid by all levels of government, the largest line item was for primary and secondary education: $13.2 billion. Assuming an additional 11.1 million new immigrants will come to the U.S. during the next decade, Huddle predicts that the net cost will be $668.5 billion. If these figures are accurate, they will be enough to bankrupt most school districts.

Can the U.S. afford to educate immigrants, especially at a time when American students are testing poorly in a whole battery of subjects compared with their counterparts in other industrialized nations? Some critics vehemently think not. "Many schools with influxes of immigrant children with specific educational needs weren't coping well to begin with," says Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group promoting immigration restrictions. "You can't keep throwing these types of children into a school system and expect us to have an educated population that will be competitive in this society." Anthony Martin, a Palm Beach attorney and Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida, concurs: "Hundreds of millions of dollars are being stolen from American children who need computers, books and guards."

Yet even those who agree with such sentiments must concede that the immigrant children are already here; ignoring them, turning them away at the schoolhouse door for lack of money or will, is not just against the American character, it is against the law. The challenges their presence creates are real enough. So is the sense that no central authority has made itself responsible for these children's support, education and future prospects in society. Lorraine M. McDonnell, a consultant at the Rand Corp. who co-authored its recent report on immigrants in schools, recalls, "What we found is that, at the local level, schools and individuals are doing the best they can. The immigrant children are eager and hardworking, and teachers love to teach them. But they are not getting the assistance they need."

If there is a potential silver lining in these prognoses, it is that the initiatives and experiments now being demanded of individual schools, teachers and administrators may spark a long-needed rejuvenation in U.S. education. The dead hand of bureaucracy has not yet grasped the teaching of immigrants or clamped down on classroom innovations. For the moment, teachers of such children need not file proposed changes in lesson plans, in triplicate, to the board of ed offices and then wait six months to have the papers returned, stamped INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION. Constrained only by the number of hours in each working day, they are dealing with immigrants as individuals, using different approaches to meet different abilities and expectations.

Interestingly, those on the front lines of this struggle -- the teachers and the local administrators burdened by growing responsibilities and dwindling resources -- have hardly any complaints about the new immigrants. "We have had to create new programs and courses quickly," says Fairfax County's McDonell. "There have been problems. But slowly and surely, this is helping us understand what the rest of the world is like." Donna Skinner, at Garden City Community College, has worked closely with immigrant children in southwestern Kansas since 1980. "You're always going to find some people grumbling about special needs, but there is a certain pride here," she says. "This adds color and zest to our community." Says Lowell superintendent George Tsapatsaris: "If our country is going to compete globally in Southeast Asia, we need to have people who can speak those languages. My kids from Lowell will be in good shape."

Having embarked on the large-scale education of new immigrant children, the U.S. has no choice but to continue on a journey toward a distant if problematic destination. One of the surprise lessons along the way may be that these young people, from virtually every spot on earth, may have as much to teach as they have to learn.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,108 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on Sept. 8-9 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%.

CAPTION: Should it be the duty of all immigrants to learn English if they plan to stay in this country?

Which comes closest to your view on bilingual education in public schools?

With reporting by Adam Biegel/Atlanta, Ann Blackman/Washington, Sharon E. Epperson/New York, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago