Growing Hispanic Enrollments:
Challenge and Opportunity
By Anne C. Lewis
Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche
|
||
Growing Hispanic Enrollments:
| ||
WHEN THE secondary school in tiny Collinsville, Alabama, burned down several years ago, the new building looked just like the old one -- plain brick front, straight halls, no frills. Things don't change much in this rural community, it seems. Enter a classroom, though, and be prepared to gaze in wonderment. About one-third of the 500 students in this K-12 school system -- all two buildings of it, surrounded by farm fields with the tail end of Lookout Mountain in the background -- are Hispanic.
In the last five years, a few families from Mexico who had been attracted to jobs in nearby knitting mills turned into a flood as they first returned home to bring more family members and friends and then began to stay year round. They are poor, living mostly in trailers, but Collinsville teachers praise the families' interest in the schools. Students, both white and black, made videotapes showing simple vocabulary words for the Hispanic students, who, in turn, did the same for the foreign language teacher. The PACERS small-school program, a statewide network that supports revitalizing rural schools, brought Mexican teachers to visit the district. The football coach is learning about soccer. Members of the community are attending Spanish-language classes. Collinsville might look the same, but in truth it is changing immeasurably. Quite by accident, its students are being prepared for the future.
The little town's transformation came to mind as the Census Bureau released some very significant data this summer. Numerically, Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the country. Most of us might dismiss the importance of this fact by saying, "Well, that's California's problem," or "That's an issue for urban districts." Not so. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of limited-English-proficient (LEP) students in Arkansas grew by 120%; in Kansas, by 118%; and in Wisconsin, by 42%. By 1992, more than one million teachers in the country had at least one LEP student in their classes.
The cultural impact of these changes has been creeping up on us. Few places in the country today are beyond driving distance of a taco dinner. One can practice Spanish by watching soap operas or the news on Hispanic channels, soccer camps and leagues are rampant in metropolitan areas, and the economic and political clout of Hispanics is only beginning to be recognized in policies and priorities.
As they would in serving any group on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, the public schools have struggled to adjust to a growing Hispanic enrollment. The results have not been good. Latino Education: Status and Prospects, an impressive report from the National Council of La Raza, paints a statistical picture that is shameful. If they are immigrants, Hispanic students who have had some education in their home country perform well in American schools. A study in San Diego, for example, found that children in immigrant families outperformed the district norms at every grade level. The longer they are in U.S. school systems, however, the more they begin to fall behind. The same is true for third-generation Hispanic children. While their parents might have performed well, these children are more likely to be poor learners. Other facts are also sobering.
Some attribute the higher dropout rate among Hispanic students to the fact that they can find employment more easily than members of other minority groups, but schools that use this excuse for not trying aggressively to keep Hispanic students in school are failing these students. They will be handicapped in today's economy. According to Sam Stringfield of Johns Hopkins University, today's high school dropouts earn less annually, adjusted for inflation, than their grandfathers who dropped out of school.
Many non-Hispanic people are unaware of the discrimination faced by previous generations of Hispanic students. Permit me to share a few anecdotes. When I was a newspaper reporter in South Texas, I covered the first court cases filed against school districts that forbade Hispanic students to speak Spanish on the playground and punished those who did. I also covered small, rural districts that were so oil-rich that they had no need to participate in the state funding program and thus were under no obligation to educate all the students in the district. By the end of the elementary grades, few Hispanic students remained in school. Anglos were quite willing to adopt the food, the architecture, the art, and the music of Hispanic cultures -- and abandon their children.
Because the border is an imaginary line for many Hispanic families, schools do face a special problem of constant migration back and forth during the school year. Family ties pull children across the border for weddings and funerals and other visits, but, as studies in California have pointed out, Mexican families do not know how to manipulate the system in the way that a white family can when a vacation extends into school time. The white family might arrange to get assignments and homework in advance, but many Mexican families just leave for a few days or weeks.
Still, as the La Raza report points out, education is a priority among Hispanic -- or Latino, as the report prefers -- families. In a recent series on immigration, the New York Times described a gathering in New York City of people from a small town in central Mexico who stay together and go home for a feast day every year. The grandchildren of the original immigrants are earning graduate degrees in this country, but their family ties are back in Chinantla.
It could be the centrality of the family that accounts for the much lower participation rate in Head Start programs for Hispanic children than for those from other ethnic groups. Families are large and protective of children, and even the 25% of families headed by single females often depend on an extended family for help with young children.
The basic issue with Hispanic students, however, is language. This issue ripped through the fabric of education and politics in California as voters there approved a ballot initiative in June that essentially eliminated bilingual education. Undoubtedly, the voting public felt at least some xenophobia -- the state absorbs more than a quarter million non-English-speaking students who have been in school less than three years. The dissatisfaction of a few Hispanic families with the progress their children were making in learning English sparked the initiative, and simplistic arguments from both sides managed to create a momentum that could not be stopped.
Certainly, some of the opposition was directed toward poorly designed and implemented programs rather than toward the idea of bilingual education itself. In a bit of irony, school districts with widely praised bilingual education programs, such as San Francisco and San Jose, learned from the first state administration of the SAT-9 test that "graduates" of their bilingual programs outperformed white students in reading and math. The Los Angeles Times reported that, in the Fullerton school district, fourth-graders who speak only English scored at the 59th percentile in reading, while former LEP students who had been "redesignated" as English fluent were at the 67th percentile. Similar patterns occurred in other districts, including Garden Grove and Irvine.
These results give hope for positive outcomes in the debate over language in California and other states -- if not for bilingual education per se, then for bilingualism in general. As school officials familiar with language learning pointed out, second-language learners have large advantages over monolingual students. Children exposed to multiple languages, they note, often read earlier and more quickly than monolingual students. According to the superintendent in Santa Ana, they are strong learners primarily because of their vocabulary, "which is very rich because they determine meanings of words in two languages."
Another example comes from Milwaukee's results on Wisconsin's statewide testing program. While the district anguishes over its low performance generally, its three "language immersion" elementary schools, in German, French, and Spanish, are top performers despite the percentages of low-income children, which ranged from 34% to more than 50%. Bilingual immersion programs are growing, and research presented at the American Educational Research Association meeting this year indicated high parental satisfaction with the approach. (Of course, parents are always happy when they can choose a program.)
Rather than wring hands over the poverty and problems of the mushrooming Hispanic population in the nation's schools, perhaps we could see this growth as an opportunity. Here is a resource to help schools become truly global in outlook and in the ways they prepare students. Instead of quashing bilingualism, schools could build on the skills and culture that Hispanic children bring to school with them in order to make all students both bilingual and more successful learners. (Latino Education: Status and Prospects will be available after Labor Day from the National Council of La Raza, 1111 19th St. N.W., Suite 2000, Washington, DC 20036; ph. 301/604-7983.)
PDK Home | Site Map
Kappan Professional
Journal
Last updated 5 November 1998
URL: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/klew9809.htm
Copyright 1998 Phi
Delta Kappa International