link to photo
Be Vocal
Find Your Voice on Immigration
click here
---
---
From The New York Times
Room for Debate: A Running Conversation on the News
Welcome to a national conversation about immigration. Starting today, readers and specialists are invited to discuss themes that will be explored each Sunday in a series of articles that will appear online and in the newspaper in the coming months.
The first article, to be published this weekend, will report on a Virginia school district that segregates students who are the children of immigrants, and who don’t speak English well, to make it easier to give them intensive support. Is that a good idea?
Here in Room for Debate, experts in the education of children learning English are already discussing strategies that schools around the country are adopting to help these students meet rising academic standards. In addition, readers can explore two interactive features. The first, a searchable database, includes the history of ethnic diversity in every school district in the country. The second, an interactive map, displays census data that show where different immigrant groups have settled in the United States over the last century.
Please join the conversation in the comment section of [the Room for Conversation NYT] blog. When the article on schools appears, the experts will be invited to return to the theme, focusing on the Virginia district’s approach. Readers are invited to do the same.
click here to link to the NYT Immigration Conversation
see NYT essay by Delia Pompa from NCLR:
Native-Born, but Not Native Speakers
Delia Pompa
New York Times
Delia Pompa is vice president for Education at the National Council of La Raza. She began her career as a kindergarten teacher in San Antonio, Tex.
A popular myth about students who are English-language learners is that they are all immigrants. The truth is that 65 percent of them are United States-born children of immigrants, or second generation, and 17 percent are children of United States-born parents, or third generation. These are American children who must be served well by the public schools, particularly during this critical economic period in our country.
The last 20 years have seen drastic changes for English-language learners in America. Not only have we developed more effective strategies for teaching academic English skills, we have committed ourselves to ensuring that English-language learners are held to the same standards as all students.
Not all students learning English arrived in the United States yesterday; some were born here and have been here for generations.
The changes have resulted in more teachers using better strategies like helping students build stronger vocabularies through literature and teaching language in the context of learning history, math and other important subjects. Policymakers and administrators are tracking the progress and results for all students, including English-language learners, and moving to close achievement gaps.
Still, we have a long way to go. But using a child’s native language while English language skills are developed or figuring out ways that parents can understand what their children know and need to know are decisions that should be left up to educators.
What doesn’t work is politicizing the issue. What occurs in the classroom should be determined by educators guided by what is good for all children; it shouldn’t be driven by debates on immigration. What doesn’t work is misinformation about English-language learners. They are not all immigrants who arrived in the United States yesterday and at the schoolhouse door today. These are American children. And what has no chance at all of working is avoiding responsibility for educating these children. link to article
-------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment