Dual-language schools urged for immigrants
Anjetta McQueen
Hispanic students are twice as likely as blacks and three times as
likely as whites to drop out of high school, the Education Department
said Wednesday in a study suggesting that the nation's education
system is ill-equipped to deal with the fastest-growing group of
schoolchildren.
Hoping to paint a different picture for these children, Education
Secretary Richard Riley called for public school districts to create
in the next five years 1,000 new dual-language schools - which would
instruct children in English and in a native language such as
Spanish.
"If we see to it that immigrants and their children can speak only
English and nothing more, then we will have missed one of the
greatest opportunities of this new century," Riley said. "It is high
time we begin to treat language skills as the asset they are."
In 1997, 25.3 percent of Hispanics age 16 to 24 dropped out of
high school, compared with 13.4 percent of blacks and 7.6 percent of
whites.
The study also said that 11 percent of Hispanics age 25 to 29
possessed at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 14.2 percent of
blacks and 32.6 percent of whites.
Riley said dual-language instruction has proved to help Hispanic
children do better academically as well as preserve children's
heritage and promote the bilingualism all students will need in a
global economy.
"Unfortunately, too many teachers and administrators today treat a
child's native language as a weakness if it is not English," Riley
said, speaking at Bell Multicultural High School, which is not one of
the nation's 260 dual-language schools.
Dual-language instruction is one of three main, often hotly
debated approaches to teaching the nation's 3 million students with
limited proficiency in English, of which nearly 75 percent are
Hispanic. These students, designated by school tests and other
measures as non-English speakers, also are taught in English-only
classes or completely in their native languages.
In June, 1998, California voters approved Proposition 227, which
required all students to be taught "overwhelmingly" in English.
Critics of dual-language schools said Wednesday that such
instruction doesn't necessarily give non-English speakers the
language immersion necessary to improve.
"You are basically using Hispanic kids to help teach English-
speaking kids Spanish," said Jorge Amselle of the Center for Equal
Opportunity, a Washington-based group critical of current bilingual
education programs and policies based on the premise that non-
English speaking children should be immersed in the language as
quickly as possible.
While Hispanic children are more likely than other kids to come
from poor families where they don't have good access to health care
and preschool classes that would make them better students -
statistics recounted by Riley indicated that language is the chief
barrier to learning.
The dropout rates for Hispanics - a third of whom leave school
overall - are linked to a student's language difficulties. Nearly
half of foreign-born Hispanic students drop out, while just 16
percent of Hispanic students born in the United States leave school,
Riley said. |