American classrooms, especially those in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, are filled with children from many diverse ethnic groups speaking different languages. School authorities claim that this diversity makes teaching these children an almost superhuman task.
It is certainly true that America has a diverse population, especially in big cities, but public schools are not the solution to educating these children. Any immigrant child who does not speak English will have a difficult time in school, just as an American child whose parents moved to Japan or Turkey would have a hard time in Japanese or Turkish public schools because he or she couldn’t speak the language.
So the first order of business for these children is to learn the language of their new country. Immigrant parents naturally expect their children to learn English. Yet look who we give this crucial job to — public schools, the same schools that can barely teach American kids to read.
Public schools are the worst place to teach English to non-English-speaking children, for many reasons:
First, these children get stuck with maybe twenty other kids in the class, including children from other cultures who speak different languages. It is almost impossible for even the most competent English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher to handle this diversity. These children need intense one-on-one instruction designed for their specific language to get them quickly up to speed.
Second, public-school classes also lump together children of different learning abilities. Out of alleged fairness, teachers often gear instruction to slower-learning students. Students who want to learn faster get bored and may take out their frustration on non-English speaking or slower children. The non-English speaking students can be shamed and humiliated by the other kids (children can be cruel). This treatment can destroy these children’s self-confidence and make them hate school and learning.
Third, as we saw in previous chapters, public-school children often get stuck with poorly-trained teachers who had the bad luck of graduating from a teacher college or university department of education.
Fourth, many public schools teach reading with whole-language instruction, not phonics. As we saw in Chapter 3, this reading method is an unmitigated disaster. Whole-language instruction used alone turns non-immigrant American children into functional illiterates with dismal reading-test scores. To use this same method to try to teach non-English-speaking immigrant children to read English is absurd. For all the reasons indicated above, public schools are the last place we should be sending immigrant children to learn English.
Many public schools try to solve this diversity problem with bilingual education classes. The schools teach non-English speaking kids reading, writing, math, and other subjects in their native language for sometimes up to four years while the children learn English through assimilation. There is a lot of controversy surrounding bilingual education. Advocates say it lets kids keep up with their studies while gradually learning English. Opponents say these classes retard immigrant children’s academic growth by not forcing them to learn English sooner.
In 1998, California’s successful Proposition 227 initiative eliminated bilingual classes, and instead mandated “English Immersion” programs for Hispanic and other non-English speaking students. In these programs, all instruction is in English and geared specifically to teaching students English as fast as possible. Some studies have shown this method to be successful in helping immigrant children develop fluent conversational English in one to two years.
Even without these programs, young immigrant children often become fluent in conversational English in this same time period. They do this by assimilating into the culture and learning from other immigrant members of their community who have been in America longer and learned the language.32
If young immigrant children can learn basic conversational English in this relatively short time period, then the diversity excuse does not hold water. Once these kids learn to speak English, they are in a similar position to American students who are learning to read from scratch. At this point, the above-noted serious disadvantages of public-school instruction kick in, and the immigrant kids are stuck with the same public schools American children have to suffer with.
The only system that can effectively handle diversity is the free market. The problem can be solved if private companies or former immigrants who now speak English set up local schools in their neighborhoods. If Chinese, Indian, Spanish, Italian, or Vietnamese entrepreneurs, churches, or social organizations opened local schools to teach new immigrants English, the problem would be quickly solved.
Why don’t we see more of these local schools in immigrant neighborhoods? One reason is that many immigrants struggle financially when they first come here, so allegedly “free” public schools seem like a better deal than paying tuition to a local private school. However, if we scrapped the public schools, the explosive demand for English-instruction schools would push local entrepreneurs to open such schools. As long as “free” public schools are around, local entrepreneurs have little incentive to risk their money opening private schools.
Tags: diversity, public schools, students
