I found this NYT article about the segregation of English-speaking students and non-English-speaking students in Hylton High School.
Here’s a link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/15immig.html
What do you think? Is it better to separate the students and give the non-English speakers extra, tailored academic support to help them succeed? Or is it better to mix the students, but risk having some non-English-speaking students flounder?
Quote from the article: ““High schools have to make a pragmatic choice when it comes to these kids,” said Peter B. Bedford, a history teacher who supports the program. “Are you going to focus on educating them, or socially integrating them?””
Even if segregation is not institutionalized in a high school, have any of you observed a de facto segregation of immigrant groups in school? Between English-speakers and non-native-English-speakers?
(This is just the beginning of the article–plenty of food for thought in the rest of the piece. Please share your observations/thoughts on other parts of the article too!)
The arguments presented in this article are very interesting. To reiterate the main points of the article, If you do segregate, you prep high schoolers who don’t know Enligh well more effectively, but you limit integration with people who know English well and they risk not learning the specific English skills more necessary for moving up the social ladder. If you do integrate, people who don’t speak English well will not get good grades. Teachers will also be pressured to reduce the rigor of the class to cater to these students. I feel thatif only some classes were seperated in this way and other not, it could create the best of both worlds. These classes that are segregated should be chosen carefully – they should be basic, core classes which would help the non-English-speaking student’s GPA considerably if they do well in. Advanced electives do not have to be segregated. That way, students can mix. The non-English speaking student can draw on material they learned in the segregated core classes, material they have learned very well, to help them with the advanced electives. Even if they do badly, they won’t do that much worse than an English speaking student, and the low grades would be accredited to the difficulty of the class.
In high school, people tend to form clusters of friends. Some clusters contain people of one ethnicity, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it de-facto segregation, because I feel that each person belongs to many social clusters, many of which aren’t all of the same ethnicity. Since there are many different social groups, I’m not sure if the scenario when one social group happens to have only one particular ethnicity should be called segregation. Many people in that group may belong to other groups that are more diverse.
My hometown has a large hispanic population of around forty percept, which presents the imminent obstacle of having a language barrier with many families. There is an entire department in the high school for ESOL students, as I’m sure many other schools have. These debates are obviously quite tricky, but I think it’s very important to put the student’s educational needs first. The groupings shouldn’t be seen as differentiating by ethnicity, but by taking those who have a common impediment and providing the solution. It is almost inevitable, even if the students in question became fluent, that they would group together simply because of commonalities. I’ve seen that in my high school where spanish-speaking students stick together because they are able to better communicate with each other. If students aren’t able to speak the language efficiently, then how would they even begin to interact socially, let alone academically?
I think that separating non-English speaking students from the rest of the student body has its pros and cons. Obviously, one of the benefits is the prevention of these students from lagging behind in their classes and from getting bad grades. And on the psychological aspect, the students wouldn’t feel as inferior from their peers. However, completely isolating them also affects them negatively. They will develop a mindset that they will never be as good as the English speaking students, and therefore will have no motivation to try to be better. Furthermore, it will also have a long term effect. Because they have given more attention by the faculty, the students will have a more difficult time once they go out to the real world. Isolation will make them more dependent, which they cannot do once they graduate and go to college/do professional work. I think that the school has to find a medium where students will still receive the extra help they need while being part of the larger student body. Perhaps, tutoring sessions should be administered after school as a form of help and social debriefing. The psychological welfare of the student plays as big of a role as his/her education progress, so it is important to know the feelings and attitudes of the student in order to accommodate to their needs.