For immigrants in NYC, going to school was a very different experience in the early 1900s than the early 2000s because of the different requirements and contexts. For example, it’s hard to imagine how it was normal for 3 elementary students had to share a chair in class because of the overcrowded classrooms. In high school, my peers complained when we had to “triple up” on the school bus. Many Russian Jews were overage, but their academic performance was higher than that of the Italian children. It is sad to see how Italian children had to work or stay home to help with housework.
It’s interesting to see that getting a high-school degree was usually needed to have a job that nowadays, college grads fight over; if I was an eighth grader in the twentieth century, I was eligible to apply for a manual job, but now I would need a high-school education for the job. However, in the early 1900s, colleges did not have such a broad variety of programs and educational opportunities as they do now. New York community colleges have special immersion programs that offer remedial classes. For example, it would probably be very difficult for an immigrant to study abroad, but now it’s much easier for one to study abroad (through Macaulay for one).
Contemporary immigrants benefit from educational programs like English as a Second Language Program, Educational Opportunity Program, and bilingual programs that recieve federal funding, which help the immigrant students to transition into learning English, which seems to be more effective that shoving immigrants who have no clue about how to speak English into classes. However, the problems that immigrant children faced in the past still linger today. For example, overcrowding persists because schools have tight budgets, and many immigrants move into the inner-city area. Overage students repeat classes, and the number of high school drop outs are higher in the immigrants than the native English speakers. As a college student considering childhood education as a major, this is a heartbreaker, even though this is not surprising. Maybe I should consider being a bilingual teacher, as the job market in New York City likes bilingual teachers more than regular teachers, even though ESL teachers have the burden of teaching English to students of over ten different languages.
There is only so much money that can help the immigrants to learn; there can only be so many bilingual programs to help immigrants that speak more than a hundred languages.
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I found that the part on the immigrants’s culture affecting how students perform in school resonated within me. The typical Asian parent sends their child to Saturday school, where children learn higher level mathematics and English; education and family are the two most important priorities in Asian culture. Parents move into districts where there are good schools.
Though the contexts in which immigrants learned in the 1900s and 2000s are different, immigrants still encounter the same problems like underfunded schools and racial discrimination.
