Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 2 | Educating Immigrant Students page 2

The immigrant wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s took place during the second Industrial Revolution. (The first took place during the late 1700s through the early 1800s.) It occurred as the idea of mass production was taking hold. And it coincided with “the eve of what would become the greatest generation of wealth in the history of humanity,” Suarez-Orozco says. “Immigrants, in a way, got off a boat and into an elevator that was about to move the entire American economy upwards very, very fast.” He adds, “The key to the successful integration of immigrants one hundred years ago was ‘floorshop’ mobility.”

What Suarez-Orozco is alluding to is that immigrants working on the assembly lines—or floor shops—of places like the early Ford Motor Company could, with dedication and hard work, earn a place in the American mainstream. In two or three generations, they could become comfortably middle class. A high school education was not necessary, much less a college education.

But the second Industrial Revolution has come and gone, and Ford is no longer a benchmark of success in today’s economy. Ford, in fact, recently announced that it had lost more money in 2006—$12.7 billion—than ever before in the history of the company. Four days later, the Intel Corporation announced the development of a new, groundbreaking computer processing chip. The dual developments—Ford’s lackluster performance and Intel’s new technology—are representative, Suarez-Orozco suggests, of how drastically things have changed. “The jobs that immigrants are going to have in the future are not going to be the jobs that immigrants were able to use a century ago to generate a state of mobility,” he continues, adding that today, education is the engine for generating economic mobility. Without it, immigrants will not be able to achieve the same middle-class status as the Irish, Italians, Jews and Poles who came before them. In short, says Suarez-Orozco, “We are asking more of education than ever before.”

The Challenge
The Bronx International High School in New York intentionally recruits youngsters who are arguably the most at-risk students in the nation. Virtually all of them are limited-English-proficient; each one had been in the country for four years or less when they were admitted into the school; and upon entry, all of them scored in the bottom quintile of an English language assessment. Ninety percent are economically disadvantaged, and the educational background of each student covers a wide range. They may have several years of schooling in their native language or they may have next to none, and a large percentage of these students tend to be undocumented, which, according to Suarez-Orozco, comes with its own set of fears and uncertainties.

The biggest hurdle for these students, however, is the language barrier. It is, says Suarez-Orozco, the elephant in the room. And the students’ biggest obstacle is time. They must master high school English, math, science and social studies, as well as the English language itself, and they must do it in roughly the same four-year period it takes native English speakers. In many cases, they also work to help support their families, and quite often they are the family translator, serving as the key liaison between their parents and myriad clerks, receptionists, administrators, bureaucrats, etc. “At relatively young ages, they have to navigate the external world for their parents,” says Claire E. Sylvan, executive director and founder of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which provides funding and support for reform efforts in eight New York City high schools.

The American education system is set up to provide a foundation in reading, writing and speaking English in the early grades so that by “the late middle school and high school years we are shoveling content into your head,” says Margie McHugh, co-director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy at the Migration Policy Institute, which has received funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York. “That whole theory, or process, breaks down,” she suggests, “if the kids don’t have English language lit-eracy skills, so we spend a lot of time being mad…and thinking we can do it on the cheap.”

Immigrant children who enter American schools at the elementary level are, by and large, in a good position to do well. “That kid is probably going to be fine, unless they’re in a really rotten school district.” says McHugh. “The bigger issue is the kids who enter the school system in high school.” That problem, replete with the language barrier, cultural acclimation, etc., can also be compounded by systemic pressures to meet graduation and testing standards.

You address the problem, she said, partly through the curriculum, but you also need properly trained teachers, you need additional materials, and you need more time. “Unfortunately,” McHugh said, “we’re practically nowhere on all of those issues.”

The Bronx International High School is an exception. The curriculum is designed to meet the needs of recent immigrants. Students are divided into teams; they stay with the same four teachers for two consecutive years; and much of the learning takes place in small groups, in which the more advanced students help those who lag behind. There are specifically designed approaches for students who enter school with vastly different skills levels, and in addition to a teaching staff of twenty, the school has a language development coach, a literacy coach and a math coach who work with teachers. The teachers themselves participate in professional development programs twice a month.

“I don’t think you could do this with a bare-bones approach,” says Sylvan. “The kids are too much at risk.” The school, which has 315 students, receives $2.3 million a year from the New York City Department of Education. That includes federal funding for economically disadvantaged youth and $115,000 in “empowerment” funds, a program that gives principals greater autonomy and additional funding in exchange for a pledge to meet performance goals. In addition, Bronx International currently receives $31,000 in funding raised by New Visions for Public Schools. And the Internationals Network for Public Schools provides upwards of $50,000 a year for teacher training and assessment.

The kinds of supports that are in place at Bronx International are necessary, Suarez-Orozco says, if the United States hopes to prepare immigrant students for a 21st century economy. “Education for the global era cannot be done on the cheap,” he declares. “The kinds of interventions that seem to be having great success…take a lot of energy and they take a lot of resources. But if you make the investment, you have wonderful results.”

The most telling of those results may be found in a math assignment completed by ninth-grader Michael Valerio, a native of the Dominican Republic who came to the United States three years ago. The assignment included a graphing exercise comparing income with educational attainment. It showed that someone with a master’s degree earned an average of $56,800 annually, and someone with less than a ninth grade education earned an average salary of $13,591 a year. The difference? $43,209.

Next page: The Lopez siblings—Alfredo Lopez, Faviola Lopez Tizcareno, Antonia Martinez and Noe Lopez—were born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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