Immigrant Education—The Program and Policy Landscape
America's experience of immigration should give it a lead in the developed world for several decades to come.... But it is not numbers alone that will give America an advantage. Even more important, the country is culturally attuned to immigration, and long ago learned to integrate immigrants into its society and economy.... The one big obstacle to the full integration of recent immigrants in America is the poor performance of American public schools.
—Peter Drucker
In 1999-2000, California was home to more than 1.4 million students who were classified as English language learners (ELLs).*1 This number represented nearly 40 percent of all public school ELL students in the United States and nearly 25 percent of the total student population in California (Kindler 2002). Currently, about 1 in 10 students in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 across the nation are English language learners, and their numbers have grown dramatically over the past decade, doubling since 1990. Furthermore, in 1999-2000, nearly 200,000 California students were classified as recent immigrants (foreign-born students attending U.S. schools for fewer than three years), corresponding to nearly 25 percent of all recent immigrant students in the United States (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition 2002). And by 2002, there were more than 252,000 recent immigrant students and nearly 1.5 million ELL students in California's public schools. Without a doubt, recent immigrant and ELL students greatly impact California schools.
Not Just California's Problem
California is not the only state facing huge immigrant challenges, however. Nationally, more than three-quarters of recent immigrant students are concentrated in a few states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. Together, these states contain nearly 40 percent of the current total U.S. population. In addition, states like Arizona, Massachusetts, and Colorado have significant immigrant populations relative to their total populations. Thus, educating immigrant students is an issue of national importance with potentially local impact on nearly half of our nation's taxpayers as well as our country's economic competitiveness. Immigrant education, primarily as it relates to debates over language curricula, has become a hot topic—not only in education policy circles, but also in state politics. Following California's lead, for example, Arizona and Massachusetts have passed ballot initiatives restricting the use of "bilingual" education in favor of some version of an "English-only" curriculum.2 Colorado voters, on the other hand, have defeated a similar measure that received much public attention when two opposing millionaires financed rival ad campaigns. In addition, the debate has recently entered federal policymaking through President Bush's education legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act. Therefore, examining California's experience in educating immigrant students is timely because the state has by far the most immigrant students and has for many years been a trendsetter in the most prominent debates about educating these children. As more states face increasing immigrant student populations, and as these states implement many of the school policies first tested in California, the California experience holds significant lessons that we bring to bear on potential strategies in other states and at the federal level.
Like the citizens of other immigrant-rich states, Californians and their state and local governments can do little on their own to affect immigrant flows because relevant policies are set federally.3 Thus, Californians and residents of other states can expect their school systems to be educating significant immigrant and English language learner populations for the foreseeable future. As Peter Drucker comments, immigrants are likely to continue to play an increasingly integral role in the economic success of the United States. And, as Drucker argues, our public schools' poor performance in educating immigrant and ELL students has impeded the kind of positive economic outcomes we might expect as a result of this country's comparative advantage in integrating immigrants into its economic and social life. In other words, the stakes are high.4 States have a strong interest in improving the educational outcomes of their immigrant and ELL students, outcomes for which they are directly responsible. The federal government, too, has a similar interest given the implications for the country as a whole and the fact that immigration policy is by definition federal.
The Focus of Our Study
We recognize the politicized and often value-laden nature of the policy arenas we are entering and seek to frame our study to motivate as many participants as possible—regardless of politics, ethics, or values—around a shared policy goal. Ultimately, the core of the policy issue is not whether immigrant students deserve better from their school system.5 In order to bring advocates of different values together for constructive debate, we begin by raising the specter of the economic costs associated with failing to effectively educate immigrants—although our discussion itself does not focus on the economic impact of immigrant students.6 With the above points in mind, this book explores the following key research questions about education in California:
- How are recent immigrant students distributed across districts and schools, and how does this distribution compare with that of English language learners and California's schoolchildren?
- What are the characteristics of the schools attended by the typical recent immigrant, and how do these schools differ from those attended by the typical student and the typical ELL student?
- How well do schools with high proportions of immigrants perform on standardized tests?
- On average, do these schools have higher or lower levels of resources?
- What challenges do recent immigrant students face, aside from language barriers and learning English at school?
- Which newcomer programs are schools and districts pursuing? Which broader policies affect recent immigrant students and in what ways do these policies affect these students?
- What educational choices are available to schools and parents, and how are these choices made?
- What are the implications of the California experience for other states, as well as for federal education policy?
This book paints a statistical portrait of English language learners and recent immigrant students in five large urban districts in California—Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. We also highlight the key issues immigrant students face as they pursue success in California's schools, as well as the concerns confronting educators and school and district staff charged with educating these students. In addition, we draw lessons learned for other states with significant immigrant populations. In doing so, we attempt to disentangle the reality of being an immigrant student (especially a recent immigrant) from that of being a student in need of language assistance. Naturally, the two concepts go hand in hand, and we do address both. However, we argue that the discussion about educating immigrants has been dominated by the debate over educating ELL students.
The Bigger Picture
The policy debate that has most dominated this arena is, of course, that spawned by the implementation of Proposition 227, a ballot initiative overwhelmingly passed in 1998 that requires ELL students to be placed in structured English immersion (SEI) classrooms unless parents choose to waiver out of SEI and into some form of "bilingual" education. We seek to broaden this debate. Simply put, even if a lot of recent immigrant students are ELLs, there is something to be gained by thinking more broadly about the students' immigrant experience beyond their efforts to learn English (and the schools' efforts to teach them English). It is important to state that we do not attempt to evaluate or by any means settle the debate concerning "English only" versus "bilingual" instruction. In fact, we attempt to remain neutral about it. Rather, we seek to shed light on key aspects of the discussion while also highlighting other issues that have been largely ignored because of the debate.
Most states, including California, have no coherent education policy strategy for immigrants, particularly new immigrants, and the same can be said for the federal government. Current policies impacting immigrants, such as English as a Second Language (ESL), are aimed at ELL students and are directed almost exclusively toward teaching them English. While this strategy addresses one critical issue relevant to immigrants and education, it may be too narrowly focused to optimize the myriad strategies for organizing and supporting schools and teaching new immigrants, other ELL students, and mainstream students. In California, the differences even between the raw numbers of recent immigrant students and ELL students are striking. More than 300 school districts educated enough recent immigrants in 1999-2000 to qualify for federal funds through the Emergency Immigration Education Program (EIEP), the only federal program that targets monies based on the number of immigrant students rather than the number of English language learners. In these EIEP districts, 32.2 percent of the students were classified as English language learners, while 4.8 percent were recent immigrants (table 1.1).
English language learner students who are not recent immigrants fall into two basic categories: (1) immigrant students who have been in the school system more than three years and are still classified as ELL, and (2) ELL students who are not immigrants (e.g., children of immigrants or Puerto Ricans). Both categories imply worrisome outcomes because they indicate that such students may not be served well by their schools.7 This study also sheds light on the challenges of educating ELL students who are not recent immigrants.
Disentangling the different issues for recent immigrants and ELL students is important because each group's challenges are different.8 Recent experiences with newcomer programs (primarily in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Illinois), which focus on serving recent immigrants exclusively, highlight these distinct challenges.9 In addition, Rivera-Batiz (1995) and Schwartz and Gershberg (2000, 2001) found that the impact of a high proportion of recent immigrants on a school could be the opposite of the impact of a high proportion of ELL students.10 For instance, all else equal, students in New York City schools with high concentrations of recent immigrants scored higher on standardized tests, while students in New York City schools with high concentrations of ELLs scored lower. These findings are consistent with theories that immigrants are more driven to succeed than many of their native-born counterparts (Ogbu 1991). Once we account for the difference in language ability, recent immigrants are in higher-than-average-scoring schools.
A Unique Look
Most academic studies of immigrants and education have been ethnographic.11 Although such studies reveal a wealth of information essential for understanding how immigrant children learn and interact with native-born children, the lessons are difficult to generalize. Furthermore, quantitative analytic work to date has often used data aggregated at the district or state level, a limitation that renders such analyses indicative of certain trends but also difficult to generalize. School-level quantitative studies have focused almost exclusively on English language learners and issues of bilingual education. This study fills a critical gap through its marrying of quantitative and qualitative work, presenting a picture of the key policy issues in California for educating new immigrants, ELL students, and the mainstream students who, increasingly, learn beside them. We concentrate on elementary and, to some extent, middle schools because these are likely the school levels at which the stakes are highest in terms of lifetime outcomes and at which the school system is most likely to be able to impact students' futures.12 Elementary school is also where, for better or for worse, the majority of the resources for language assistance and other immigrant education programs are concentrated (Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix 2000). We concentrate on recent immigrants because the first years after arrival are critical for this group. As the immigrant scholar Carola Suárez-Orozco notes: "There are energies we could harness as a society, but we're not. Kids come in with energy and quickly lose hope."13
The Outline of Our Study
The remainder of this chapter surveys briefly the major policy debates relevant to recent immigrant and ELL students in California.14 Chapter 2 provides a statistical portrait of these immigrant and ELL students. We examine and categorize the kinds of schools that typical ELL students attend and compare these with typical schools attended by recent immigrant and native-born students. We also measure segregation of recent immigrant and ELL students compared with other segregated student populations. In chapter 3, we perform statistical analyses to examine further the patterns and distribution of school resources and outcomes for schools attended by recent immigrant, ELL, and other students. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 rely on a qualitative study involving more than a hundred open-ended interviews with district- and school-level staff in California's five largest school districts. We offer insights relating to the impressions of key stakeholders in the education system—often through their own words. Chapter 4 examines the major challenges (in addition to learning English) faced by recent immigrant students. We describe what teachers, schools, and districts are doing both formally and informally to serve recent immigrants—so-called newcomer programs, policies, and practices. We discuss how these approaches both relate to and differ from programs that serve ELL and native-born disadvantaged students. The particular challenges to parental involvement and other important school governance issues related to recent immigrants are also highlighted. Chapter 5 concentrates on the challenge of teaching English to recent immigrant and ELL students. It focuses primarily on the controversial choice between "bilingual" and "English only" education, and the views educators and other stakeholders have regarding how the choice is made for each student. Chapter 6 examines and analyzes California's assessment and accountability systems, concentrating on the implications for recent immigrants and the schools that teach them. Finally, chapter 7 concludes the book with policy recommendations and directions for future research.
Policy Debates around Recent Immigrant and ELL Students in California
An enormous amount has been written about the debate over "bilingual" versus "English only" education, much of it specifically in response to Proposition 227.15 The California Department of Education (CDE) is in fact performing its own evaluation of the proposition's effects (Parrish 2001). The debate over the passage of Proposition 227 has evolved now into various debates over its implementation. For instance, Ron Unz—the author of Proposition 227—has claimed the initiative led to huge successes for ELL students and recently clashed publicly with the State Board of Education (SBE) over changes in rules governing the waiver process and the requirement that children annually receive 30 days of "English-only" instruction.16 (We discuss both these issues in chapter 5.) In addition, Unz has spread the debate nationally through ballot initiatives in at least three more states, eyeing as well such bastions of "bilingual" education as New York and Texas. On the other side of the debate, García and Curry-Rodríguez (2000) assert that Proposition 227 did not produce a "'sea of change' in programmatic efforts ... [or] achievement gains."17 The issue was also prominent in both the debate over and the final version of President Bush's education bill of 2002, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. For example, according to bill sponsor Congressman John Boehner, bilingual education is "one of the components [of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act] that is most badly in need of reform."18
Unfortunately, far less has been written about other issues related to the schooling success and failure of immigrant students. To deal effectively with the issue of immigrant education, these policy debates must be broadened beyond the question of bilingual education. In fact, NCLB consolidates the Bilingual Education Act and the EIEP and changes the criteria for funding districts. Though it is too soon to determine the full consequences this change will have at the state and district levels, the initial signs are worrisome for the one federal program that targets immigrant but not ELL students.19 NCLB requires states to comply with the legislation by channeling monies to districts with high levels of growth in recent immigrants. The implication is that districts with large but steady numbers of recent immigrant students (like San Diego, Long Beach, and San Francisco) have fewer relevant needs than those with small but growing numbers, and remarkably many districts with larger immigrant populations now do not qualify for federal funding for immigrant education. California has experienced perhaps the starkest change resulting from NCLB. In the year following NCLB's enactment, the count of recent immigrants qualifying for funding dropped from 205,540 to just below 133,000, and the funding per pupil plunged from $153 to $67. This policy change, buried deep in the NCLB legislation, certainly raises some questions.20 In particular, districts that have implemented EIEP-funded programs to address issues arising largely from federal immigration policy must now find ways to fund the programs with state or local monies, or cut them.
More Research Needed
Nearly a decade has passed since a RAND study helped put the so-called newcomer issue on the research landscape. That study found:
The most notable characteristic of immigrant education policy at the state level is its total absence, aside from programs for [ELL] students. Across the six states we studied, there are no policies specifically targeted to students on the basis of their immigrant status. Rather, state policy focuses on students with limited English-language skills, whether they be immigrants or native born (McDonnell and Hill 1993, 24).
Little additional scholarly research exists that informs either the debate or the policy changes at the state or federal level. A few reports and organizations provide some heartening exceptions, but policymakers and the media have failed to pick up on their findings. California Tomorrow, an advocacy organization, has written extensively about the newcomer experience and issues (especially in high schools); however, despite the organization's efforts, the concept is nearly invisible in the policy landscape of California or most other states, and may indeed be disappearing.21 California Tomorrow has argued that educators must consider the broad experience that newcomer students face in becoming a part of the U.S. educational system:
The law focuses on language as the barrier to immigrant student achievement, but in the lives of students, language is just one part of the gap they must leap in trying to bridge cultures and nations. And learning the language is just a small part of what goes on for immigrant students in negotiating their place in school (Olsen and Jaramillo 1999, 204).
Challenges beyond Language
The Urban Institute has issued several reports dealing with immigrant students in a much broader context than their language ability, in particular Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix's (2000) "Overlooked and Underserved: Immigrant Students in U.S. Secondary Schools."22 And in "Immigrant Children and Their Families: Issues for Research and Policy," the Board on Children and Families (of the National Research Council) declared that "immigrant children have been rendered largely invisible in policy spheres" (BCF 1995, 72). The Board stressed both the "value of looking at immigrant children in the context of their families" and the "need for policymakers to address such policy issues as education and health care." The report asked several questions that provide an important backdrop for our study:
The pressing practical issue, then, is not whether policies and programs for immigrant students exist, but to what extent appropriate policies for immigrant children and existing policies (such as those for [ELLs]) overlap, and whether special policies and programs are needed for immigrant children. Among the crucial questions: Are there social services that schools might provide or coordinate which would benefit recent arrivals? Do immigrant students need educational services different from those provided to [ELL] students? What might those services be and how should they be integrated into the educational system? (BCF 1995, 80; emphasis added).
The Board noted the "paucity of research on immigrant children" and appealed for research on immigrant children to "throw light on the issues affecting these populations, removing them from obscurity and validating their experiences" (83). We seek to answer this call using the Board's "crucial questions" as a springboard.23
Thus, in chapter 4, we determine what educators perceive to be the biggest challenges recent immigrant students face, aside from learning the language. Some of these challenges relate to the socioeconomic condition of these families—poverty, minimal prior schooling, inadequate and costly housing, and family separation. Many of these difficulties, however, relate to issues at the school and school-district level—stigmatization of immigrant and ELL students, difficulties fostering parental participation, legal and immigration-related issues, and immigrants' difficulties in navigating the school system and accessing adequate health care and other social services. We focus on these issues because schools and school districts can do and are doing something about them. For instance, we document in chapter 4 the extent to which schools serve as "connections brokers," linking immigrants to a wide range of social services (e.g., health care). We examine a few government programs organized to facilitate this role and mitigate the challenges; for the most part, however, schools do this without explicit support.
The "Long-Term ELL Problem"
Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000) focus on high school students and highlight the challenges associated with two subpopulations: adolescent youth with significant gaps in their schooling upon arrival in the United States, and long-term ELLs.24 Our study echoes these themes and, in fact, some of our empirical results support their idea that our schools (and, thus, our society) have more of a "long-term ELL problem" than an "immigrant problem" (as is so often stated in the popular media). Part of the solution to that "problem" may lie in more nuanced approaches beyond, or in addition to, simply providing language assistance for recent immigrants who arrive in elementary and (to some extent) middle school. Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix provide ample insight into the practices (realized and unrealized) that support long-term English language learners once they are in secondary school. However, these authors offer little evidence as to the factors that produce long-term ELLs, particularly those factors that relate to the education and other services these students receive upon entering the school system, often as recent immigrants, and often in elementary school.25 School officials and Californians in general who want to reduce the number of long-term ELL students should be concerned with understanding the nature of the three "sources" of these students: (1) recent immigrants, (2) nonrecent immigrants, and (3) nonimmigrant ELL students.26 While our quantitative work does not provide any immediate answers to this obviously important and difficult problem, it does, along with our qualitative work, provide insight—especially into the first group—that should prove beneficial to current policymakers and in future research.
Newcomer Programs
As mentioned earlier, there are few explicit newcomer policies and programs in elementary and middle schools. Los Angeles and, to a much lesser extent, San Francisco have small programs. Like newcomer schools in New York City—which focus on serving recent immigrants—these California schools and programs appear to have arisen as local, isolated, almost organic responses to dire need (especially overcrowding), not from any sort of organized district, state, or federal policy or funding initiative to better educate recent immigrants.27 To a large extent, public fears over segregation and isolation of newcomer students have quashed any potential experimentation with newcomer schools and programs, and such programs appear to be waning in California. Many educators in our study, especially those in San Francisco, had high praise for newcomer schools in their districts. Others, however, expressed grave concern. Thus far, neither the policy analytic nor the policymaking communities have shed any light that would help build or support consensus one way or the other. Throughout this study, we also seek to highlight state and district programs that appear to positively affect the educational experience of immigrant students, even if many of these programs do not explicitly target these students. Examples include home-school liaisons, the Healthy Start Initiative,28 and other health-related programs.
Whether or not districts or states choose to encourage even limited experimentation with newcomer policies and programs, newcomer policy is happening every day in every school and classroom with significant populations of recent immigrants. As we explore in chapters 4 and 5, teachers and other staff in such schools and classrooms are making daily decisions that amount to de facto newcomer policies and practices. Examples range from placing all recent immigrants in the same class (creating an unofficial "newcomer" class) to partnering recent immigrants with experienced students who tutor, translate, and even comment upon their work. We argue in this book that state departments of education, along with the most immigrant-rich districts, should examine seriously and likely support experimentation with the range of potential strategies and classroom practices we only touch upon here.
Facing the Challenge
Immigrants face many challenges to achieving educational success. And, as participants in this study reveal, immigrant students present many challenges to California's schools. These challenges (particularly the challenge of teaching English) have been the primary focus of the policymaking and political rhetoric relating to immigrant students. Such rhetoric is unlikely to cool down without considerable effort. For instance, Putnam (2002) shows that in the months since the terrorist attacks of September 11, U.S. citizens have become more tolerant and more accepting of diversity, and show signs of increasing social capital in all of the wide range of measures he examines except one: the country has become markedly more hostile toward immigrants. At the same time, recent immigrant students present also enormous and important opportunities—opportunities the United States and California can ill afford to squander. At stake are not only their own citizens' economic well-being (both native and foreign born), but also the progressive social fabric upon which Peter Drucker (2001) argues the new "knowledge society" will be built in the near future. In order to reap the benefits of the opportunities provided by immigrant students, states and the federal government need to foster educational environments that help overcome the challenges facing recent immigrants. Drucker argues that, in general, the United States is "culturally attuned to immigration" compared with other developed nations, and that this fact is a key aspect of the nation's comparative advantage in the world economy. We argue, following Drucker, that the education of immigrants in California is not as effective as it must be and that this obstacle is in part created by a school system that does not appear adequately attuned to recent immigrants, culturally or otherwise. The same could be said for other states across the country. Teaching language is only one important aspect of educating immigrants effectively.
NOTES
The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from "Survey: The Near Future," The Economist, November 2, 2001.
* Students for whom English is a second language and who are not completely proficient in English (as determined by an assessment system) are often referred to as LEP (limited English proficient), ELLs (English language learners), and ELs (English learners). We generally use "ELL" throughout this book to reflect the most current usage in other related research studies.
1. Note that these data exclude Puerto Rico and other outlying jurisdictions from English language learner counts. Including Puerto Rico, California had 25 percent of all the ELL students in the nation.
2. We employ the term "bilingual" education to refer to any course of instruction in which the teacher is permitted to use a language other than English to a significant degree in the classroom, and in which non-English instructional materials will often be used. We often put quotation marks around "bilingual" because we believe that true bilingual education has fluency and full proficiency in both languages as its ultimate goal. While some programs still state this to be the case, most do not appear in fact to do so; however, the term "bilingual" education is still widely used. (For additional discussion, see Rossell [2000a, b].) A similar argument could be made about the term English only. In fact, we believe our study makes clear that the dichotomous nature of the political and policy debates does not reflect actual teaching practices and students' needs in real and diverse classroom learning environments.
3. Some may argue that states that deny or lower the quality of social services to immigrants will decrease immigrant flows. See Borjas (2001), chapter 6, for a review. However, recent studies by Kaestner and Kaushal (2001) and Kaushal (2002) show that new immigrants' location decisions are unaffected by the accessibility of means-tested programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid. Immigrants locate primarily based on historical patterns of family and social networks. These studies also indicate that immigrants do not need a bigger incentive than do the native born to become economically self-sufficient. The belief that immigrants need a bigger incentive to become economically self-sufficient led to welfare reform, in part to exclude immigrants from benefits.
4. Economic analysts such as George Borjas (2001) and Jasso, Rosenzweig, and Smith (1998) have argued that immigrants' education and skill levels have declined steadily over the past three decades, as has their potential economic productivity. Cornelius and Marcelli (2000) argue that recent immigrants to California from Mexico have, by some measures, higher educational attainment than earlier cohorts. They show that the average number of years of schooling has risen for certain key groups of Mexican immigrants. If, however, the quality of their education is low, or their educational attainment relative to U.S. native-born students has fallen, then Borjas's implications still hold. Previous work at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) (Cheng 2001) hints at some of the disparities in school readiness among ethnic and immigrant groups. In a sense, however, it does not matter who is "right" here; if schools are performing poorly in educating immigrant children, then policy alternatives focusing on these children can potentially improve this performance.
5. Our personal values would lead us in that direction, however.
6. In this sense, we can agree with Borjas (2001, 188) when he argues that although "moral issues may influence the direction and tone of the immigration debate, as well as determine the likelihood that some policies are adopted or rejected, it is still valuable to describe the ... policy that the United States would pursue if it wanted to maximize the economic well-being of its native population." There is relevance here for immigrant education policy in California.
7. However, Hakuta, Butler, and Witt (2000) summarize well the prevailing consensus in the education literature that even successful English learners likely take four to seven years to achieve proficiency. This conclusion indicates that the federal definition for recent immigrant students (foreign-born students attending U.S. schools for fewer than three years) is not adequate if the goal is to support students until they achieve proficiency. Nevertheless, even if all recent immigrants were English learners (an assumption we do not make), more than 27 percent of ELL students either immigrated more than three years ago or were never immigrants. This number seems large enough despite the inapplicability of the three-year definition to raise concern over the effectiveness of the state's system for educating recent immigrant and ELL students.
8. We discern, a priori, four main reasons why immigrants have an effect on schools: (1) immigrants' limited English proficiency; (2) immigrants' varying levels of academic preparation; (3) the stressors of expected acculturation immigrants face; and (4) overcrowding of individual schools with already scarce resources. This project's qualitative work, in particular, will shed light on the non-ELL issues mentioned here and the potential policy responses.
9. See Gershberg (2000) and Avila (2002).
10. That is, they found that regression coefficients for "recent immigrants" and "ELL students" had opposite signs in models of either test scores or school-level resources. See Rivera-Batiz (1995) and Schwartz and Gershberg (2000, 2001).
11. See, for instance, Valenzuela (1999). Rivera-Batiz (1995) also summarizes nicely the extensive ethnographic and anthropological research to date that is relevant in explaining these potential outcomes. In short, Ogbu (1982, 1991), Ogbu and Simons (1998), and Suárez-Orozco (1991) have all argued that immigrants appear to be more motivated to succeed than native-born students of similar background. In addition, these experts argue that immigrants, particularly members of racial minority groups in the United States, perceive and overcome social obstacles in ways that are more beneficial to their schooling success. Kao and Tienda (1995) and Vernez and Abrahamse (1996) provide some quantitative support for these qualitative arguments.
12. In addition, Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000) look at similar issues, concentrating exclusively on secondary school students, and derive considerable insight from schools and districts in California.
13. Cited in Zehr (2001). Also, recent work by the New York City Board of Education (2000) found that the academic success of ELL students—measured primarily by their exit from ESL/bilingual programs—depends critically upon the grade at which they enter the New York City public schools. Those entering in elementary school, especially kindergarten and first grade, do the best, followed by those entering in high school. But more than a third of elementary school ELL students did not exit by the target date. The implication is that the immigrant experience and the needs of immigrants differ significantly between elementary, middle, and high school.
14. In addition, appendix A summarizes the state-level programs and policies in place to support these students.
15. The volume of literature on this topic is large, and even summarizing it is beyond the scope of this study. Readers interested in work supporting the abolishment of "bilingual" education could start with Rossell (2000a, b), Rossell and Baker (1996), and Santosuosso (1999). Readers interested in work supporting "bilingual" education could begin with August and Hakuta (1997), de Cos (1999), Johnson and Martinez (2000), and Crawford (1997). Two works that appear to be impartial and relatively neutral evaluations are Greene (1998) and Lopez (2000). Parrish (2001) also provides a nice summary of the research findings to date on instructional programs for ELLs. The underlying pedagogical theory upon which much of the push for bilingual education is based can be found in Cummins (1981, 1986, and 1994), Krashen (1994), and Leyba (1994).
16. Mendel (2002). See also California Department of Education (2002b).
17. See the special issue edited by Eugene E. García (2000) for a series of articles from this camp.
18. See Boehner (2001); this document contains a summary of NCLB's changes to bilingual education.
19. "At the current appropriation level, the Emergency Immigrant Education program is not authorized. That program and the bilingual education program previously authorized by Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act were replaced by a new state formula program. Eighty percent of state allocations [are] based on the number of limited English proficient students in the state and 20 percent [are] based on the number of immigrant students. States use these funds for services to limited English proficient students, whether or not they are immigrants. However, states may reserve up to 15 percent of their allocation for special grants to school districts that 'have experienced a significant increase, as compared to the average of the two preceding fiscal years, in the age or number of immigrant children and youth.' The No Child Left Behind Act holds states and school districts accountable for teaching limited English proficient students English and holding them to the same high academic standards as all other students." E-mail message from Ki Lee, U.S. Department of Education, to Alec Gershberg, February 13, 2002.
20. Other aspects of NCLB, not addressed in this study, also impact recent immigrant students (e.g., the testing NCLB requires). Note also that much of the fieldwork and research for this study took place before NCLB was implemented, so we continue to refer to the EIEP and do not analyze the impact of the dramatic changes resulting from NCLB. These data are taken from California Department of Education ("Immigrant Student Demographics").
21. See Olsen (1997); Olsen and Chen (1988); Olsen and Dowell (1989); Olsen and Jaramillo (1999); and Olsen et al. (1994, 1999) for the most relevant work by California Tomorrow. Much of California Tomorrow's work over the past 15 years has focused on immigrant students and their right to a quality public education. The organization has promoted active school-level counseling and support focused on the transitional phase of immigration and the special concerns and problems facing immigrant children. California Tomorrow advocates that this support be designed to foster the development of a positive self-concept incorporating the binational, bicultural, and bilingual experiences of the foreign-born child.
22. See also Fix, Zimmermann, and Passel (2001) for a broader context than immigrant children and their schools.
23. Of course, some education scholars have highlighted "an overemphasis on language of instruction," which in turn overshadows "other issues critical to the education of language minority students" (Schirling, Contreras, and Ayala 2000). However, their arguments have focused largely on pedagogical issues in the classroom rather than on broader policy issues for districts and school, and they also emphasize the ELL aspect of students over the recent immigrant aspect of students.
24. Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix (2000) cite a northern California district where "over 42 percent of the districts' secondary [ELL] students are still classified [ELL] after six or more years in U.S. schools," even though most of these students are "orally proficient" (47). They use the term "long-term LEP."
25. They say language development in secondary schools is not happening in content areas and that school staff members do not know how to work with ELLs. These insights, while potentially important, concentrate on language issues.
26. This last group comprises mostly children of immigrants and Puerto Ricans.
27. Illinois has recently experienced a more organized push for newcomer schools and centers, supported by the nonprofit Center for Applied Linguistics (Avila 2002). See also Schnur (1999).
28. The Healthy Start Initiative was created to improve the lives of children, youth, and families by placing comprehensive school-linked services at or near schools.
Beyond "Bilingual" Education, by Alec Ian Gershberg, Anne Danenberg, and Patricia Sánchez, is available from the Urban Institute Press (paper, 6" x 9", 256 pages, ISBN 0-87766-723-3, $29.50).
