March/April 2008

Educating Teenage Immigrants

High schools experiment with ways to group new English-language learners

by Lucy Hood

As the nation debates immigration policy, educators in communities across the country are seeking ways to meet the needs of a rapidly changing school-age population. Students born abroad or to immigrant parents now make up the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. student population. In 1970, immigrant youngsters represented 6 percent of the school-age population; by 2010 they are expected to make up 25 percent. About one-quarter of these students have limited English proficiency (see “Children in Immigrant Families,” p. 2), and they are entering school at a time when federal and state standards for judging their success keep rising.

The challenges of educating immigrant learners are particularly acute at the high school level. Experts of all stripes—academics, principals, and classroom teachers—say an immigrant student’s biggest hurdle is becoming proficient enough in academic English to graduate from high school and, ideally, get a college degree. The key obstacle is time. According to New York University professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, it takes five to seven years under optimal conditions for a non-English-speaking student to achieve the academic language skills of his or her native-born peers. Immigrant teens must master high school literature, math, science, and social studies, as well as the English language itself, and states are increasingly requiring that they do it in a four-year period.

To meet the needs of immigrant students, schools across the country have put a wide range of programs in place. While the most common approach is still to put students in ESL classes according to their English-language abilities, many schools are experimenting with different ways of grouping students to accelerate and support their learning. Some are exploring heterogeneous grouping, or mixing students who have varying levels of English proficiency. Others offer a combination of leveled groups, sheltered classes, and differentiated instruction within general education classrooms. From cities like New York and Houston—longstanding destinations for immigrants—to districts like Wake County, N.C., which are experiencing an unprecedented influx of newcomers, educators are seeking ways to incorporate immigrant learners into even their most challenging high school programs.

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Hot Topics and Key Words

Pilot project brings teachers together to tackle middle school literacy

A Conversation with Catherine Snow

Six years ago, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Catherine Snow and then–Boston Public Schools superintendent Thomas Payzant served together on a National Research Council committee that envisioned a new model for education research: Researchers would partner with school districts to identify “problems of practice” and commit to a long-term collaboration to solve them. The committee’s work resulted in the birth of the Strategic Education Research Partnership Institute, or SERP (see “Can Researchers and Educators Really Work Together to Improve Learning?” HEL, November/December 2003). In 2005, SERP established its first field site in the Boston Public Schools, where Snow and a team of colleagues were invited to focus on improving middle school literacy. Snow recently talked with the Harvard Education Letter about the Word Generation program, a vocabulary-building curriculum for middle schoolers that grew out of this collaboration.

With all the progress made in reading, why is adolescent literacy still a problem?

Most of the progress, and 85 percent of the research that’s been done, has been on getting kids to read well by third grade. That research has been enormously valuable and the quality of the instruction that goes on in early elementary classrooms has benefited. But it is a mistake to think that students who read at a third grade level can, without scaffolding and additional instruction, tackle more complex texts. For the majority, the challenges are just too great. If they don’t have strong oral language skills, if they are just managing with the reading but their exposure to oral English is limited, or if they come from homes where they are spending all of their time watching television and none of their time talking to adults and reading books, then they have not developed the capacities that they are going to need for comprehension.

If a student is reading a year below grade level by sixth grade, he’s going to slip farther and farther behind. A student who is three or four years below grade level will get put in special ed. But if he or she is just a little bit below, there’s no safety net for continuing to ramp up. These are the kids who are really in danger. So what you have by entry to high school is a much broader range of skills in a classroom.

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Point of View

The "Quiet" Troubles of Low-Income Children

by Richard Weissbourd

When many Americans think of at-risk, low-income kids, we may imagine young children who are disruptive and aggressive, ricocheting around the classroom. Or we may picture teenagers caught up with drugs or gangs, pregnant girls, or homes where parents are absent or abusive.

These images are powerful, but they badly distort who at-risk children are and what makes them vulnerable. Most of the troubles poor at-risk children have are not “loud” problems like disruptive behavior or gang involvement. They are “quiet.”

I began to better understand the true nature of poor children’s vulnerabilities soon after receiving my doctorate in education. I was working for the Annie E. Casey Foundation on a dropout prevention project, and I was assigned to write portraits of teenagers at risk of dropping out in Little Rock, Ark.

The first child I spoke with was staying home to take care of his mother, who was wiped out by a crushing depression. The second child I met—a lovely, shy eighth grader whose teacher described her as only thinly connected to school—was drifting along the edge of the playground, seemingly untethered to any other child. She soon revealed that this was her fifth school in two years. I met other children who were drifting out of school because they had fallen far behind or were struggling with undiagnosed learning disabilities.

But I remember thinking, “Where’s my at-risk child?” None of these children matched the portrait I thought I had been assigned to write.

Click here to read the full text of "Waking Up to Sleep Deprivation."

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