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 sidebar "Children in Immigrant Families"), Close SidebarChildren in Immigrant Families
A recent report based on data from the 2000 U.S. Census draws the following portrait of children of immigrant families (defined as those with a least one foreign-born parent):
* 20 percent of all children in the United States belong to immigrant families. The proportion of newcomer children falls below 5 percent in only 11 states
* Two-thirds of children in immigrant families have parents who have lived here 10 years or more
* Four in five children in immigrant families are U.S. citizens (born in the United States)
* Three out of four children in immigrant families are fluent in English
Close SidebarSource: Children in America’s Newcomer Families (2007 Research Brief Series). Child Trends and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, SUNY. 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.
Learning from Each Other
Bronx International, New York City
Bronx International High School is part of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which has nine small schools in New York City and one in Oakland, Calif. Opened in 2001, Bronx International High School is a small public school with 341 students. Nearly 74 percent are Hispanic, almost 20 percent are black, and 2 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander. The school accepts only teens who have been in the country for four years or less and who scored in the bottom quintile on an English-language assessment. Still, the school’s overall graduation rate surpasses the city average, and in its six-year history, the college attendance rate has fluctuated between 88 and 99 percent.
Internationals Network director Claire Sylvan credits the school’s achievement to two strategies. One is a refusal to separate students into leveled groups according to their language ability. The other is a heavy dose of professional training, particularly in the area of language development.
Students and teachers at Bronx International are divided into teams of 60 to 80 students. Students in the ninth and tenth grades stay with the same four teachers for two years; eleventh and twelfth graders have their own teams. Within each team, students have varying degrees of English-language proficiency, and in each of their classes, teachers often separate students into groups so they can learn from each other. One common approach is to group students according to their native language, so that those who have more advanced English-language skills can help those with more limited skills. The setup requires teachers to gear their instruction toward students with a wide range of English-language abilities.
Done properly, heterogeneous classes filled with English learners at different levels of proficiency can be effective, says Aida Walqui, director of the Teacher Professional Development Program at WestEd, a California-based nonprofit. Students end up learning a great deal from each other and, according to Walqui, it’s a much more natural approach to learning language. “A mother uses language in much more accomplished ways than a child does,” she says. “That kind of interaction between someone who knows more and [someone who] knows less is essential for language development.”
Professional development at Bronx International takes place to a great extent on the job. The teaching teams, for example, typically meet once or twice a week to design their curriculum and discuss students. They also observe each other and periodically present portfolios of their work to their colleagues, just as their students do. “The team is a place where you struggle through the complex questions of providing highly rigorous academic curriculum to a diverse group of students in a practical way,” says Sylvan. In addition, the school has two full-time literacy coaches and four other part-time coaches to work with staff and students. To support this work, the school has received funding over the years from nonprofit groups including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Internationals Network for Public Schools, and the Institute for Student Achievement.
A recent report based on data from the 2000 U.S. Census draws the following portrait of children of immigrant families (defined as those with a least one foreign-born parent):
* 20 percent of all children in the United States belong to immigrant families. The proportion of newcomer children falls below 5 percent in only 11 states
* Two-thirds of children in immigrant families have parents who have lived here 10 years or more
* Four in five children in immigrant families are U.S. citizens (born in the United States)
* Three out of four children in immigrant families are fluent in English
Close SidebarSource: Children in America’s Newcomer Families (2007 Research Brief Series). Child Trends and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, SUNY. 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.
Learning from Each Other
Bronx International, New York City
Bronx International High School is part of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which has nine small schools in New York City and one in Oakland, Calif. Opened in 2001, Bronx International High School is a small public school with 341 students. Nearly 74 percent are Hispanic, almost 20 percent are black, and 2 percent are Asian or Pacific Islander. The school accepts only teens who have been in the country for four years or less and who scored in the bottom quintile on an English-language assessment. Still, the school’s overall graduation rate surpasses the city average, and in its six-year history, the college attendance rate has fluctuated between 88 and 99 percent.
Internationals Network director Claire Sylvan credits the school’s achievement to two strategies. One is a refusal to separate students into leveled groups according to their language ability. The other is a heavy dose of professional training, particularly in the area of language development.
Students and teachers at Bronx International are divided into teams of 60 to 80 students. Students in the ninth and tenth grades stay with the same four teachers for two years; eleventh and twelfth graders have their own teams. Within each team, students have varying degrees of English-language proficiency, and in each of their classes, teachers often separate students into groups so they can learn from each other. One common approach is to group students according to their native language, so that those who have more advanced English-language skills can help those with more limited skills. The setup requires teachers to gear their instruction toward students with a wide range of English-language abilities.
Done properly, heterogeneous classes filled with English learners at different levels of proficiency can be effective, says Aida Walqui, director of the Teacher Professional Development Program at WestEd, a California-based nonprofit. Students end up learning a great deal from each other and, according to Walqui, it’s a much more natural approach to learning language. “A mother uses language in much more accomplished ways than a child does,” she says. “That kind of interaction between someone who knows more and [someone who] knows less is essential for language development.”
Professional development at Bronx International takes place to a great extent on the job. The teaching teams, for example, typically meet once or twice a week to design their curriculum and discuss students. They also observe each other and periodically present portfolios of their work to their colleagues, just as their students do. “The team is a place where you struggle through the complex questions of providing highly rigorous academic curriculum to a diverse group of students in a practical way,” says Sylvan. In addition, the school has two full-time literacy coaches and four other part-time coaches to work with staff and students. To support this work, the school has received funding over the years from nonprofit groups including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Internationals Network for Public Schools, and the Institute for Student Achievement.
Creating a Sense of “Oneness”
Lee High School, Houston, Texas
At a glance, Lee High School in Houston is a very different place from Bronx International. It’s a large, comprehensive high school with close to 2,000 students located in what once was a thriving area of the city. More than 50 percent of its students were born outside the United States, but only 20 percent have been in the United States for three years or less.
Nine years ago, the Houston Independent School District appointed principal Steve Amstutz to revamp Lee High School. He initially divided the school into 10 small learning communities, but later reduced the number to seven, which now serve 250 to 300 students each. One of them, the English Language Institute, is designed as a point of entry for students with little or no English. The other six communities are organized according to themes, such as law and justice, the performing arts, and business.
Most newly arrived students spend their first year in the English Language Institute, where they take English classes for half the day and content-area classes for the other half. In the other six communities, English-language learners are integrated into heterogeneous classrooms along with fluent English speakers for math, science, social studies, electives, etc. For English, they are grouped separately from fluent speakers, but in heterogeneous groups by grade level. The content taught is the same as in classes throughout the Houston Independent School District, but teachers use multiple strategies to target the varied English-language skill levels in their classrooms. English teacher Kim Grunder, for example, has different lesson plans for those at the intermediate, advanced, and transitional (highest) levels.
“I spend a lot of my time modifying and deciding how to best group students,” says Grunder. “I need to consider grouping for everything that we do. It turns into a lot of planning, but if I do that planning on the front end, the students really are better because of it.” In a reading comprehension assignment, for example, she would initially group the students homogeneously according to their skill level. This way they must depend on their own understanding to complete the task, she says. “Following this work, I would regroup the students heterogeneously so that students from mixed levels are able to share the finished product, evaluate one another’s work, and receive feedback from a peer,” says Grunder.
Heterogeneous grouping helps build a classroom culture and fosters positive interdependence, she says. With students from diverse countries such as El Salvador, Angola, Somalia, Brazil, India, Russia, and Pakistan, she notes, “I need to work to create a sense of ‘oneness’ within the classroom.”
In gauging the school’s success, Amstutz says he tries to stay focused on three major “pulse points”—credit accumulation, student improvement on the statewide standardized test, and graduation rates. In the nine years since Amstutz took over, student performance on the statewide test has improved. Graduation rates, however, have proved more difficult. Initially, graduation rates went up, then they held steady, then last year when the state decided to go from a five-year to a four-year graduation rate, he says, “we took a hit.” The time constraints, he notes, are problematic for the school, and he’s adamant that immigrant students at the high school level need more than four years to reach the same academic proficiency that it takes native-born students 12 years to achieve (see sidebar "Creating More Time for Immigrant Students"). Close SidebarCreating More Time for Immigrant Students
From the beginning of his tenure as principal of Lee High School in Houston, Tex., Steve Amstutz saw time as an enemy when it came to educating immigrant students. Many older teens felt uncomfortable in classrooms with students who were only 14 or 15. Others dropped out of school to find a job to make money. By law, students who turned 21 before September 1 could no longer continue to come to class.
In response, Amstutz helped create a charter school aimed at older immigrants, called Liberty High School, which offers flexible scheduling, including evening and Saturday classes. He also took part in discussions that ultimately led to two new state laws that, beginning late last year, will give all students, including immigrants, more flexibility to attend school and more time to finish. One law allows for the creation of programs that do not require students to attend school five days a week. Instead they can go to school year-round, attend three days a week, and still meet the state’s 180-day requirement. The other gives local school boards the option of accepting students up through age 26.
“Our hope and belief is that we can hang on to students who would otherwise drop out,” says Amstutz. Even though the state of Texas still considers every student who does not graduate high school in four years a “dropout,” he notes, “we’ll know they are still in school and working toward their diploma. We’ll know that we will have done the right thing for students, their families, and our community.”
A Work in Progress
Broughton High School, Wake County, N.C.
Between 1990 and 2005, North Carolina’s largely Hispanic immigrant population grew by 400 percent. Although the Wake County, N.C., public school system does not count students according to their immigrant status, nearly 14,000 of its 134,000 students are considered limited English proficient (LEP) and close to 7,000 are enrolled in ESL classes. All but one of the county’s 150-plus schools have ESL classes.
One of these schools is Broughton High School, an International Baccalaureate (IB) magnet school that has a dual-enrollment policy. It caters to neighborhood students as well as those outside its attendance zone who apply to the IB program. Located near N.C. State University and downtown Raleigh, Broughton draws a more diverse group of immigrant students than many of the other Wake County high schools. The 73 ESL students there represent 20 countries—including Mexico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Thailand, Burundi, Somalia, and Iraq—and make up a little over 3 percent of the total student population.
Lee High School, Houston, Texas
At a glance, Lee High School in Houston is a very different place from Bronx International. It’s a large, comprehensive high school with close to 2,000 students located in what once was a thriving area of the city. More than 50 percent of its students were born outside the United States, but only 20 percent have been in the United States for three years or less.
Nine years ago, the Houston Independent School District appointed principal Steve Amstutz to revamp Lee High School. He initially divided the school into 10 small learning communities, but later reduced the number to seven, which now serve 250 to 300 students each. One of them, the English Language Institute, is designed as a point of entry for students with little or no English. The other six communities are organized according to themes, such as law and justice, the performing arts, and business.
Most newly arrived students spend their first year in the English Language Institute, where they take English classes for half the day and content-area classes for the other half. In the other six communities, English-language learners are integrated into heterogeneous classrooms along with fluent English speakers for math, science, social studies, electives, etc. For English, they are grouped separately from fluent speakers, but in heterogeneous groups by grade level. The content taught is the same as in classes throughout the Houston Independent School District, but teachers use multiple strategies to target the varied English-language skill levels in their classrooms. English teacher Kim Grunder, for example, has different lesson plans for those at the intermediate, advanced, and transitional (highest) levels.
“I spend a lot of my time modifying and deciding how to best group students,” says Grunder. “I need to consider grouping for everything that we do. It turns into a lot of planning, but if I do that planning on the front end, the students really are better because of it.” In a reading comprehension assignment, for example, she would initially group the students homogeneously according to their skill level. This way they must depend on their own understanding to complete the task, she says. “Following this work, I would regroup the students heterogeneously so that students from mixed levels are able to share the finished product, evaluate one another’s work, and receive feedback from a peer,” says Grunder.
Heterogeneous grouping helps build a classroom culture and fosters positive interdependence, she says. With students from diverse countries such as El Salvador, Angola, Somalia, Brazil, India, Russia, and Pakistan, she notes, “I need to work to create a sense of ‘oneness’ within the classroom.”
In gauging the school’s success, Amstutz says he tries to stay focused on three major “pulse points”—credit accumulation, student improvement on the statewide standardized test, and graduation rates. In the nine years since Amstutz took over, student performance on the statewide test has improved. Graduation rates, however, have proved more difficult. Initially, graduation rates went up, then they held steady, then last year when the state decided to go from a five-year to a four-year graduation rate, he says, “we took a hit.” The time constraints, he notes, are problematic for the school, and he’s adamant that immigrant students at the high school level need more than four years to reach the same academic proficiency that it takes native-born students 12 years to achieve (see sidebar "Creating More Time for Immigrant Students"). Close SidebarCreating More Time for Immigrant Students
From the beginning of his tenure as principal of Lee High School in Houston, Tex., Steve Amstutz saw time as an enemy when it came to educating immigrant students. Many older teens felt uncomfortable in classrooms with students who were only 14 or 15. Others dropped out of school to find a job to make money. By law, students who turned 21 before September 1 could no longer continue to come to class.
In response, Amstutz helped create a charter school aimed at older immigrants, called Liberty High School, which offers flexible scheduling, including evening and Saturday classes. He also took part in discussions that ultimately led to two new state laws that, beginning late last year, will give all students, including immigrants, more flexibility to attend school and more time to finish. One law allows for the creation of programs that do not require students to attend school five days a week. Instead they can go to school year-round, attend three days a week, and still meet the state’s 180-day requirement. The other gives local school boards the option of accepting students up through age 26.
“Our hope and belief is that we can hang on to students who would otherwise drop out,” says Amstutz. Even though the state of Texas still considers every student who does not graduate high school in four years a “dropout,” he notes, “we’ll know they are still in school and working toward their diploma. We’ll know that we will have done the right thing for students, their families, and our community.”
A Work in Progress
Broughton High School, Wake County, N.C.
Between 1990 and 2005, North Carolina’s largely Hispanic immigrant population grew by 400 percent. Although the Wake County, N.C., public school system does not count students according to their immigrant status, nearly 14,000 of its 134,000 students are considered limited English proficient (LEP) and close to 7,000 are enrolled in ESL classes. All but one of the county’s 150-plus schools have ESL classes.
One of these schools is Broughton High School, an International Baccalaureate (IB) magnet school that has a dual-enrollment policy. It caters to neighborhood students as well as those outside its attendance zone who apply to the IB program. Located near N.C. State University and downtown Raleigh, Broughton draws a more diverse group of immigrant students than many of the other Wake County high schools. The 73 ESL students there represent 20 countries—including Mexico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Thailand, Burundi, Somalia, and Iraq—and make up a little over 3 percent of the total student population.
Broughton offers leveled classes—ESL 1, 2, and 3—as well as guided study periods. Some content-area classes are “sheltered,” or designed specifically for LEP students. Both ESL and sheltered classes are taught by certified ESL teachers. Once English-language learners pass ESL 3, they are put into mainstream classrooms for English.
Teachers at Broughton have also begun to experiment with heterogeneous grouping. Renee Alman, one of three ESL teachers at the school, coteaches the sheltered ninth-grade English class with English instructor Richard Matkim. Last winter they were teaching a simplified version of Romeo and Juliet. Alman modified the text a couple of times—once so students could understand the plot and then again in play format. By working in their own language groups, Alman says, students “can support one another, [and] the ones who are proficient can help the ones who are not.”
Of the 25 students in the class one day in early December, only two had been in the United States for four years or more. The rest had been there for anywhere from two months to two years. Together—speaking Swahili, Spanish, and Jarai (from Vietnam)—they helped each other navigate the meaning of Shakespeare and decipher words like “banished” and “duel.”
Carol Dukes, another Broughton ESL teacher who, like Alman, is certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, notes that there can be drawbacks to heterogeneous grouping. “I noticed we were enrolling more preliterate students who had limited or no schooling in their home country,” she says. “Although I had tried to differentiate [instruction] in the mixed class, it seemed like the preliterate students were not getting the attention and skills they needed.” She started a new Applied ESL class this year to address the needs of these students.
District ESL director Tim Hart says that the heterogeneous approach is a work in progress. He notes that it is most difficult to apply when students come into school with no English or have had very little schooling in their own language. At the same time, he says, “in order to get students to the place where we want to get them, a one-hour ESL class a day isn’t going to cut it.
“They have to have access to the standard course of study. They need to be taught by ESL methods all day long,” he says. “That’s what we’re moving toward.”
Lucy Hood is a freelance education writer based in Washington, D.C.
Teachers at Broughton have also begun to experiment with heterogeneous grouping. Renee Alman, one of three ESL teachers at the school, coteaches the sheltered ninth-grade English class with English instructor Richard Matkim. Last winter they were teaching a simplified version of Romeo and Juliet. Alman modified the text a couple of times—once so students could understand the plot and then again in play format. By working in their own language groups, Alman says, students “can support one another, [and] the ones who are proficient can help the ones who are not.”
Of the 25 students in the class one day in early December, only two had been in the United States for four years or more. The rest had been there for anywhere from two months to two years. Together—speaking Swahili, Spanish, and Jarai (from Vietnam)—they helped each other navigate the meaning of Shakespeare and decipher words like “banished” and “duel.”
Carol Dukes, another Broughton ESL teacher who, like Alman, is certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, notes that there can be drawbacks to heterogeneous grouping. “I noticed we were enrolling more preliterate students who had limited or no schooling in their home country,” she says. “Although I had tried to differentiate [instruction] in the mixed class, it seemed like the preliterate students were not getting the attention and skills they needed.” She started a new Applied ESL class this year to address the needs of these students.
District ESL director Tim Hart says that the heterogeneous approach is a work in progress. He notes that it is most difficult to apply when students come into school with no English or have had very little schooling in their own language. At the same time, he says, “in order to get students to the place where we want to get them, a one-hour ESL class a day isn’t going to cut it.
“They have to have access to the standard course of study. They need to be taught by ESL methods all day long,” he says. “That’s what we’re moving toward.”
Lucy Hood is a freelance education writer based in Washington, D.C.
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