Five Questions

The United States is, and always has, been a nation peopled in part by immigrants. Since the 1970s, we have been in a period of almost unprecedented immigration, so we are now the most ethnically, linguistically, culturally diverse society ever. There is no indication this will change anytime soon.

While local impacts differ, there is no question that schools throughout the U.S. need to be prepared. It used to be that the places experiencing the impacts of immigration were gateway states like California, Florida, Texas, New York. But in the last five years the greatest growth in immigrant population has been in Georgia, Tennessee, Nevada, South Carolina, Arkansas and Nevada. States like Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas are grappling with the incorporation of immigrants which even 10 years ago would have been unthinkable. So any school board member who thinks “immigration isn’t an issue for us” is bound to be surprised sooner rather than later.

Many schools in other parts of the country are now facing the influx of diversity that Madison High saw in the mid-1990s. What lessons could apply for schools in other areas?

Effective responses and successful approaches depend on two related but somewhat different factors: the attitude, will, and political climate regarding immigrants, how welcoming and how willing the community is to incorporate immigrants, and matters of capacity, skills and knowledge, how prepared are the schools to serve and educate immigrants. In each of these areas, there are important lessons.  

When immigrants arrive, communities are often wary. Newcomers who are different, who speak other languages, eat different foods, dress differently, can make people uncomfortable. Teachers discover that teaching how they have always taught just doesn’t work so well for students who don’t speak English and whose experiences are from wholly different nations and cultures. 

In these situations, leadership plays a huge role in whether people end up hostile to newcomers and resentful, or open and inclusive. We’ve seen the impacts of each.  In some places, politicians have fed on the fears and anxiety of the public and it has resulted in ugly, exclusionary practices that result in low educational outcomes for immigrants and an ugly climate overall. In other places, school leaders have stepped up to make it clear that immigrants are to be welcomed, served, educated. Leaders have made certain that supports are in place to help it happen, and monitoring is in place to be sure it happens. In those places, we have witnessed a transformation of education that has enormous benefits to everyone.

It takes work and supports for schools to incorporate immigrants, and this was a lesson Madison High had to learn the hard way. New programs [to serve immigrant students] had to be created, and then [they] it had to be expanded, curriculum developed, modified. It was learning to fly a plane while still building it.

New course sections had to be created, but then they didn’t have adequate numbers of teachers with skills to teach grade-level academic content across language barriers and also help students develop English proficiency.  New assessments had to be put into place. Getting students who speak no English to acquire the kind of academic English proficiency they need to succeed requires an articulated sequence of classes in English Language Development -- but that meant teachers had to create curriculum, they had to find materials. And it wasn’t enough that a small core of teachers [was] doing this work; they were discovering that across the school, teachers needed professional development in how to help English Learners access the curriculum.  

Now, there is a stronger body of research on effective practices, there are excellent models to learn from, there is existing curriculum that has been piloted and tested. School leaders need to reach out and learn from this prior work. But even with the advantage of being able to build on what has already been done, the work of creating a strong program for immigrants still takes planning, time, expertise and money. And so, the attitudes and willingness of leadership to devote those resources is key. 

How can schools better engage parents and family members of immigrant students in their work?

Think about what it means for a parent to send their child off to a school and raise their child in a nation which is foreign to the parent. Schooling systems in other nations are different from schools in the U.S. Immigrant parents often don’t understand how the school system works, they don’t understand the language their child’s teacher speaks. They don’t understand the world in which their child is growing up.

Orientation programs and welcome centers help with newcomer parents--a place they can go where someone speaks their language and takes time to explain school expectations and how things work. Translation, of course, is important--for notices, for meetings. But beyond that, schools need to intentionally reach out to immigrant parents to create welcoming and supportive relationships. Administrators and teachers need professional development in cross-cultural communication.

In the 10 years since the book was first published, have schools made progress in understanding cultural differences and integrating foreign-born students? What will be the upcoming challenges in educating diverse populations and how should school officials prepare?

It’s the best of times and the worst of times. There are some great schools, major progress in how to integrate and educate foreign-born students. But two powerful forces have hit public education in the decade since Made in America was first published.

First, No Child Left Behind [spotlighted] the underachievement of English Learners in our schools nationwide. And that has resulted in a level of attention to their needs that all the “compliance” with civil rights law wasn’t able to produce. Yet many of the school improvement coaches and support entities that get called when a school doesn’t meet Adequate Yearly Progress targets for English learners don’t have expertise in English learner education. The interventions and efforts to improve achievement, then, aren’t the most powerful--and sometimes make things worse.

All this is happening in the midst of a deep division in our country over the role of schools with regards to immigration and language policy. There is just no public or political consensus about what schools are supposed to do or ought to do, and there is often little consensus within a school about these issues as well. In numerous states, these dynamics have played out in state-level public ballot initiatives, legislative proposals and political resolutions seeking to end bilingual education, seeking to impose English-only policies on schools, and efforts to deny access to public education for undocumented immigrant children.

It is educational policy being determined in a political arena – in battles that are not really about education or about what research tells us is best practice. And in the midst of all that, schools boards feel conflicting pressures from the public, and educators don’t know who to believe with regards to whether there is an educational research base for effective practice. 

What other challenges do you foresee for schools?

There is an increasingly large pool of immigrant students who enroll in our schools in kindergarten or first grade, but who haven’t received the level of support or the program that would help them both learn English proficiently and be able to learn the curriculum at grade level. They arrive in high school still English learners. Cynically called “ESL Lifers” or “Long-term English Learners,” they are discouraged learners, disengaged from education.  

While many educators and policymakers focus on newcomer immigrants, the real problem we are facing is seven or eight years down the road after they have been in our schools and poorly served. 

Have you been back to Madison High recently, and if so, what has changed?

The district and community are 10 years wiser and more seasoned. The newcomer center was disbanded as the secondary schools developed more capacity to serve their immigrants. A new superintendent has made English learners a high priority, and has been able to attract private foundation funding for those efforts.

There is still some resistance. Some teachers don’t see why they should have to go to workshops or change what they are doing. But by and large, there is much more awareness and responsiveness to serving immigrants.