XPost: alt.education, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics
XPost: talk.politics.guns

On 21 Apr 2023, Rebel <nowomr@protonmail.com> posted some news:u1v7gg$2up39$1@dont-email.me:

Execute all liberal teachers who encourage illegal immigration. Burn
their bodies in front of the schools.

Democratic politicians and the liberal media made the first day of
school all about welcoming migrant children.

That’s sheer propaganda.

Parents deserve the truth. The migrant surge is a disaster for their
kids.

The surge will worsen our education system’s twin failures: plunging
math and reading scores and the failure to ensure newly arriving kids
learn English so they can succeed too.

Kimberly Carchipulla, who came from Ecuador and has been living at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan with her son, brought him to school
Thursday and said through a translator, “What I want for him is a
future.”

That’s what all parents want. But when migrant children are added to the
class, the rest of the kids get less of their teacher’s attention.

A teacher will have to focus on the needy newcomers who speak no English
and may not have been to school before.

For the rest, it could be a year of lost opportunities.

Public-school students’ reading and math scores have been falling for
decades and just hit a new low, according to National Assessment of
Educational Progress tests.

One reason is the soaring number of non-English-speaking students, up
from only 9% of public-school students in 1980 to nearly 25% now.

Until the 1960s, children arriving in this country were put in public
school without interpreters and bilingual teachers.

Children were taught in one language — English. No confusion.

The current approach is a disaster for migrants and the rest of the kids
in class with them. The data don’t lie.

Now typically, a bilingual teacher and teaching assistants try to teach
— math, science, art, any subject — in two or more languages, speaking
English at times but also answering questions in Spanish and other
languages.

It’s chaos. Everyone learns less.

Jean Skorapa, superintendent for a rural school district in Maine, says
the 67 migrant children enrolling “are a tremendous, tremendous
benefit”: “They make our community diverse and more well-rounded.”

All true. But that’s happy talk.

What about the impact on learning?

Geralde Gabeau, with Immigrant Family Services Institute in
Massachusetts, explains migrant children will be placed “in a first
grade with children who know their ABCs, who already know how to read,
so those children are going to suffer.”

New York City has disastrously low reading scores. The influx of non-English-speaking students makes the challenge greater.

European countries are also grappling with waves of migrants.

IZA, a European think tank, found that “a high share of immigrant
children in schools leads to lower test scores of native children.” OECD researchers report similar findings.

It’s not about race or ethnicity. It’s about too many languages spoken
in the classroom.

Politicians would rather pander than address it.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont says, “From the bottom of my heart, I want
to make sure this is the most welcoming state in the country.”

Yet state education statistics show that the more “high-needs” kids in
the class, including non-English-speaking students, the lower the
reading and math scores for the others.

The system is lose-lose, hurting migrant kids as well. They’re given too
many opportunities not to learn English.

Lamont, for example, is expanding translation services for parents and interpreters for students.

That’s misguided. Families need to be prodded to learn English, not
linger in a language ghetto.

Some school districts in New York state are experimenting with
temporarily schooling newcomers separately, offering them months of
intensive language preparation to succeed as English-speaking students.
Good idea.

But the United Nations insists children have a “right” to be educated in
their native language.

Nonsense. It dooms them to low-paying jobs.

The vast majority of non-English-speaking students — 97% according to
one report — lack English proficiency when they graduate from US high
schools.

That’s the definition of failure.

Last week, mothers gathered outside Park Avenue elementary school in
Port Chester to pick up their kids. Few spoke English.

Some mothers had attended the same school decades earlier. Yet they
can’t speak English. Tragic.

Tell the pols to stop romanticizing this lose-lose disaster and start
fixing it.

This is America.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.

Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey

https://nypost.com/2023/09/11/nyc-migrant-crisis-is-a-disaster-for-learni ng-for-all-kids/

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