Posted on 10/07/2005 9:49:14 AM PDT by etlib
The 10th annual Latino Education Summit, just held in San Diego, wasn't much different from the previous nine. Each year, San Diego County's Office of Education reports to educators, parents and students on how well Hispanics are faring in county schools. The news this year, as in summits past, wasn't good – while nationally there is evidence the achievement gap between Latino and white students is narrowing, especially among younger students, a sizable gap still exists in San Diego.
The gap is even larger – up to 51 percentage points at some schools – for English learners, most of them immigrants. This is a major problem for San Diego, which has a particularly large immigrant population.
...
Interestingly, some schools are doing notably better than others in teaching these students. English learners in San Diego Unified and Oceanside Unified school districts, for example, are outperforming their peers in nearby Vista Unified.
The difference?
San Diego Unified and Oceanside have embraced English immersion while Vista stubbornly sticks to its outdated bilingual program.
(Excerpt) Read more at signonsandiego.com ...
It totally frosts me that we have to teach and pay for, English lessons for illegals! Dang! Won't the gummint, both the Feds and the States, ever figure out that we are being invaded and that American companies are breaking Federal and State laws every day by hiring the illegals? The silence re the situation from the pols is driving me over the edge past simple anger.
I was a teacher who was laid off in 1980. Teachers were losing jobs because the children of these wealthy parents were moving away to new locations that they could afford. Also they were not having many children. Then immigrants came in and legal or illegal, they had the babies. They were willing to live several families to a house. Their numbers soon allowed the schools to reopen. The schools did not teach as much as they did when the kids were all rich and white, there were lots of problems with the new batch of students. Speaking spanish, or their parents spoke spanish, they did little homework, they frequently went to work after 8th grade, but they created the jobs for the teachers, and the teachers are happy with it by and large.
The teachers even created special jobs called "bilingual" ed to hire more spanish speakers and add pay to bilingual teachers. I taught math, but went back to school to learn spanish. But I was one of the teachers laid off in the decline. I did not go back when it picked up again, because I was happy doing engineering for almost twice the salary. Part of the reason no elected official cares about the immigration is that they new people fill in the role of citizen and add growth.
Nature will fill a void if people make it. It frost me too, because I believe the people who wait in line and follow the rules are the immigrants we really should take. But I wanted to point out that if our schools taught a kind of patriotism that existed when we were in school, the new immigrants would grow up and appreciate this country. As it is now, everytime I hear an immigrant complain about something, (and this goes for lefties too), I want to remind them that the door opens both ways. they can always go home.
>>Once again English immersion does better than bilingual programs.
Every Spanish teacher I had said Spanish immersion is the quickest way to learn the language. So I did just that.
Strangely enough, the same teachers thought that English was best learned via bilingual ed.
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