NEW ITEMS ARE ADDED AT THE BOTTOM

Immigration in the Classroom

The following exchange was prompted by a note from a teacher upon seeing ProjectUSA billboards. These billboards were erected by the organization which is urging immigration reform. Tim Aaronson is a former teacher.

“We all enjoy freedom of speech in this country, but how do you explain the message presented in your billboards to a group of children whose parents or themselves are immigrants?”
— Zulma Hernandez, 4th grade teacher

As one who has spent his career in education I recognize good teaching technique — in this case your seizing the “teachable moment” and discussing immigration with your students. I would also like to thank you for the tone of your inquiry. It is in stark contrast to many who are unable to distinguish concern from hatred. I hope I succeed in convincing you that it is the former and not the latter that motivates ProjectUSA to put up billboards.

First, let me try to explain the concerns many of us have. The U.S. is growing at a staggering rate. Americans are the greatest consumers of world resources so it is particularly important that we act responsibly and 'tighten' our population belt. At first glance there is great news — American families typically have just two children, the number needed to stabilize the population. Yet our population is growing at the rate of an India. How can that be? Most of our population growth is now due to immigration. The U.S. Census Bureau confirms this in a report issued in early January. The Dallas Morning News (1/14/00) reported this fact with the headline: “U.S. population projected to double in next century.” The subtitle of the article reads: “Immigrants will fuel growth, Census Bureau says.” The story contained a graph that shows the U.S. could reach 1.2 billion over the next century. Since the Census Bureau has often underestimated the number in the past, the prospects are truly frightening!

I am sure you teach your children about conserving resources and about recycling. Isn't it reasonable to also look at conserving our own numbers? And what good does it do to recycle when all those efforts are wiped out by adding more and more people? Those who are genuinely concerned about America's children — including your fourth graders — don't want to see an America of one billion people. There is a simple solution at hand: Reduce the current unhistorical rate of immigration to a more traditional and sustainable level. Your letter spoke of helping society. Isn't slowing the current mass immigration level an important way to help our society? It is, of course, not easy talking about this with students. It may well be embarrassing — for both immigrant child and native born, but we do a disservice to our children if we teach them to avoid looking at difficult things. Not talking about something does not make it go away. Now to your question, “How would I explain the message to a group of children whose parents or themselves are immigrants?” What a challenging question! Let me give you some thoughts off the top of my head. Immigration is closely tied to population issues, so I suggest you check the Zero Population Growth (ZPG)* web site for some of their excellent teaching resources designed for elementary teachers. Some of their materials are free. They also conduct workshops for teachers.

Here are some questions I can think of that might spur some discussion:

• What would it be like if we doubled the number of students in our class; our school?

• Many farms are being turned into houses and highways as our population grows and grows. How will we feed people if we lose our farms?

• Are there any limits to the number of people who can come to our country?

• What would be more helpful to people living in other countries — inviting them to leave their country to live in America or helping them to make their own countries a better place to live?

• Would it be better to help 80 people in foreign countries or invite one person to live here? (Reflects world population growth vs. U.S. immigration numbers.)

• If someone left the faucet on and our classroom was flooding and you could do only one thing — grab a mop or turn off the faucet — which would you do?

• Should people talk about things which are disturbing, e.g. immigration?

As a teacher, I know the joy you must experience seeing the progress made by children recently arrived. You could not be a loving and effective teacher otherwise. Yet let me leave you this to consider: In an avalanche, every beautiful snowflake pleads not guilty.

by Tim Aaronson

FURTHER READING:

Diversity Blamed for Reading Score Drop
"An increasingly diverse student population is contributing to lower reading scores that emphasizethe need for more intensive focus on the subject in the lower grades, state school officials say." The numbers cited are substantial: the population of Hispanics has increased from about 88,000 in 1990 to more than 201,500 in 2000.

Southern Schools Strain under Immigrant Arrivals
Small towns are overwhelmed by thousands of Hispanics, mosty illegal aliens, requiring free medical care and education for non-English-speaking children. In the town of Piedmont, North Carolina, for example, 60-65 percent of pregnancies are to Latino women.

The Cuckoo's Egg
The Department of Education doesn't want Americans to know that the exploding school population — and therefore increasing costs — are entirely due to immigration. The line about the cause being the children of boomers is pure nonsense. Author Linda Thom draws the parallel between the crafty cuckoo and the educational establishment. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and allows the foolish birds to care for the eggs as if they belonged there.

Enrollment boom will test schools
Endless immigration means stresses on schools.

Language barriers challenge schools
Schools in Columbus, Ohio, are swamped with Somali refugee children who do not speak English.

Testimony on Parachute Kids
These are foreign kids living in the U.S. apart from their parents for purposes of getting a free U.S. education and a leg up on getting into an American university. They may live with distant relatives or even complete strangers.

Special Report on the Baby Boom Echo
This study from the US Education Department is a little unclear on the concept of Baby Boom Echo, such as saying that school overcrowding is permanent for the forseeable future and diversity will increase — neither of which would be true if the exploding student population were the kids of boomers.

The Impact of Immigration on U.S. Population Growth
Steve Camarota's testimony before the House Immigration Subcommittee has a section on immigration's effect on schools. He stated, “Thus immigration accounts for virtually all of the increase in the school-age population in the United States over the last few decades.”

Educating the Enemy
Open borders (educationally targeted) has had the disadvantage of educating America's enemies in our universities about the means to harm us, from nuclear physics to bioterror.

Failure in California Schools
The California Council on Science and Technology released a report in April 2002 showing the total degradation of the once top-notch California public schools. Some headlines: 30 percent of 9th graders won't graduate (up 10 percent from 1990); 43 percent of Latinos won't finish high school; K-12 program ranks 47th in the nation. In the 1960s, families moved to California for the excellent quality education.

Bonds, Taxes, and Immigration
Columnist Lance Izumi analyzes the crushing burden imposed by immigrant children in the California school system, e.g., recently lawmakers placed $25.3 billion in bonds, much of which would go to school facilities, on the November 2002 and March 2004 ballots. This is after a $9.2 billion bond was passed in 1998 and is presumably already used up. Bottom line: without the weight of millions of immigrant children, there would be no classroom crisis in the state.

Time to Make Language Costs Fall on Immigrants
Lodi ESL teacher Joe Guzzardi describes the failure of yet another taxpayer-funded program to help immigrants. The Community Based English Program set up English language instruction for adult immigrants along with one-on-one tutoring for the kiddies occurring at the same time and place. Convenient and inviting. But all of the many classes scheduled are poorly attended. Guzzardi recommends the Dutch solution, the one envisioned by the new Pim Fortuyn group of legislators, that new immigrants pay a $1,500 deposit upon entrance to be refunded when the language of the new land has been learned.

The Civic Education America Needs
Classics professor Victor Davis Hanson relives his childhood school experience in a small central valley town in California. The mix of kids was "diverse" (as we know to say today), yet the ideals, rights and responsibilites of American citizenship and community were stressed as belonging to everyone.

Ken Ward Columns
The Wednesday column in the Las Vegas Review Journal written by Ken Ward focuses on education. He has noted the negative effects of immigration on American classrooms, where teachers must cope with little communities of Babel, as well as the bilingual scam, testing and other timely topics.

Parents Writing Big Checks for Higher (Priced) Education
This article notes toward the end that "over the next decade, more than 4 million qualified students, most of them low income, won't be able to afford a four-year university education." Why then should taxpayers be subsidizing illegal alien students by underwriting in-state tuition when so many American young people are going without?

Year-Round Discontent at Hollywood High
Los Angeles school overcrowding is overwhelming education and diminishing quality. Particularly troublesome is the 12-month scheduling that allows more students to be processed through the premises.

Crowding into a year-round schedule
More of LA overcrowding here from a high-school kid, first person. He notes that of 49 high schools in the district, 18 are year-round as of 2001 with more to go that route soon.

California K-12 Enrollment, 1950-1980
Just the numbers. And here are the numbers for 1980-2002.

California State University students still need remedial help
Only 51 percent of incoming freshmen in the State University system in 2002 were able to use English at an acceptable level. The low scores were blamed on the fact that "as many as 40 percent of incoming CSU students come from homes where English is not the primary language." If students cannot pass required remedial math or English by the end of the first year, they are asked to leave. Such dropouts have risen recently, e.g. 8 percent for the class of 2001.

Where Two Worlds Collide: Muslim Schools Face Tension of Islamic, U.S. Views
This Washington Post article should have been a major wake-up call as it called attention to the dangers of Muslim schools implanting jihadist ideas right here at home. The Islamic Saudi Academy in Northern Virginia teaches its high school students that "the Day of Judgment can't come until Jesus Christ returns to Earth, breaks the cross and converts everyone to Islam, and until Muslims start attacking Jews."

U.S. Islamic Schools Teaching Homegrown Hate
Conservative columnist Ken Adelman registered his alarm at the junior fifth column being readied in jihadist Muslim schools. He recommends that such schools lose accreditation and that Saudi funding no longer be permitted.

Sowing seeds of hatred (March 2003)
Textbooks for school children in Islamic schools are the subject of an investigation by the New York Daily News. The books are filled with inflammatory, hate-filled rhetoric against Jews in particular who are consistently characterized as deceitful, but also against Christians who are described as idolatrous. An associate director of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops complained, "Give me a break. We don't worship statues." There are 3,000-4,000 children attending New York City's 15 Islamic academies.

Exit Exam Too Hard: California May Dumb Down Test for High School Graduation
The state keeps promising to require some degree of academic achievement for high school diplomas, but not yet. Too many students (20-30 percent) are failing and the state law which requires that a passing test score to graduate may require a lessening of standards. The possibility that the many immigrant students are pulling down the average is not mentioned.

Parents storm Ackerman's office: Anger over S.F. school enrollment
A crowd of 75 Chinese parents stormed the office of San Francisco School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman because of their anger over the city's "diversity index" designed to reduce racial uniformity in schools. At one point, 911 was dialed because of the physical danger to Ackerman, who is black.

Alingual Education
Educating immigrant children is more difficult than was evident because some kids are growing up in America learning neither English nor their parents' language — instead of being bilingual, they are alingual. Some have little communication with adults, who are always out of the house working. It's not uncommon for a four-year-old from that sort of household to not know words for colors.

UC admissions under fire again
Prop. 209 was supposed to ban affirmative action in admissions, but the Chair of the University of California Board of Regents John Moores discovered that several hundred very underqualified minority students were admitted to Berkeley, some with shockingly low SAT scores.

How to Combat 'American Amnesia'
Bruce Cole, the Chair of the National Endowment for Humanities, warns that schools are producing graduates with no grounding in American culture and history: "One study of university students found that 40% could not place the Civil War in the correct half-century. Only 37% knew that the Battle of the Bulge took place during World War II." He promises new initiatives from his group to get more historical awareness into schools.

Inside a Failing School
From a PBS series "From First to Worst" about California's educational decline, here is an interview with the principal of Helms Middle School in Richmond. The demographic facts tells you all you need to know: "It was built for 800 students, we now have 1410 and of those 1410, 90 or 95 percent qualify for free lunch. It's about 60 percent Spanish speaking. About 10 percent Southeast Asian - mainly Hmong - from Laos - and about 25 percent African American and then a bunch of other languages. The students are very sweet but we have a lot of work to do because they don't come from homes where they are prepared for school the way the middle class prepares their children for school."
    "In this area there are lots of little houses, and the families, mainly Spanish speaking, have been doubling and tripling up in these houses. So ten years ago Helms had 10 or 20 percent Spanish speakers and now we have 60 or 70 percent."

Interview with Ron Unz
The crusader for classroom English reflects on California's current school situation. He is optimistic since some of the ideological idiocy has been turned back: "The message is basic standard traditional education works, testing works, educational fads are a disaster."

Progress of English Learner Students
From the California Legislative Analysts Office, here is a look at the progress of the more than 1.3 million English learner students in the state. Spanish speakers dominate English Learners, with more than 83 percent. Lots more statistics and graphs.

Immigrants freed from progress tests
More from the dumbing down front, as No Child Left Behind becomes No Child Allowed to Be Literate. If testing proves to be a political problem, then change the tests. Therefore, new rules from the Dept. of Education permit ESL students to be left out of testing requirements.

Immigrant Influx Threatens California Colleges
Joe Guzzardi reflects on how the once excellent state education system has fallen into the lowest standards imaginable. He remarked that a high school teaching aide didn't know what the word "errand" meant, and she had received a full scholarship to UC Davis, one of the better schools, or at least used to be. Half of CSU students require remedial education in English, and there is abundant evidence that a degree from a California university means far less than it did a couple of decades ago. More about the monetary subsidies here from ace investigative reporter Jill Stewart.

Brief Description of Mexican Higher Education System
There are a lot of demands from illegal immigrant high school students that they should receive taxpayer-subsidized in-state tuition rates at American state universities. You would think that there are no colleges in Mexico — nothing could be further from the truth. Check out this overview to readjust your ideas to reality. Tuition is quite low, and there is no reason why Mexican students cannot receive higher education in their true homes. Many rich American kids spend piles of money to study for a year or two abroad, so it's not exactly punishment. More about the Mexican University system here.

Disregard For Law Requiring Algebra Adds Up To Trouble
More dumbing down in California, where 40 percent of the state budget goes to educate the 6 million students. In 2000, a law was passed required Algebra I as a requirement for high school graduation. But some schools have simply overlooked the law and requested waivers. The curriculum director for the San Jose Unified School District told the San Jose Mercury News, "The law says every student must take and pass an algebra course. That isn't going to happen." The upshot is that administrators are frittering away standards that make a California high school diploma meaningful.

Spanish GED to become more difficult
Did you know that an American high school GED may be obtained by taking a test in Spanish? Of 625,000 people who took the GED test in 2002, 50,000 took it in Spanish. The tests are quite popular. In addition, those GED certificates have no indication that the test passed was in Spanish.

© 2004 Brenda Walker