The demographics of US elementary and secondary
schools are changing rapidly as a result of record-high immigration,
growing national origin and linguistic diversity, and immigrants’ increasing
geographic dispersal. Sustained high levels of immigration have also
led to a rapid increase in the number of children with immigrant
parents.
By 2000, immigrants represented one in nine of all US residents,
but their children represented one in five of all children under
age 18. Many of these children do not speak English well, have low-educated
parents, and live in poor families. Meeting their linguistic and
academic needs presents a challenge to educators nationwide.
Education policy – and in particular immigrant education policy – is
in flux with the enactment, implementation, and pending 2007 reauthorization
of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
The NCLB, which may represent an important new de facto integration
policy, requires that schools identify, teach, and test limited-English-proficient (LEP) students using standardized state tests. It requires
that their scores be separately reported as a subgroup and that schools
be held accountable for that subgroup’s performance.
Schools
that fail to meet standards can be subjected to increasingly severe
sanctions. In addition, NCLB for the time imposes a federal requirement
that LEP students make progress learning English. NCLB can be seen
as the culmination of a decade of reform that began with schools
often leaving immigrant and LEP students overlooked and underserved. |
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