Molly Gavin's List: Language Discrimination

• one of the last widely acceptable forms of discrimination in the United States
• What accommodations should be made for speakers of non-standardized English and English as an additional language in the admissions process (and freshman writing seminars)?
• language frequently becomes connected to issues of socioeconomic, ethnic and other types of diversity
• Schools and employers are not permitted by law to discriminate based on gender, race or ethnicity but they often reject people based on their verbal ability,” Hudly said. “As a society, we have to be more thorough on just what ‘verbal ability’ means.”
• children were disproportionately placed in special education classes and speech [and] language pathology services.

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• great burden that is placed on bilinguals through public policies
• symptoms of public anger
• bilinguals “provoke the wrath of those who view concessions to linguistic diversity as fundamentally un-American”
• a border divides people who have similar concerns, such as education, health, and shelter, creating enemies of people who could instead work effectively together to improve their conditions
• creating climates of “estrangement and mutual negation,”
• proposition 200 in 2004, banning public services to undocumented immigrants and threatening public servants with jail time for providing assistance to such immigrants
• proposition 203 in 2000, banning bilingual education
• these propositions mask their racism behind the guise of equal opportunity and merit
• Juan Perea
• Educators who care about linguistic and cultural diversity must educate the public about
• why languages other than English matter, and why it is foolish to squelch, rather than
• nurture, the linguistic resources extant in the various heritages of Americans”
• Schools were forced by law to enact policies that prevented children from studying in their home languages. While educational research has largely supported bilingual education as a way to help students become competent in English, public policies in Arizona were forcing schools to discontinue their bilingual programs
• border region yielding very little political power in the state.
• In an effort to avoid legal trouble with the state government, school districts on the border enact policies even stricter than the state law requires, often preventing the use of Spanish on school grounds, even for disciplinary interventions or emergency situations.
• neither their rights as workers nor as learners are protected.
• predominantly English-speaking students are allowed to develop an unhealthy superiority over Spanish-speaking or other students with home languages other than English
• they use books that either exclude or reinforce negative stereotypes
• Lisa Delpit
• Borderlands schools are easier for English-proficient students because they understand the cultural and linguistic environment and are able to acclimate more easily to the classroom environment.
• white students are given the benefit of the doubt, while the non-white students must counter negative stereotypes designed to limit their success
• disconnection between the educational research community and the school personnel working in the borderlands
• Schools who do not want to face the consequences of an inadvertent error go to extremes to prevent problems. Districts create strict English-only policies that surpass the state initiative in their fervor: teachers in more than one elementary district in rural Arizona are summarily fired if they are heard speaking Spanish, even to prevent an accident on the playground.
• Families are torn between their love for their home language and their desire for their children to succeed economically in their country of residence
• immigrants often assimilate to their adopted land by accepting the dominant language, but that this assimilation should never be understood as consensual; instead, she says, we must understand that immigrants are losing their home languages in response to economic and political pressures outside of their control
• There is an enormous guilt in the American soul
• “sacrifices and efforts are rewarded by estrangement from their grandchildren
• the real crisis in this debate is not whether or not children can learn English but rather “the systematic loss and eventual death of the heritage language in immigrant families”
• Ada (1991) claims that children who do not attend schools in their native languages are often frustrated with school and not motivated to learn to read. Children must be offered attractive and interesting books in their home languages, according to Ada, because part of the joy of reading is the ability to predict, to see one’s predictions realized, or to be surprised by outcomes. Young people who have never had the opportunity to enjoy reading become adults who are disillusioned and disinterested in the literary world (Ada, 1991).
• Rather than use their rich potential to become leaders in bilingual education, these schools have had to find ways to educate bilingual or Spanish-speaking students in spite of laws that prohibit bilingual education. In many ways, the schools of southern Arizona have had to deny their own potential for leadership.
• True democracy depends on each of its members thinking critically, acting responsibly, and reflecting upon the meaning and significance of what it means to be a citizen in a true democracy. Nothing about freedom is free, and nothing about freedom is easy. Freedom implies a great deal of responsibility: to oneself, to the community, to the world.
• It is the responsibility and privilege of educators to work together with parents, community, and students to eliminate the barriers and promote the skills and confidence necessary so that each students can fulfill this basic human need: to communicate clearly, honestly, and with power.
• Perea, J. F. (2001). The new American Spanish war: How the courts and the legislatures are aiding the suppression of languages other than English. In R. Dueñas-González & I. Melis (Eds.), Language ideologies: Critical perspectives on the official English movement (pp. 121-139). Urbana, IL: NCTE, & Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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• effort to improve education for English- and Spanish-language learners.
• training for teachers and administrators with a document called Side by Side, which helps teachers plan instruction by breaking down language standards — the knowledge, concepts, and skills that students should acquire — by grade level

• A student’s level of language acquisition is measured as either beginning, early intermediate, intermediate, early advanced or advanced. Sanchez said instruction is tailored to meet the needs of where individual students are before moving them on to the next level.

    
• the principal of each school will be trained alongside seven teacher leaders, one from each grade, kindergarten through sixth. They will then go back to their respective school sites and help train the remaining teachers
• gradual release of responsibility lesson planning
• AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress)
• API (Academic Performance Index)
• ’d like to see it take precedence at schools that are on the lower tier as far as English-language learners are concerned.

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• August 4, 200
• pdated June 16, 2011
• From the 1997-98 school year to the 2008-09 school year, the number of English-language learners enrolled in public schools increased from 3.5 million to 5.3 million, or by 51 percent (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, 2011)
• Nationwide, only 12 percent of students with limited English scored “at or above proficient” in mathematics in the 4th grade
• NAEP reading test
• consider the implementation of the common-core academic standards, adopted by almost every state, as promising for raising achievement for English-language learners. But experts in the field and advocates of ELLs also have expressed concerns that not enough attention has been paid to including ELLs appropriately in implementation of the standards.
• translate its common standards math test into Spanish and three other languages, along with American Sign Language
• English-language-proficiency tests for the common standards that would measure ELLs’ annual progress in reading, writing, and speaking.
• law requires states to develop English-language-proficiency standards and implement English-language-proficiency tests. The English-proficiency standards had to be linked to state academic standards.
• not many states have met the law’s AYP goals for ELLs. During the 2007-08 school year, only 11 states met their accountability goals for ELLs, according to an analysis of federal data by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research (
• it’s not possible to compare ELL performance among states
• A review of research studies conducted by the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth concluded that bilingual education has an edge over English-only methods (August and Shanahan, 2006)
• Obama endorsed “transitional bilingual education” in the document spelling out a platform for his presidential campaign in 2008, but, as president, he hasn’t restated that endorsement publicly.
• features a dual-language program in Minnesota’s St. Paul Public Schools as a model for ELLs
• Quality Teaching for English Learners, or QTEL, which emphasizes professional development for secondary school mainstream teachers, as well as ELL specialists, to learn how to engage English-language learners. Aida Walqui, the director of the teacher-pro
• Arizona’s home-language survey, a tool used by most states to determine what languages students speak at home, did not fully capture the pool of students who should be assessed on English skills to see if they needed special services
• the Education and Justice departments found fault with Arizona for reclassifying ELLs as fluent in English even if they don’t pass all sections of the state’s English-language-proficiency test.

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