New York: Proficiency in English Decreases Over a Decade

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,

January 19, 2005
Proficiency in English Decreases Over a Decade
By NINA BERNSTEIN

The number of New York adults who have a problem speaking English
increased by 30 percent between 1990 and 2000, to more than 1.5 million
throughout the city, according to figures released by the city yesterday.
That amounts to more than one in four adult New Yorkers, and officials
said more recent figures show no sign of a decline. With the supply of
English classes for immigrants lagging far behind demand, Joseph Salvo,
the city's demographer, said the language problem is now affecting the
education of the next generation. More than half of all births in the city
are to foreign-born women.

Almost half of the 1.5 million people with English difficulties live in
households where no one speaks English proficiently, said Mr. Salvo, the
director of the population division of the Department of City Planning,
citing statistics culled from a new analysis of census and immigration
information. Another quarter of the group live in households where only a
child is proficient in the language.

The immigrant groups with the highest number of births - Dominicans,
Mexicans and Chinese - also have the highest rates of difficulty with
English, ranging from 70 to 76 percent, he added. Yet in the areas of
Queens and Brooklyn where those immigrants are most concentrated, English
classes are especially scarce.

For generations of immigrants to New York, learning English has been the
passport to a better life, whether it turned a busboy into a waiter,
bridged the distance between an ethnic enclave and the Ivy League, or was
just used to persuade the landlord to turn on the heat.

"English literacy supports self-sufficiency, supports the ability to get a
raise, to get a promotion, and it fosters children's academic success,"
said Jeanne B. Mullgrav, commissioner of the city Department of Youth and
Community Development, citing research that underscores the importance of
parental involvement. "To the extent that parents improve their skills,
children succeed."

In the migrations before 1965, most newcomers spoke European languages.
But what is striking about the current generation of immigrants is the
vast range of tongues they use on the city's streets, adding difficulties
in education, business and the minutiae of daily life and making the need
for English as a common language all the more urgent.

"The earlier waves of Southern and Eastern Europeans that dominated
immigration at the turn of the 20th century spoke many languages," Mr.
Salvo said. "But the level of language diversity today far surpasses
anything we have seen in the city's history."

Of those who do not speak English very well, 51 percent speak Spanish at
home, 13 percent speak Chinese, 8 percent Russian, 4 percent French,
including Creole, 3 percent Korean, 3 percent Italian and 2 percent
Polish, with other languages accounting for 16 percent - a range of 175 to
200 languages.

Mr. Salvo's statistics were the framework for a meeting aimed at creating
a new public-private alliance for teaching English to the city's newcomers
through family programs. The session, called an Immigrant Family Literacy
Summit, was convened by The New York Times Company Foundation, the city's
Department of Youth and Community Development and the Literacy Assistance
Center, an umbrella research group for many of the programs that teach
English to immigrants.

Compared with the general population, census and city statistics show,
adults without proficiency in English have less education. Close to half
have not graduated from high school, compared to 27 percent of all New
Yorkers 18 and over. Many may not be literate in their own language, noted
Mr. Salvo, and that adds to the difficulty they may have in learning to
read and write in English.

All but 6 percent are foreign born, he said, and those recorded as born in
the United States were nearly all born in Puerto Rico. At least 40 percent
arrived in the decade between 1990 and 2000, compared to 44 percent
between 1965 and 1989, and only 10 percent before 1965. They are a little
older than the city's general population, because the foreign-born tend to
be workers, not children. But the lion's share - 33 percent of those who
have trouble speaking English - are between 30 and 44, the same age
distribution as in the city's adult population of 5.9 million.

Some of Mr. Salvo's most striking figures relate to the high immigrant
share of the city's 121,000 births in 2000. The top three immigrant groups
alone account for one out of every six births, he said: 8,940 births to
women from the Dominican Republic, 6,410 births to women from Mexico and
5,680 to women from China. In these same groups, 70 percent, 76 percent
and 75 percent respectively reported that they speak English less than
"very well," a response that typically means real difficulty with the
language, census studies show.

Andres Alonso, a chief of staff in the city's Education Department,
reminded participants in the literacy summit of studies showing the
resilience of immigrant children, who tend to outperform the native-born
if they enter the school system before the ninth grade. But recalling his
own family's migration from Cuba when he was 12, he spoke of the
disadvantages immigrant parents have in navigating bureaucracies in order
to assist their children.

Currently, even locating a family literacy program is a challenge, Elyse
B. Rudolph, the executive director of the Literacy Assistance center, told
the group. The center counts 183 programs with about 45,000 seats that are
offered through a confusing mix of schools, libraries, churches, unions
and work-development sites, supported by fluctuating streams of city,
state, federal and private money.

Maps produced for the session showed a more fundamental problem: a
mismatch between program sites and the areas where immigrants who lack
English proficiency are most concentrated. Manhattan has 80 sites, while
Queens, with the world's most densely diverse immigrant neighborhoods, has
only 14.

Another problem was raised by Digna Sanchez, president of Learning
Leaders, a nonprofit organization that recruits and trains volunteers in
the public schools. Many of the city's new immigrant parents are here
illegally, she said, and while city agencies try to maintain an
environment of "don't ask, don't tell," sources of funds increasingly
demand Social Security numbers to track how many students are being
served.

"No matter how you look at it," said Richard Fish, an adviser at the
Department of Youth and Community Development, "the number of programs and
students we're supporting is insufficient."


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/nyregion/19english.html