Boston: Broken English immersion

[Harold Schiffman]

 Forwarded From:  edling at lists.sis.utsa.edu


Boston Globe



Broken English immersion



Boston Suffers from a garbled approach to education for students with
limited English - an approach that is widening achievement gaps at all
grade levels and driving students to drop out. A change of course is
needed to ensure opportunity for the 24,000 Boston students who aren't
native speakers of English.



A report released this week by the Gastón Institute at the University
of Massachusetts at Boston revealed the system's inability to adjust
to changes in state law on how to teach students with limited English
ability. The high school drop-out rates for so-called English language
learners nearly doubled, to 12 percent, between 2003 and 2006,
according to the report. The school district's family resource centers
routinely fail to assess students' language skills. And fearing
stigma, parents often make matters worse by withholding information
about their native tongues.



Full story:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/04/08/broken_english_immersion/





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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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