Arizona: English Only

This week the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Arizona State Department of Education will be cracking down on teachers who do not speak English flawlessly. These teachers, who were recruited in the not so distant past by the same Department, will now be forced out of classrooms with English Language Learners.  The State is announcing these changes in the name of English-only movement, noting that these children will not learn English as well under the supervision of these bilingual teachers.

The role of language in American classrooms has become a particularly contentious and complicated issue. Especially in school districts, like many in Arizona, where there are large populations of ELL learners and where students come to school with many different levels of English and other language fluency.


Language policy in school has become an emotional rather than a logical debate.  Data is largely missing from media forums and  public dialogue on policy regarding language in schools. 

It starts with hello

Many studies have shown that parents' involvement in their child's school has long term effects on student achievement.

But for many immigrant parents--especially those who have recently arrived in the US--there are many barriers to such involvement. Carreon, Drake and Barton identify structural and psychological barriers in their ethnographic study of  immigrant parents in New York. These included.

• Inflexible work schedules and long hours.
• Language barriers with teachers. Child is often the only translator available.
• A devaluing of the type of cultural capital they are bringing to their children (teaching their children to respect authority rather than voice opinion in class).
• Isolation from network of parents who could support them and share information about education system.

Many foundations and policy organizations have developed recommendations for better involving immigrant parents in school; often focusing on making meeting times with teachers flexible, providing translators or translated school materials and offering childcare during meeting times.

But one of most easily implemented recommendations turns out to also be one of the most effective. The Harvard Family Research project reports that making parents feel welcome and valued is critical.  Many immigrant parents felt that the school saw them as liabilities rather than assets and feared humiliation in the school setting. Simple steps such as learning parents names, learning more about their situation and engaging in individualized conversation were shown as effective ways to get and keep parents involved.

On a larger scale, other policy groups pointed toward creating events or classes that would increase parents feeling of partnership with schools and develop peer networks among immigrant parents; as one New York school district did:

"Early in the school year, families meet with teachers for “Parents as Partners Day,” building a two-way partnership between the teachers and families before any problems start. Parents are invited to workshops that focus on the strengths of their culture and the importance of respecting other cultures. They learn techniques to share their culture with their children, such as storytelling or talking about the significance of certain foods and mealtime in their home country. Professionals from the community, such as Judith Rapley, a social worker who is the minister of an Afro-Caribbean church, build relationships with the families and connect them to resources. “We use the parents own cultural values to encourage them to get involved in school,” says project director Esther Calzada

Latina Sexual Risk and Acculturation

In the US, the pregnancy rate for Latina adolescents is nearly twice the national average.

This however, is not a pattern that starts with the first generation. In a 2006 review of the literature, Afable-Munsuz and Brindis document 15 studies that show that greater acculturation (birth in the US, higher levels of US cultural/English language orientation) is positively related to higher levels sexual risk taking in Latina and Latino adolescents as compared to only two studies which show the reverse.

First generation Latina adolescents are less likely to have had sex (see figure) and, if they have, are less likely to have be involved with multiple partners. They also show lower rates of early pregnancy than later generation youth.

Advocacy for Youth identifies high levels of monitoring by parents, high educational aspirations, and tight-knit ethnic communities which reinforce traditional Latino cultural values as particularly strong and positive influences for Latina adolescents; all areas which have been documented as more likely to be present in the lives of the first generation.

However, while many areas of sex-risk are lower for first generation Latinas, condom use and knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases are considerably lower for these adolescents. This gap in weakens the possitive effects of their other positive behaviors; recent work by Guarini and Marks reports equivalent levels of STI and STDS in first and later generations of Latino adolescents.

What makes the news?

In a media content analysis of news stories published and produced in 2009 the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Hispanic Center find that the Hispanic population remains barely represented in major media.
As the Hispanic population grows so has its importance in larger public dialogues but official coverage has lacked meaningful content concerning the lives of Hispanic Americans.  Rather existing coverage (involving Hispanic individuals/groups) has been almost exclusively "event driven". The debates around the Sonia Sotomayor, the Mexican drug war, the H1NI outbreak and  immigration have become the central, and often only, narratives.
Rapidly changing demographics in the US have opened the door to what could be a fascinating dialogue around what is already happening in American communities, what is already being seen in schools and how immigrant individuals and communities are creating and building on narratives in the US. But buried under a mass of disjointed headlines, the public narrative around Hispanic Americans remains largely incoherent.