Workforce Language Services

An estimated 850,000 adults in the Greater Chicago area have limited English competency skills, according to Literacy Chicago. With many of their children in English-speaking public schools, this creates a huge problem for Chicago schools.

Parents may not need the English communication skills on the job, but without the ability to speak in English, they are unable to communicate with teachers and other parents, as well as their children. One example:

Although Maximina Esteban’s work as a house cleaner does not require her to speak English, her duty as a single mother of two sons does.

Born and raised in Chicago, Esteban’s children, 11 and 7, spend most of their days at school speaking English rather than Spanish.

Despite her attempts to get them to speak Spanish at home, they reply in English, especially her younger son. He understands very little Spanish and rarely uses it with his mother.

Literacy Chicago, which provides free English language training to adults, had their federal funding reduced by 13% for the 2010 fiscal year. They anticipate greater cuts in 2011. Other organizations with English literacy programs are facing similar cuts.

Explains Medill Reports of Northwestern University, “This threat of budget cutbacks makes immigrant parents particularly vulnerable. With fewer opportunities for free English instruction, they will continue to struggle to communicate with their children and their teachers.”

Read the full story here.

Should names of the likes of Cesar Chavez and other Hispanic historical figures be erased from the history books? Some people in Texas seem to think so, and so the State Board of Education will put the question to a vote.

The online magazine Latina Lista takes a strong stance against this in an editorial titled “Latino leadership needed to counter TX State Board of Education’s attempt to write minorities out of history.”

The article cites a new study from the Southern Education Foundation that reports that for the first time in history, more that half of students in the 15 Southern states are children of color—African-American, Hispanic and Native American. Latina Lista sees this as a blatant reason not to cut minority leaders out of the textbooks.

These SBOE board members, along with their appointees, who adhere to the perspective that it is repugnant to teach children about the historical contributions of Latinos and African Americans show they are no better, and given recent quotes attributed to some who were involved in setting the Social Studies standards, are essentially rewriting U.S. history to conform to their distorted views of how they wish to see the United States.

Click here to read the full (heated) opinion.

Sad, but true — a local Chicago non-profit will be closing its doors after 18 years due to the economic downturn. The MultiCultural Development Center (MCDC) has been an area leader in education related to issues of diversity and cultural inclusion.

From the December 7 press release:

Through its many programs, thousands of participants gained new understanding and knowledge regarding the many people and cultures that make up the world in which we live. The goal of MCDC has been to help build a culture where the attitudes and actions of people foster mutual respect so that people of all backgrounds can fully participate in the workplace as well as in the community.

From 1991 to 2009, MCDC educated thousands of people by promoting cultural understanding and inclusiveness to enhance workplace performance and community relationships. The organization was best known for its educational events, led by presenters such as Dr. Roosevelt Thomas, Tim Wise, Angela Bassett, Jane Elliott and Lee Mun Wah, as well as its trademarked Chronology of World Cultural Events poster calendar.

Workforce Language Services is sad to see this great community resource go, and wishes everyone involved with MCDC the best in the coming year.

Visit the MCDC at http://www.mcdc.org/.

The NYTimes article “In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap” was a most-emailed article last week. We’ve written about this issue before — job applicants with ethnic-sounding names are having a harder time getting interviews and jobs than their white counterparts, despite being equally qualified.

With the job market in a crunch, applicants are doing everything they can to gain an edge over their competitors. But when highly-qualified African-Americans are changing the way their names appear on their résumés just to get a call back, its obvious that they are facing a more devastating disadvantage.

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

Another applicant interviewed uses the name Barry J. Sykes instead of the full Barry Jabbar Sykes, even though he’s always gone by Jabbar.

Although discrimination is rarely overt, interviewees report surprised faces on interviewers once they do get their feet in the door, with waned interest after the interviewers see the applicant is not white. Surprisingly, education, which would seem to level the playing field between whites and blacks, has made it more difficult for black job applicants. The unemployment rate for black male applicants with college degrees is twice that of their white peers.

Read the full article and interpretation here.

A school in Southern California, Grupo Educa, is working hard to keep Spanish alive in a young generation for whom English is the first language. Even in a region where almost everything seems bilingual, a constant wave of English from television and school is creating a gap between Spanish-speaking parents and their children.

Monica Robles, a 29-year-old Guadalajara native and teacher at the school, has seen this among her L.A. relatives from Mexico.

“I have all these cousins who are basically monolingual in Spanish,” Robles told me. “But all their kids are monolingual in English. They can barely communicate with each other.”

It actually takes a certain stubbornness to pass on Spanish to your kids in L.A. A lot of people here can say they understand the language — thanks, in part, to the proliferation of Spanish media — but struggle when forced to speak it.

The Grupo Educa weekend language school uses tactics like the “Spanish-language bear,” a stuffed animal who only speaks Spanish. Even though the teddy bear stays quiet, all the children must speak Spanish so he doesn’t feel left out.

Even in California, there can be a stigma associated with speaking Spanish. It was discouraged for many generations in many schools and communities, and even today English is viewed as the language of power. Writes Hector Tobar in an LA Times column, “Here, English is the language of success, while Spanish is the language of hard labor. Some people run away from it as fast as they can.”

But at the Grupo Educa school, the kids are proud of their Spanish-speaking skills, and their parents too.

Read more about the school in the LA Times article here.

New Bedford, MA believes that their community will succeed when immigrants have more opportunities in the workplace. Local business and civic leaders have launched an initiative called English Works Campaign that helps to eliminate the long waiting lists for English classes.

Anthony R. Sapienza, president of Abboud, a New Bedford manufacturer of men’s clothing, believes proficiency in English helps businesses and opens up more job opportunities to the workers.

Business leaders like Sapienza have seen the effects of workers learning English on the job. Workers can better understand their duties and communicate with management, creating a more productive workforce and local economy.

Sapienza says English skills increase efficiency, reduce errors, and improve employee retention. Immigrants can also feel more integrated into their new communities, and can better help their children who are growing up in English-speaking schools.

Manufacturing emphasizes these days an approach known as “lean manufacturing,” which involves teamwork. This type of collaboration is not possible with “15 different people speaking 15 different languages,” Sapienza said.

Beyond that, there are jobs requiring customer service or computer skills, where it helps to speak English, he said.

Learn more about what New Bedford is doing to improve its community and workplaces here.

Even though ELL (English Language Learners) students make up the fastest growing student population in the U.S., teacher-prep courses are not readying teachers for this reality.

The population has grown astoundingly: between 1996 and 2006, the overall U.S. student population has only increased by 3%, whereas the ELL student population has grown 60%. The students come from diverse language and cultural backgrounds, and are foreign and native born.

A Government Accountability Office study on teacher preparation reports that “English language learners…speak more than 400 languages, with almost 80 percent of these students speaking Spanish… These students also include refugees with little formal schooling and students who are literate in their native languages, resulting in a range of educational needs.”

Mary Ann Zehr of Education Week points out that most teacher prep courses focus on students with disabilities and provide field experiences with disabled students, while ELL instruction is not regularly provided. She writes:

Interestingly, administrators of teacher-prep programs told the GAO that one of the main reasons they don’t have stiffer requirements for teachers to be trained to work with ELLs is that their state standards don’t require it of them.

The GAO notes that state standards sometimes include limitations on the maximum number of program or credit hours, so I can see how it could be a challenge for teacher-prep programs to add a requirement that everyone take a course devoted to teaching ELLs.

But I wonder if blaming the lack of standards is really just an excuse on the part of the teacher-prep programs for not keeping up with how school demographics are changing in the United States.

Click here to read Zehr’s full opinion.

Anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language knows that it’s not easy to express yourself exactly as you’d like, because some words and expressions simply don’t transfer from one language to another. High school teacher Jenny Sonya Patino sees this struggle in her bilingual students all the time, what she calls their lack of “voice.”

Patino’s own mother grew up in a generation that strongly discouraged speaking Spanish in school. Because of her mother’s negative experience, Patino was raised speaking English only.

She remembers being hit for using Spanish when she didn’t know the English words to express herself. Her suffering was common for students like her back then.

It seems that schools have been set up to shame children out of Spanish as a way to accelerate English learning. This is quite obvious in recent generations. Many who were punished for speaking Spanish have chosen to raise their children to speak only English because of the pain they went through.

How then, Patino asks, can we now encourage bilingual students to find their “voice” in school today? Where does Spanish fit in an all-English classroom? How can schools help develop students’ “voice” in both languages?

Imagine the possibilities for our bicultural children if they were able to weave a precise selection of words from Spanish into their writing. They would have much more to offer because their means of expression would increase.

Patino offers the idea of incorporation of Spanish into English because, like Pat Mora’s famous poem “La Migra” written primarily in English with some important Spanish speckled throughout, it would give children the opportunity to include their unique bicultural experience into their expression.

Read Patino’s full column in the El Paso Times here.

A story from KTRE news in Texas reports that colleges and universities want to double Hispanic enrollment by 2015. While higher education institutions have seen a gradual increase in Hispanic enrollment over the last few years, rapid growth will be difficult to accomplish.

The article indicates that it is Hispanic students’ families that most influence their decision to go to college. While one family with no college graduates may not consider or encourage college in their childrens’ future, another family with the same educational background might value it more.

Universities face a few obstacles as well. Some worry that bilingual students will be recruited by companies before they reach college level.

Recruiting Hispanics is a big challenge, says Avant. “Each student that we have that are already bilingual, they have jobs waiting for them,” [Dean of Social Work Dr. Freddie] Avant said. High schools, community colleges, and minority conferences are targeted by university recruiters. Recently, the SFA Social Work departments partnered with the school of foreign language to seek applicants to its masters’ scholarship program.

The most successful way Dr. Avant found is reaching out to parents. He is encouraged by the fact that graduates will more than likely teach their own children the value of higher education. “Really being able to reach the students and their parents and saying these are some of the opportunites for their children to build a profession and a career.”

Learn more about this issue in the full article.

A Cafe Magazine article talks about the progress of dual-language schools in Chicago, and benefits their students are receiving.

To clarify: dual-language education is one of several approaches to bilingual education. Unlike ESL or transitional bilingual learning, the dual-language method teaches both English and Spanish to both English and Spanish native speakers. “Dual-language learning emphasizes the idea that English and Spanish are equal languages and that there is not a movement from a lesser language to a better language, but that both are beneficial to learning.”

St. Procopius Elementary protects the native language by teaching about 90% of the day in Spanish in Kindergarten, and progress to a 50/50 model by third grade. The school’s goal is to graduate completely bilingual and bicultural students.

Another dual-language model is Chicago Public Schools’ Inter American Magnet School, opened 30 years ago on the North Side.

Acting Principal Susan Kilbain states that the school’s program benefits all students. In a school of 650 students, about half of the students do not speak Spanish before entering the program. All teachers are bilingual and, unlike St. Procopius, it does not reach the 50/50 point until seventh and eighth grade. “It’s a very successful program,” Kilbain says. “It’s a schoolwide commitment.”

Dual-language education faces one problem: convincing parents, especially second and third generation Latinos who see a stigma associated with the Spanish language, that there is a benefit to being bilingual. Research aside, many parents tend to discourage learning Spanish.

Click here to read the full article.