With Hispanic enrollment surging in schools, many Spanish-speaking parents are having trouble helping their children with homework or communicating with teachers as English-immersion classes proliferate in US schools.
An Associated Press-Univision poll highlights the language and cultural obstacles for US Latinos, the largest and fastest-growing minority group, which lags behind others when it comes to graduating from high school.
The findings also raise questions whether English-immersion does more to assimilate or isolate — a heated debate that has divided states, academics and even the US Supreme Court. Arizona recently ordered its schools to remove teachers with heavy foreign accents from English-language instruction, while US President Barack Obama’s administration is seeking to push more multilingual teaching in classrooms.
“The language barrier is still a serious risk factor for Hispanics,” said Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor emeritus of education who helped analyze the survey.
Even with many schools replacing Spanish with English in classrooms, for a student evaluated as learning English, “the odds of completing high school, and particularly college, significantly drops,” he said.
The nationwide poll, also sponsored by The Nielsen Company and Stanford University, found the vast majority of Hispanics — 78 percent — had children enrolled in K-12 classes that were taught mostly in English, compared with 3 percent in Spanish.
Just 20 percent of mainly Spanish-speaking parents said they were able to communicate “extremely well” with their child’s school, compared with 35 percent of Hispanics who speak English fluently.
About 42 percent of the Spanish speakers said it was easy for them to help with their children’s schoolwork, compared with 59 percent of the Hispanics who speak English well.
Children of Spanish-dominant parents were also less likely to seek help with homework from their families. Fifty-seven percent of those parents said their children came to them with school questions. That’s compared with 80 percent for mainly English-speaking Hispanic parents, who were also more likely to send their children to relatives or friends for answers.
The hardships often center on language for Latino parents, who value a high school diploma more than the general population and want to support their children, according to the poll. However, educators say the problems can be cultural, too, if some Hispanic parents feel less comfortable acting as vocal advocates for education, such as meeting with teachers or lobbying for an extra honors class.
Under federal law, if the parents’ English is limited, schools must provide notices and information about student activities in a language they can understand. The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is now reviewing some school districts to see if students are being denied a fair education.
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