I am quite convinced if you put an ad in the SJ Mercury News looking for unaccredited teachers fluent in english and spanish, you'd get thousands of responses. For a town the size of Mountain View, you need 100 to 150 total teachers. The "logistics" is a non-issue. But you have me interested in the WHY of what I propose is wrong to you. In this thread, I've posted links to studies of the very kinds of program I propose and the results are outstanding. I will present something that is anecdotal in support of my proposal. In my HS French class, within a couple of years we were reading Sartre in French and discussing it in French. A significant portion of the class was quite fluent in the language, in terms of speaking and reading/writing in it. All this was without the benefit of being able to go out on the street and speak the language with native speakers. And, of course, we learned to read, write, and do algebra and biology and physics and computers in our native language.
I think you'd have a problem in that every immigrant community would demand the creation of a public school to teach in their native language. And it is quite possible that it would be unlawful for the government to deny such demands.
If the local school board is in charge, then those immigrants could demand from them whatever they want that's lawful (e.g. can't demand teaching creationism). By your logic, wouldn't it be unlawful for govt. to teach in English? Consider: * There is no official language of the USA. * They print just about every legal document in California in at least 22 languages.
Please tell me what conclusion you think I've come up with? 9000 teachers over an 8 year period plus the time it took develop the program before a single teacher is recruited. You continue to only answer parts of what I'm asking which is why you keep presenting such straw men.
Obviously money could solve a lot of things, but there is still the logistics of being able to support this model in more than one location across the country. How do you make this a sustainable and portable model? My retort isn't a straw man because I'm not asking for a study. I'm pointing out that he hasn't addressed my questions, only parts of them. Mike, I haven't attacked that point of it at all. I said long ago in this thread that qualified has nothing to do with accreditation. When I talk of qualified teachers, I am only talking about teachers that are competent in the subjects they will be teaching.
Thousands of qualified applicants? The economy isn't that bad. Again, you are focusing on only 1 school district. Of course out of the metro area of SF-Oakland-SJ you could eventually staff 2 HS. That isn't a portable model though. The Phoenix metro area is huge and would need lots and lots of said high schools. An add in the paper isn't going to be enough to fill all of that.
By my logic? I am not making an argument. I am merely speculating. You can do your own legal research if you want the answer.
Admittedly I'm never really sure what Denny's point is but I gathered it was that students were to be segregated by and taught most subjects in their native language. I don't think he's intending some literal segregation into separate schools in every situation as you're implying. At least from the perspective of having "enough" native language teachers to do it, I don't see a problem. You can always play with class sizes, teacher duties, and so forth, especially if you're in a public school system. For that matter, there are all sorts of methods for teaching without having a teacher there in a traditional class setting. You could hire a guy to do video who lives in Spain if you wanted to, do correspondence courses, whatever. Most teachers can cover several subjects. There's all sorts of possibilities once you break out of the basic one classroom / one teacher idea. As it turns out, there's plenty of precedent for stuff like this. My high school offered a Chinese class taught by video. And if you look around the world, a lot of these notions of language don't make much sense in the first place, of course. My wife managed to get a very good education despite having textbooks in all sorts of languages she didn't speak. For lots of stuff, it just doesn't matter that much.
My argument is to put the kids first and do what makes sense within the school district. 2/3 of the kids are hispanic. Teaching them as we are is a miserable failure by just about any measure except for teachers and administrators being satisfied to have a job. So why not have 2 of the 3 schools be labeled as education in spanish and the other as a traditional english speaking school? When hispanic kids are taught by hispanics, even in english, they fare much better. When they're then taught in spanish, they excel. People can choose what school to send their kids to, and the district is small enough that it's no more than a 15 minute bus ride for the students furthest away from their school of choice. The financial cost of running 3 schools english only are things like art departments and music departments and computer labs and libraries can't be afforded; the money is spent on ESL/ELL. The educational cost is that all the kids, including the english speakers, fare worse on tests, and the whole school district suffers. The 3 schools in question aren't high schools. After 8 or 9 years of english classes at one of these spanish speaking schools, they'd be ready for english speaking HS and later on, college. The bottom line is a choice between having these kids count to 10 badly in english, or be as well educated in math in spanish and then translate that to the english speaking world.
The 14th amendment would be the law in question. If there's a violation of it in offering courses in the spanish language, then there's a violation of it in offering courses in the english language. For the very same reasons. I wonder if the education system has been challenged at the supreme court level.
I'm using the concept of entire high schools because it makes the "math" simpler. In the first post, Denny talked about the school district being 67% and needing 2 of the 3 HS's to teach in the native language. By talking about full HS's, I'm making sure that the courses include AP classes, multiple science options (my HS had botany, human anatomy, zoology, 3 advanced chemistry classes etc) I'm glad you brought that up as I was waiting for it. Alternative teaching means is really the elephant in the corner. As an example, some for profit universities are opening up for profit HS's that offer the majority of the course work online.
Skimming over this thread, I feel the need to comment: The majority of "minority" teachers suck, and are difficult to understand. It hinders my learning experience, and makes subjects twice as difficult to learn as with American teachers that I can actually understand.
There's probably a good argument to be made that your proposal would violate the 14th amendment. You'd probably eliminate the risk if you adjusted your proposal to teach students in multiple languages in the same school, instead of segregating them into separate schools. It's not the end of the research, though. You could also try the Equal Education Opportunities Act, the Bilingual Education Act, etc.
um, okay. As I said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if segregating non-English speakers into separate schools was unconstitutional. I think you're getting way off track here. teaching immigrants and children of immigrants only in their native language would doom them to a life of low-paying jobs. It is unassailable that every student should learn english if you want to elevate immigrants to a position where they can compete for high-paying, skilled positions. Many school districts have been struggling with these issues. I believe that many school districts have established programs where students initially learn the subjects in their native languages, and, over time, the english language becomes more predominant. After a few years, the children are only taught in english. Unlike CPaw, I believe that you can find qualified teachers to do this, especially in areas where there is a large community that speaks a particular language. Perhaps they couldn't find teachers to teach all classes, but I suspect that in most cases the students first learning english are probably in elementary and middle school, where they'd be able to learn a new language quicker and wouldn't have to be introduced to very complex subjects. Of course, I'm not an expert in any of this. How anyone can argue in favor of segregating immigrants and not teaching them english is beyond me.
I've consistently argued throughout this thread that the students should be taught english. Just not taught core subjects in english.
This is my biggest problem with this as well. Even if it is constitutional, it doesn't seem right to me to segregate the students, and I don't know why you feel that would be needed or a good idea. Put the new teachers in all three schools and I find the idea interesting, and the students would have more of a chance to practice their English outside of the English class.
