Immigrant Teens Struggle With Formal Schooling - NYTimes.com: ...New York City classrooms have long been filled with children from all over the world, and the education challenges they bring with them. But hidden among the nearly 150,000 students across the city still struggling to learn English are an estimated 15,100 who, like Fanta, have had little or no formal schooling and are often illiterate in their native languages.
More than half of these arrive as older teenagers and land in the city’s high schools, where they must learn how to learn even as their peers prepare for state subject exams required for a diploma.
“They don’t always have a notion of what it means to be a student,” said Stephanie Grasso, an English teacher at Ellis Prep, which opened this fall and is New York’s first school devoted to this hard-to-educate population. “Certain ideas are completely foreign to them. They have to learn how to ask questions and understand things for themselves.”
The largest share of these students come from rural areas of the Dominican Republic, where they did not attend school because it was too far away or because they were working to support their families. Others fled religious persecution in Tibet, civil wars in West Africa or extreme poverty in Central America, often missing years of class while in refugee camps.
