Poll: Language barrier a 'risk' for Latinos in schools - USATODAY.com: With Hispanic enrollment surging in schools, many Spanish-speaking parents are having trouble helping their children with homework or communicating with U.S. teachers as English-immersion classes proliferate in K-12.An Associated Press-Univision poll highlights the language and cultural obstacles for the nation's Latinos, who lag behind others when it comes to graduating from high school.
The findings also raise questions about whether English-immersion does more to assimilate or isolate — a heated debate that has divided states, academics and even the U.S. Supreme Court. Arizona recently ordered its schools to remove teachers with heavy foreign accents from English-language instruction, while the Obama administration is seeking to push more multilingual teaching in K-12 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.'"
