Reply to What does having a high percentage of English learners in a class mean in practice?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I teach in a school which has about 60% EL population.  What does this mean?
Amazing kids from all over the world, who are eager to learn, caring, interesting and funny people.  Many of them are smart enough to speak 2, 3 or 4 languages. 
 
My kids who aren't as gifted linguistically, those who can only speak English, are not put on computers so I can "catch everyone else up".  Nor are they given a book to read while I "catch everyone else up".  In fact, the students who are only able to speak one language are often just in much of "catching up" as my bilingual and multilingual kids, if not more.  Yes, even the white, middle income kids need remediation.

I think we need to stop saying our bilingual and multilingual kids need remediation and insist that every single student become proficient in at least two languages in order to graduate 8th grade.  And then let's test the kids whose first language is English and see how they perform on assessments after a year or two in Urdu or Spanish or Polish.  My guess is everyone else would have to sit around waiting while the "I only speak English" crowd has to catch up.

But, to the OP's question, it means that your child will have friends from different places, who speak different languages and what a rich school environment that will be!  I put my own child in a heavily Spanish speaking school.  She's now fully bilingual and headed to college on a full ride scholarship in her field of choice.  We Americans need to stop understanding "smart" as a 1600 SAT and a top ten university and need to start understanding smart as learning more than one language.  [/quote]

This seems overly optimistic to me.  We were in a diverse school and ended up having a child with dyslexia.  I think if you have a test taking wunderkind like above they will do well in nearly any school.  My kid was just ignored.  Granted this was MCPS but APS seems equally hair on fire bad at basics.  Also question the friendships this poster says came about - our diverse hood either had mama trying to recreate Mumbai - only play with other boys from Mumbai, cram school or major language differences (parents couldn’t coordinate play dates in English): also as one child got older he found a good friend via soccer but kid lived in such a scary neighborhood- and had likely gang members as friends we said no go to meeting up.  Sorry to be the truth teller here but we moved from said diverse hood and at least got English speaking parents who could arrange play dates.[/quote]

This sounds very similar to our experience too, except the problem was that parents spoke very little English and had no interest in playdates or birthdays because they celebrated and hung out within the diaspora.
Fortunately got a spot at a good school in 3rd grade and it was night and day- my kid made a lot of friends. 
Of course it was 60% ELL and low income and not 30% but still. [/quote]

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