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]

Omg this is some fantasy land BS right here 
Other posters have already covered the truth about elementary - your average or above average kid will be basically ignored and handed a book, ipad or some coloring sheets or simple worksheets during 75% of the day. The teacher will say glowing things bc your kid doesn’t have behavior issues and bc they teach at a level sufficient for grade level your child will be excelling. Side note - “grade level” is a low bar bc it’s a universal standard for an slightly below average student.  If your child is struggling they will sweep it under the rug bc they don’t want to have to deal with parents who are going to push for services bc they already have too many kids and too few people to provide services.

also as far as having an UN delegation for friends like the PP claims - yeah that doesn’t happen. Kids self segregate in elementary and the non English speaking kids stick together as do their parents. Shocker - their parents don’t trust white Americans a lot of the time and don’t want to get involved with them more than necessary. I don’t necessarily blame them on this one. 
i 
[/quote]

I have a similar experience both as a parent of a middle class child in a high poverty school k-2 and someone working at such a school for a short time (I left because the atmosphere was just so depressing).[/quote]

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