Law makes few allowances for immigrant students

Law makes few allowances for immigrant students

12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, June 11, 2008
By HOLLY K. HACKER / The Dallas Morning News
hhacker@dallasnews.com

The sweeping federal school reform law known as No Child Left Behind has been a mixed blessing for immigrant schoolchildren.

On the plus side, they get more attention. The law, in effect since 2002, requires schools to report academic progress of categories of students, including ethnic minorities, kids from low-income families and those learning English. Most immigrant Texas kids are in one or more of the groups.

But that extra scrutiny comes with extra pressure. All kids – no matter whether they've mastered English – are supposed to meet the academic standards.

And if they don't? Schools face sanctions, such as having to let parents send their children to another campus. Teachers and principals can be reassigned or fired from schools that repeatedly fail to meet standards. The state also rates schools and has a similar set of penalties for those that consistently underperform. The state system was a model for No Child.

The federal law takes a one-size-fits-all approach, but schools and districts are diverse, Dallas Superintendent Michael Hinojosa says. Some school systems have a lot of immigrants, low-income kids and students learning English, while others have very few.

Students learning English generally fare worse on the state's TAKS exams, with the gaps tending to widen significantly in higher grades. In Dallas, for example, 72 percent of students learning English passed the fourth-grade TAKS math test this spring, compared to 77 percent of all students, according to preliminary results released recently. By 11th grade, the gap had grown; 49 percent of English-learners passed the math TAKS, compared to 75 percent of all students.

New immigrants get some testing exemptions during their first years in the U.S., but they have to pass, in English, the 11th-grade tests to earn a diploma. Those tests are in language arts, math, science and social studies.

The state and federal standards also require students to graduate on time – four years in Texas. That means teen immigrants who come to Dallas have four years to earn a diploma, just like everyone else – even if they don't understand English well or arrive with gaps in their home-country schooling.

"Districts that have a lot of immigrant students have a higher bar to clear in a shorter period of time," Dr. Hinojosa said.

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