Teach Your Children Well

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On a cloudy winter afternoon, Florann Greenberg, a teacher at P.S. 14 in New York City, noticed that her first-grade class was growing fidgety. One girl, dropping all pretense of work, stared at the snow falling outside the schoolroom windows. Annoyed, Greenberg asked her, "Haven't you seen snow before?" The girl whispered, "No." Her classmates began shaking their heads. Then it dawned on Greenberg: of course these children had never seen snow; almost all were immigrants from Colombia and the Dominican Republic. Immediately, she changed the lesson plan. New topic: What is snow? How is it formed? How do you dress in the snow? What games do you play?

Such moments of cultural dissonance, followed by attempts to learn and teach from them, now take place daily in thousands of classrooms scattered across , the U.S. The children of the new immigrants, often immigrants themselves, have been arriving at these classrooms in growing numbers, and more are on the way. They are placing unprecedented demands on teachers, administrators and already strained school systems. To a heartening degree, however, educators are responding with fresh, pragmatic methods of coping with these new demands.

Isolated numbers hint at the scope of the challenge:

Total enrollment in U.S. public schools rose only 4.2% between 1986 and 1991, according to a 1993 Urban Institute study, while the number of students with little or no knowledge of English increased 50%, from 1.5 million to 2.3 million.

In the Washington school system, students speak 127 languages and dialects; across the Potomac, in Fairfax County, Virginia, that figure is more than 100.

In California public schools 1 out of 6 students was born outside the U.S., and 1 in 3 speaks a language other than English at home. The Los Angeles school system now absorbs 30,000 new immigrant children each year.

Such figures, startling as they are, have stirred little national attention, in part because the new immigrant families have not spread themselves uniformly across the country. A recent Rand Corp. study found that 78% of school-age immigrants who have been in the U.S. three years or less live in just five states: California, New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois. Like most statistics, this one can be misleading if it is taken to mean that the surge of immigrant students is solely a big-state, big-city concern. In absolute terms, even a small number of such students can profoundly affect the way a school district goes about its business.