Study Faults Immigrants’ Education

Lack of funds, bilingual teachers and instructional materials in big-city schools are failing the educational needs of more than 2 million immigrant children, a new study says.

Urban school districts coping with funding reductions, aging infrastructure and union-management disputes are increasingly unable to adequately educate immigrant children, according to the RAND Corp. study released Wednesday.

The study, titled “Newcomers in American Schools,” was co-authored by Lorraine M. McDonnell and Paul T. Hill. For many big-city schools, Hill said, the demands to provide bilingual education are “madly unrealistic.”

Financial restrictions--not national standardized testing or shifting decision-making power to the local level--hamper urban districts’ ability to provide a sound education, the study said. Such schools “cannot improve simply by trying harder,” it said.

The study focused on children who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and who are clustered in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Miami and Houston. It also looked at Visalia, Calif., and Fairfax County, Va., rural districts with recent influxes of immigrant students.

The study analyzed 55 schools in the eight districts. Researchers also conducted telephone interviews with 240 district and school administrators, teachers, counselors and community representatives.

The 625,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District had 200,500 students with limited English proficiency and 89,048 students considered recent immigrants, those in the United States three years or less, in the 1990-91 school year.

McDonnell and Hill called for the federal government to help local districts increase the numbers of teachers who can speak to students in their native languages, including those of the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Funds are needed to provide instructional materials in languages that are not frequently used and where publishers have no financial incentive to fill the need, the study said.

It also called for expanding adult education programs for older immigrant youth who were unable to finish high school and for the immigrant parents of school-age children.