Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012 - 5

online>> www.edweek.org/go/dc12

HeritaGe proFile: meXiCo
Language Learning Twice as Hard For Mayan Student From Mexico
It’s taken less than five years for Luis Mis Mis to learn two languages—English and Spanish—since arriving in San Francisco from his birthplace in the state of Yucatán in Mexico. A Mayan Indian, Mis Mis, who is 18, is a bit atypical compared with most students of Mexican heritage attending school in the United States. He was raised mostly by his grandparents, who spoke only the indigenous Mayan language. As a child, he rarely attended school and spent much of his time helping his grandfather work on the family’s small farm. In 2008, when his mother came back to Yucatán to bring him and his siblings to join her and their father in California, he had not seen his parents for nearly 10 years. In the United States, he landed at Newcomer High School in San Francisco, one of the nation’s oldest secondary schools for new immigrants. It has since closed down because of budget cuts. Speaking only a little Spanish at the time, Mis Mis struggled to communicate with teachers and fellow students, none of whom spoke Mayan. After seven months at Newcomer High, where he learned Spanish from his peers and took English-as-a-second language courses, Mis Mis transferred to Abraham Lincoln High School, a large, comprehensive San Francisco high school where a majority of students are Asian-American. He continued in esl courses for another year and a half at Lincoln and was then reclassified as proficient in English—a remarkably short amount of time for an older immigrant student to learn the language. Still, he needed a fifth year of high school to earn enough credits to graduate. But with the support of the administration at Lincoln High and the advocacy of Spanish teacher Suzann Baldwin and environmental science teacher Vanessa Carter, Mis Mis has been able to stay at Lincoln for an extra year. Without their assurances that he could stay another year, Mis Mis says he would have dropped out and sought a General Educational Development certificate, or ged. Last year, he earned a 4.0 grade point average; this year, he’s enrolled in Advanced Placement Spanish with students who are all native speakers. Mis Mis has never told his parents about his successes in school and has only shared a little with them about his ambitions: college and a career as a musician or an environmental science teacher. This spring, he’s been working with Baldwin, the Spanish teacher, to figure out how he can pay to attend a four-year college in California. “I’m not sure they would understand,” he says of his parents. “They work really hard and probably want me to do the same thing to help out.” Mis Mis spends all of his time outside of school “playing guitar, reading, writing, and working on my own to study and improve,” he says. “I want to have a good life.” n —LesLi a. maxweLL

meXiCo
selected statistics on children of mexican heritage in the u.s.

Luis Mis Mis, 18, attends an English-literature class at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco. A fifth-year senior, he spoke Mayan—not English or Spanish—when he arrived in the United States at age 14.

70.4% 8.3% 65.2% 43.8%

share of latino children of mexican descent

mexican-Heritage education attainment (ages 25-64)
2.6 7.0

l less than high
school

mexican-heritage children who are foreign-born

l High school
21.5 42.3
diploma (including Ged)

l some college
(including associate degree)

mexican-heritage children who live in low-income families

26.5

l Bachelor’s degree l Graduate or
professional degree

mexican-heritage children whose parents are fluent speakers of english

sourCe: epe research Center, 2012. analysis of data from the american Community survey (2008-2010), u.s. Census Bureau.

But the survey results don’t capture the full English-literacy skills of a respondent, and they also do not show how many children who report speaking English might also be receiving English-language services in their schools, Fry says. Still, more than 77 percent of the 5.3 million English-language learners in the nation’s public schools are from Spanish-language backgrounds, according to data for the 2008-09 school year from the U.S. Department of Education. And how successful those Englishlearners are in acquiring the language has an important impact on the overall achievement picture for Latinos. Some of the lowest-achieving Latinos are those who attend U.S. schools for seven or more years without ever meeting criteria to be considered fluent in English. Those

life in isolated communities that are overwhelmingly poor makes it difficult for successive generations to change their trajectory in an upward direction. Many parents of Latino youths— especially those who come from Mexican-immigrant families—have had little formal education themselves, especially at the high school level, either in their home countries or the United States, Gándara says. “This is really an important context for people to understand when it comes to our societal expectations that children will complete high school and, hopefully, go onto colCollege Expectations lege,” Gándara says. “With Latinos, children are often living in commuFor many Latino families, the nities where no one has completed combination of a continuing cycle high school or even had contact of low educational attainment and with high school, and where people

students may sound fluent, but they lack the reading and writing skills to be successful in accessing core academic content. “For these kids, the problem is that they aren’t getting the supports they need to address the reading and writing skills that they lack, and they also aren’t getting access to the mainstream curriculum that they need to graduate and succeed,” says Patricia Gándara, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-director of the university’s Civil Rights Project/ Proyecto Derechos Civiles.

don’t know how to go to college or why you would go to college.” For Latinas, because of gender stereotypes and factors such as the pressure to make family a priority, the desire to attend college can be outmatched by the expectation that it won’t be an option for them. In the Mexican-American community, children who are third generation (born to U.S.-born parents) or higher often fare worse than their relatives who were immigrants themselves or second generation, a phenomenon that has been studied in Mexican-American families. Some of that is explained, Gándara says, by the tendency of Latino students to attend schools with few peers who are college-oriented and college-bound. “Peers are huge,” Gándara says. “If you are exposed to peers who are

college-oriented, you are naturally going to hear things from them about how to get over the ivy walls. Latinos are not getting the kind of access to college-bound peers who are oftentimes the biggest agents for information and motivation.” Pompa, of the National Council of La Raza, believes the core problem is not the ethnic or socioeconomic homogeneity of the public schools that many Latino students attend, but what the educators who work in those schools expect and demand from them. “To say that these kids only have each other as role models, it’s a weak argument when you consider the world we live in,” she says. “To doom a school because it’s mostly Hispanic or [English-language learners], that’s the epitome of low expectations.” n
diplomas Count 2012 |

ramin rahimian for education week

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Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012

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