Stop Blocking Immigrant Students Graduating!
The biggest single gap in educational outcomes for students in New York City is between those for whom English is their first language and English Language Learners, who are about 140,000 or 12.5% of NYC students. Subtracting ELLs, the graduation rate for New York schools is over 80%, but only 50% of those who are struggling with a new language get a diploma. This is a problem created by the system. Studies show it takes five to seven years to master a second language. The answer is more bilingual and dual language programs, and schools that are geared up to handle this. Newcomers or the International schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens achieve phenomenal results. But overall, the opposite is happening. Under Part 154 of the NY State education law stand-alone English as a New Language classes are being shut down and instead ENL instructors “push in” to other classes. And by eliminating local diplomas, forcing everyone to take the Regents exam even when they lack the language skills to pass, they are producing a whole layer of immigrant youth denied a high school diploma.
On top of that they are slashing ENL programs in adult education and public colleges, so that federal grants are now overwhelmingly geared to “workforce development” not general education. It’s all part of the anti-immigrant offensive, along with the deportations and I.C.E. raids. Nor did this start under Republican Donald Trump but under the Democratic deporter-in-chief Barack Obama. It’s not that immigrants don’t want to learn English. If instead of cutting back, the number of English language adult ed courses were quadrupled, the classrooms would be filled. And if they reworked the TASC high school equivalency exam so that English language learners could pass it, these students could have a real future as high school graduates. These punitive measures undertaken in the name of “raising standards” are in part a peculiarly local issue: students with a similar level of English language skills can get a diploma in New Jersey, but not in New York with its “rigorous” (i.e., exclusionary) Regents exam.
“Workforce Development” for Wage Slavery
But this does not just affect secondary schools, it is part of a broader offensive against education, as opposed to skills training, for immigrants, affecting adult education as well. The defunding of Adult Basic Education (federal funding has been reduced by 17% since 2010) in favor of workforce development represents part of a drive to place public educational funds in the service of corporations and their perceived needs rather than the educational needs of adult students and their families. In 2012 under Republican Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor’s Office of Adult Education was closed and folded into the Office of Human Capital Development. In 2014 Democrat de Blasio went even farther, renaming it the Office of Workforce Development.
The rationale for this shift of scarce resources to workforce training rather than basic education was the need to unify adult education with the need for employment readiness. The “work-first” corporate shills within the adult education community talked about ridding the field of the “silos” of separation. Of course, it was only the adult ed silo that was burned down, while the workforce training silo expanded to distort the purposes and popular education tradition of adult education. It should be obvious that literacy and English language acquisition is job readiness. But that is not the program of “work-first” ideologues. They point to a “skills gap.” But that gap is belied by the considerable underemployment in the city. And they suggest training programs. But many of those programs require high-level English language proficiency and high school diplomas.
The 2018 federal/state proposal for grant-funded programs dumped the English Language and Civics Education program for a program that requires students to be concurrently enrolled in ESOL and job training.
The 1996 Clinton “welfare-to-work” reform that was racist and punitive at its core is the model for this “work-first” emphasis. It propagated the false assumption that recipients of public assistance were lazy, work averse “takers.” Parents on welfare, mainly mothers who wanted to feed their children, were ripped out of education programs and shoved into unpaid, dead-end WEP (work experience program) jobs. Despite all the talk about education as the generator of economic equality, the poor, the oppressed and immigrants are denied effective educational opportunity. Capitalist politicians are now trying to apply the work-first doctrine to Medicaid recipients. The defunding of Adult Basic Ed/High School Equivalency (ABE/HSE) and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), and the devastation of family literacy programs widen economic inequality and increase intergenerational poverty. Although parents’ literacy level has a proven determining affect on children’s academic success, the corporate “job-creators” want to hustle English language learners and basic education students into narrowly conceived “job training.”
Of course, contextualized curriculum can be an effective classroom strategy for learning. And the “world of work” can be an important context. ESOL and ABE classes have pioneered such pedagogy for years. But the measure of success was language learning and academic progress, not any immediate job. The study of work and labor is essential to education. More than a hundred years ago, educational philosopher John Dewey argued for such an emphasis for all students. He saw that almost every town had an academic school and on the other side of the tracks a training school to produce compliant workers. And unlike our current crop of workforce developers, Dewey understood the political consequences of leaving marginalized populations in the educational dust. “Democracy cannot flourish,” he said, “where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class” (Democracy and Education [1916]). n
Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.