PRI – Dan Carsen
“Imagine being in second grade and trying to learn math in a language that you’re also learning. That’s the situation for an increasing number of students in the US and the South. If you focus too much on learning English — maybe in special, isolated classes where you don’t hear your peers speaking the native language — you fall behind in math, among other things. But you can’t learn those core subjects from a teacher you don’t understand. “We put them into school and we say, ‘we’re going to start in a new language — you have no labels for any of these things that you already know,” says author and researcher Patricia Gándara of UCLA. “I mean, the most critical, important learning that occurs in a person’s life is discounted. It’s crazy.” And those hurdles have increasing economic ramifications as language-minority students make up more and more of the school population of the South and the nation.”(more)