Question: Why would the U.S. Department of Education insist that a kid who
has little or no English take his year-end tests in English? There are some
4,000 such students here in Arkansas alone. Everybody knows they're going to
flunk the test. Why make them take it?
Answer: So we'll know who these kids are, where they are, and just how far
behind in English they are. That way, we can concentrate on helping them
pass the test in the future.
Why bother? Because it's important that these youngsters become fluent in
the language of their adopted country. Let's not pretend that they're being
educated (and prepared for citizenship) if they don't know how to read and
write English in this one nation indivisible by language.
Here in Arkansas, such students have been allowed to make notebooks
portfolios -- to demonstrate their educational progress. But everybody
knows, or should know, that putting together a scrapbook is not the same as
being fluent in English.
Now that the feds are insisting that these kids be tested, folks are
complaining. But the feds are to be complimented, not badmouthed, when they
take this No Child Left Behind business seriously. And that means not
leaving little Jorge or Maria behind, either.
Various alternative ways to test such kids are being explored by the
specialists who teach ESL, or English as a Second Language, but none of
those ways sound as good as preparing the student to take the test with
better results next time.
Yes, it's hard. But better to accept a tough challenge than spend all this
time and energy devising ways around it.
The worst of these cop-outs is the suggestion that the student be given the
standardized test in his native language. That's a great way to encourage a
bilingual society complete with bilingual tensions. See Canada/Quebec.
Granted, the comparison is not exactly accurate. Because our population is
even more diverse than Canada's. Go that route and we'll soon have a
trilingual, quadrilingual and generally multilingual country, considering
how varied the waves of American immigration tend to be.
Canada's bilingualism would look simple compared to the patchwork of
languages Americans would be using if everybody got to take standardized
tests in his own native tongue -- from Armenian to Zulu.
I confess that, coming from a Yiddish-speaking home, I never had any formal
education in mama-loshen, my mother tongue.
I had to make do with my immigrant mother's helping me piece out the
headlines letter-by-letter in the Forvertz, the Yiddish paper that showed up
in the mailbox every week. I can still hear her reading the tearjerkers in
the advice column to my grandmother. (Even then I knew they weren't exactly
great literature.)
If only I'd been given some Yiddish education, I might now be able to read
Sholem Aleichem, the creator of the Tevye stories, as in "Fiddler on the
Roof," in the original. Not to mention I.L. Peretz, the brothers Singer,
and, well, a whole literature and therefore world. Yiddish may be a small,
even diminutive, language, but there are those who love it.
Still, I'm grateful that, once I entered public school, it was conducted in
English, including the tests. The monolingual may not believe it, but it
seemed perfectly natural to switch from Yiddish at home to English in school
and then go on to Hebrew School in the afternoons.
A child's sponge-like mind can do that. Kids in Spanish-speaking homes all
over the country are probably changing languages just as naturally today
whenever they walk in and out the door.
Rather than water down the tests, let's invest in intensive language
training for the kids who are still struggling with English, whether they're
Chinese in San Francisco, Cajun in South Louisiana, Portuguese in Boston --
or Hispanic in Arkansas.
Because they're all American, and one can scarcely be American without
knowing English, or what passes for it on this side of the Atlantic --
whether the dialect being spoken is Maine Yankee or Arkinsaw Suthuhn.
What's the best approach to take toward kids without much English?
Well, I've been reading about a fifth-grader at the John Tyson Elementary
School in Springdale, Ark. His literacy instructor, Therese Thompson, isn't
about to wait the estimated two years it's going to take for the ESL
establishment to come up with alternatives to the regular tests. She notes
that the state's next standardized exams will be given in April. "We've got
all of December, January, February and March to get him there," she says.
That's the spirit. What's needed is not non-English tests, or tests that use
"simplified" English, but more Therese Thompsons.