New Column: Improving Our Immigration and Education Debates

Dual language learners (DLLs) are a big part of the how immigration affects our political economy” and the “how do we improve our schools” stories in the United States. It’s impossible to get a realistic or serious view of either without taking DLLs into account. But, for some reason, we don’t talk about them much when we’re talking about immigration or education. In a U.S. News and World Report column out today, I explain that this is a mistake:

[T]hese kids are the country’s future workforce. Taxes on their future wages will pay for your retirement programs someday. However important present-day partisan positioning on immigration may seem, serious presidential candidates should be talking about how to ensure that U.S. schools prepare these kids to succeed.

How? Unfortunately, these children get almost as little attention in education discourse as they get in immigration debates. When we argue about education policy, we usually talk about “low-income” children or (even more amorphous) “the underserved.” Even though nearly one in three Head Start participants is an English language learner, even though more than one in five U.S. children speaks a non-English language at home, many schools are struggling to update their instructional models to support these students’ linguistic and academic development.

In most cases, this isn’t because educators are unwilling to change how they teach English language learners. Rather, it’s because they aren’t familiar with alternatives to their current approaches.

That’s why my colleagues and I at New America recently published a series of reports exploring efforts to better support these kids at schools in San Antonio; Washington, D.C.; and Portland, Oregon’s David Douglas School District. Each of these communities is investing in a few big things: quality early education for young English language learners, thoughtful engagement with multilingual families, as much support as possible for preserving students’ native languages as they learn English, and anti-poverty efforts that simultaneously benefit adults and children.

Click here to read the entire column.“