Andrew Coyne: Politicians need to forget about polls and do the right thing

2017/03/15 1 Comment

Great column by Coyne “rather trust the data:”

Liberals used to take a dim view of this sort of perception-based decision-making. When the Harper government claimed it didn’t matter if the official statistics showed crime rates falling to their lowest levels in decades, because people felt as if crime was rising, Liberals rightly scoffed. Now a similar fact-free feeling — the middle class is getting nowhere — is the foundation of their whole economic platform.

Liberals are by no means the only ones playing this game. Rather than answer questions raised by her signature proposal to subject every refugee, immigrant or tourist to a quiz on their belief in “Canadian values” — questions such as why this is needed, what it would accomplish, and what it would cost — Kellie Leitch refers to polls showing sizeable majorities of Canadians support the idea.

Likewise, those raising the alarm over Motion 103, unable to answer how a parliamentary motion with no legal force or effect could restrict free speech, have lately taken to citing polling data showing a majority of Canadians with varying concerns about the motion.

It’s easy enough to gin up a poll in support of just about anything, of course, depending on how you ask the question. The people waving them about today are in many cases the same ones who not long ago were railing ago about all the pollsters who failed to call Donald Trump’s victory (in fact, they called the vote to within a percentage point: Clinton beat him by two points, instead of the three points in the consensus forecast).

But let’s suppose these polls are genuine reflections of current public opinion. That’s a good answer to the question: what does the public think on these issues? It’s no answer at all to the question: are they right to think so? Yet that is how they are invoked: if that’s how the public feels, it must be true.

Skeptics are challenged, in tones of indignation: what, so you’re saying that millions of Canadians … are wrong?

Well, yes. What of it?

“Millions of people” are quite capable of believing things that aren’t true, particularly on matters to which they have given very little thought and with which they have little personal experience. The political science literature is filled with examples of people cheerfully offering their opinions to pollsters on entirely fictional events and people. As Will Rogers used to say, “there’s lots of things that everybody knows that just ain’t so.”

Climate skeptics rightly make the point that the overwhelming consensus of expert opinion on global warming is not enough, in itself, to prove it is right. Science is not a popularity contest: throughout history, individuals have stood against conventional opinion, and been vindicated, But let 1,340 randomly selected Canadians have their dinner interrupted to answer a question from a telemarketer about a subject they’ve barely heard of, and suddenly it’s gospel.

Experts, it is true, can sometimes be mistaken. But if experts can get it wrong, the public is at least as capable of it. And yet these days we are enjoined to reflexively reject the former, and just as reflexively to believe the latter. Perhaps we should rather trust the data.

Source: Andrew Coyne: Politicians need to forget about polls and do the right thing | National Post

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Immigration et religion: Lisée blâme l’inaction de Couillard

2017/03/15 Leave a comment

Lisée is like a gnat, buzzing around these issues and changing his positions regularly.

A bit rich to blame all Quebec’s integration challenges and issues on Liberal governments, given the role of the PQ in recent years of playing identity politics, one that Lisée has also participated in:

Le gouvernement Couillard est responsable de l’insatisfaction exprimée par plusieurs citoyens quant à l’intégration des immigrants et au port de signes religieux, estime le chef péquiste Jean-François Lisée.

Le chef du Parti québécois a été invité, lundi à Montréal, à commenter les résultats d’un sondage Crop réalisé pour le compte de Radio-Canada.

Ce sondage indique notamment qu’une majorité de gens pensent que le port de vêtements religieux devrait être interdit pour les éducateurs (66%), les personnes en autorité (76%) et les autres employés des services publics (67%).

De même, 57% des Québécois qui ont répondu au sondage jugent que les musulmans sont mal intégrés, soit 38% «plutôt mal» et 19% «très mal». Ils sont 7% à estimer qu’ils sont très bien intégrés et 35%, plutôt bien intégrés.

Interrogé à ce sujet lors d’une conférence de presse à Montréal, après son retour d’un voyage à saveur économique en Europe, M. Lisée a blâmé le gouvernement Couillard et les gouvernements libéraux précédents pour leur inaction en la matière depuis des années.

«Les Québécois sont impatients face à l’incapacité du gouvernement Couillard d’agir sur les signes religieux, sur les accommodements religieux», a conclu M. Lisée.

Il s’est par ailleurs dit heureux de constater que pour bien des questions du sondage, les Québécois ont offert des réponses similaires aux autres Canadiens.

Source: Immigration et religion: Lisée blâme l’inaction de Couillard | Lia Lévesque | Politique québécoise

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Europe’s high court rules workplace headscarf ban is not ‘direct discrimination’

2017/03/15 Leave a comment

Hard to see how this policy helps integration. Not as neutral as the Court ruled given that main focus was with respect to the hijab.

Will companies now also police any employee wearing a small crucifix?:

Private businesses in Europe can forbid Muslim women in their employ from wearing headscarves if the ban is part of a policy of neutrality within the company and not a sign of prejudice against a particular religion, the European Court of Justice said Tuesday.

Such a ban doesn’t constitute what Europe’s high court calls “direct discrimination.”

The conclusion by the highest court in the 28-nation European Union was in response to two cases brought by a Belgian and a French woman, both fired for refusing to remove their headscarves. It clarifies a long-standing question about whether partial bans by some countries on religious symbols can include the workplace.

The court’s response fed right into the French presidential campaign, bolstering the platforms of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, a leading contender in the spring election who wants to do away with all “ostentatious” religious symbols in the name of secularism, and conservative François Fillon, who hailed the court’s decisions. France already bans headscarves and other religious symbols in classrooms as well as face-covering veils in streets.

However, critics quickly voiced fears that the decision risks becoming a setback to all working Muslim women.

“Today’s disappointing rulings … give greater leeway to employers to discriminate against women — and men — on the grounds of religious belief,” said a statement by Amnesty International. “At a time when identity and appearance has become a political battleground, people need more protection against prejudice, not less.”

The Open Society Justice Initiative, which submitted a brief supporting the women, expressed disappointment.

“The group’s policy officer, Maryam Hmadoum, contended that the decision “weakens the guarantee of equality that is at the heart of the EU’s antidiscrimination directive,” which the Court of Justice cited in weighing the cases.

The European Court of Justice made separate decisions on the cases, but linked them.

In the Belgian case, Samira Achbita, a receptionist at a security firm, was fired in June 2006 for wearing an Islamic headscarf, banned in a new set of internal rules by her company that prohibited visible signs of their political, religious or philosophical beliefs. Belgium’s Court of Cassation sought guidance from the Luxembourg-based European court which rules on cases involving EU law, which applies to all EU members.

While the cases were linked by the European court, the French case differs and offers Asma Bougnaoui a reason for optimism because the reasons for her dismissal as a design engineer were based, not on internal rules, but on the complaint of a customer unhappy with her Islamic headscarf.

The court said that an employer’s readiness to take into account the wishes of a customer, not internal policy, don’t qualify for the measure set out by the European Union: a “genuine and determining occupational requirement.”

Source: Europe’s high court rules workplace headscarf ban is not ‘direct discrimination’ | Toronto Star

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Reevely: Massive collection of race-based data part of Ontario’s anti-racism strategy

2017/03/15 Leave a comment

It all starts with having more and better data and ensuring that the data is consistent and reliable.

While there will be differing interpretations of what the data means, without having good data, society is flying blind when dealing with complex issues. While data and evidence are never perfect, they do provide a sounder basis for policy choices and political discussion:

Ontario will start collecting masses of race-based data on the programs in its biggest ministries this year, hoping to use the information to find and help stamp out systemic racism.

That’s a big deal in the provincial government’s new anti-racism strategy, a three-year plan that took a year to create.

Much of the strategy is high-level stuff, scooping together things particular ministries were doing and calling it a plan. That includes a training program for staff in the courts system so they better understand aboriginal culture, trying to make the boards of Children’s Aid Societies more diverse and having the first black judge on the Ontario Court of Appeal assess the way police forces are overseen. All of it noble, some of it genuinely consequential, most of it already underway.

There’s also this: “To address racial inequities, we need better race-based disaggregated data — data that can be broken down so that we further understand whether specific segments of the population are experiencing adverse impacts of systemic racism,” the strategy says.

They’re going to start with health, primary and secondary education, justice and child welfare. That is, in the areas where government policy really makes and breaks lives.

The systems in those various ministries generate boatloads of data already, from wait times for surgeries to rates of readmission for patients in particular hospitals, from school occupancy numbers to results from Grade 6 math tests, from trial times to recidivism rates. “Disaggregating” that data means pulling apart the stats by race, routinely, in a way that typically raises more questions than it answers.

So if 15 per cent of the Queensway Carleton Hospital’s patients are back in hospital within 30 days of being discharged, we’ll monitor whether the stat is the same for members of different racial groups. If not, why is that?

Pulling all this together means devising a consistent approach so the information is collected, crunched and presented in a standard form, while protecting privacy. Which is hard enough, and that’s before we get to what we’ll do with the information.

This is, historically, very touchy. Systemic racism “can be unintentional, and doesn’t necessarily mean that people within an organization are racist,” the government says, but being accused of systemic racism sets off the same sorts of reactions as being accused of the traditional kind.

Here in Ottawa, the police spent two years tracking race-related data on their traffic stops, following a human rights complaint by a black teenager who said he’d been pulled over only because an officer was suspicious of him driving a Mercedes (which was his mother’s). When researchers managing the study released their findings last fall, they reported that drivers the police identified as black or Middle Eastern were stopped at rates many times their population shares.

A companion study found some officers deliberately misrecording the races of people they’d stopped, staying away from some parts of town and otherwise behaving differently to shift the stats so they’d suggest less racism. To whatever extent police officers changed their behaviour so as to actually behave less racistly when they knew their work was being measured, that’s a good thing in itself, of course.

Ontario’s chief human-rights commissioner Renu Mandhane argued the stats are consistent with racial profiling; Chief Charles Bordeleau of the police defended his officers, saying there’s nothing going on in the police force beyond what’s normal in society at large.

(Something similar happened when the Toronto police released statistics on the people they “carded” — stopped in the street to ask for their ID papers. Way more black and brown people than whites, for reasons that were argued about for years. Yasir Naqvi, the then-provincial minister responsible for policing, imposed new rules scaling the practice back.)

You can use such statistical findings in a lot of ways, including flatly racist ones. Maybe the police are irrationally suspicious of certain visible minority groups. Maybe certain visible minority groups are worse drivers. Maybe they’re more likely to be driving in areas patrolled by police — a possibility that opens whole vistas of speculation about why either of those things might happen. Maybe it’s a combination of things. Collecting the data doesn’t solve the problem.

We can argue about why people in different ethnic groups have different dealings with the authorities, and heaven knows we do. Sometimes to a fault. But at least with traffic stops and carding, nobody can say any longer that it doesn’t happen, and that’s a step forward.

Source: Reevely: Massive collection of race-based data part of Ontario’s anti-racism strategy | Ottawa Citizen

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Anxious about immigration? Here’s some food for thought – Geddes

2017/03/15 Leave a comment

Another good piece by John Geddes, with this excellent summary of the data and evidence from the latest OECD immigrant indicators report.

I am a great fan of these reports (used it for the above summary table in Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote) and am using it to prepare for an upcoming seminar in Copenhagen.

I generally find these data based comparisons more informative than the policy comparison indexes like MIPEX or the Multiculturalism Policy Index although both, of course, are helpful to understanding and discussion.

As with previous and other studies, the sharp contrast between immigration-based countries, particularly Canada, Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent, the USA, is striking:

All those images of border-crossing migrants, and swaggering tough talk about what to do about them from some federal Conservative leadership aspirants, have prompted a lot of discussion about how Canada absorbs newcomers, and if we do it differently, maybe better, than other countries.

My colleague Scott Gilmore warned here that we should brace for anti-immigrant populism to rise in Canada, as it has in other countries after the immigrant portion of their populations reached a certain level. I reported here on research that suggests that where immigrants tend to live in Canada, and how they vote, makes the path to political power steeper for right-leaning populists in this country than in the U.S. and Europe.

No matter how you see the issue, understanding how immigrants fare in Canada suddenly seems essential—if the debate is going to be about more than hunches. If you’re really gripped by the subject, you might want to take a look at “Indicators of Immigrant Integration 2015: Settling In,” by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.” Here’s some of what jumped out at me from that study of the OECD’s 35 member countries [I have only listed the titles, the article has charts and narrative – well worth reviewing]:

  1. The Big Picture

  2. Recent Change and Stability

  3. Points of Origin Vary

  4. A Gender Gap

  5. Credentialed Newcomers

  6. Second-Generation Acceleration

  7. But Catching Up Isn’t Easy

  8. … And Some Will Stall

Source: Anxious about immigration? Here’s some food for thought – Macleans.ca

Filed under Immigration, Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

More men moving into women-dominated fields of work: U.S. study

2017/03/13 Leave a comment

Important study that helps explain some of the political currents. Not sure if there has been equivalent research in Canada:

Even as women moved into men’s jobs, in fields like medicine, law and business, men did not flock to the lower-status jobs that women mostly did.

That’s changing. Over the past 15 years, according to a new study in the United States, men have been as likely to move into predominantly female jobs as the other way around – but not all men. It’s those who are already disadvantaged in the labor market: black, Hispanic, less educated, poor and immigrant men. While work done by women continues to be valued less, the study demonstrates, job opportunities divide not just along gender lines but also by race and class.

At the same time, the women who have continued to make inroads into more prestigious male-dominated professions in that period are likely to be white, educated, native-born and married, according to the research, which is not yet published.

“More privileged men can resist entry into predominantly female occupations more readily than their less privileged counterparts,” said Patricia A. Roos, a sociologist at Rutgers, who did the study with Lindsay M. Stevens, a sociology doctoral student there.

The gender composition of jobs matters for reasons of equality – fields with a majority of men pay 21 per cent more than those with mostly women. Also, the fastest-growing jobs are dominated by women, while the fastest-shrinking ones are predominantly male.

The jobs that have become more female are generally professional or managerial ones, the study found. Some examples of high-paying, high-status jobs done mostly by men in 2000 that had an increased share of women by 2014: supervisors of scientists, which had 19 per cent more women, podiatrists with 8 per cent more and chief executives with 5 per cent more.

Jobs that were mostly female in 2000 and have become more masculine are lower-status jobs. The share of women who work in stores selling products and answering customer questions fell 10 per cent; the share for crossing guards and counter clerks each fell 7 per cent, and for textile workers it fell 5 per cent.

Men are much less likely to have moved into the higher-status professions that are majority women, like nursing and high school teaching (they became more male by about 2 per cent between 2000 and 2014.) The share of women grew slightly in two female-dominated professions, social worker and librarian.

Race, ethnicity and gender have always contributed to who does what work. Women have typically entered occupations when men find better ones, and immigrants have filled the ones women left behind. In the 1800s, according to previous research by Roos and Barbara Reskin of the University of Washington, Irish men replaced native-born white women in textile mills. The women moved to middle-class jobs like teaching – which native-born white men were leaving.

The current patterns reflect widening inequality as a whole, said Leslie McCall, associate director of the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality at CUNY, who was not involved in the new research but said it was consistent with past findings. She said it shows that policymakers who want to improve jobs should focus not on gender or race, but on general working conditions at the bottom of the income ladder.

“People are focusing too much on the white, male working class,” she said, “but if you look at the working class more broadly, the issues are quite similar across all groups: wages, economic security, employment support, training.”

The Rutgers researchers used census data to track 448 occupations. Occupations were considered male or female if they had more than 60 per cent of one sex in 2000, and they were considered to have masculinized or feminized if the percentage of men or women changed by at least 4 per cent by 2014. This happened in 27 per cent of occupations.

Health care showed some of the most striking changes: Every health care job except one is more female than in 2000. (The exception is radiation therapists: from 72 per cent female to 65 per cent.) The share of female dentists, optometrists and veterinarians each increased by more than 10 per cent. The majority of doctors are still men, but women have become the majority in some health care specialties, including pharmacists and veterinarians.

Men’s movement into low-skilled women’s jobs since 2000 is partly a result of the hollowing out of middle-skill jobs in fields like clerical and manufacturing work, which was described by economist David Autor. Women were hit harder – female employment in those jobs fell 16 per cent from 1979 to 2007, compared with 7 per cent for men. But women almost uniformly moved into high-skill jobs, while men were more likely to move into low-skill, low-paying jobs.

Other research has found that men resist so-called pink-collar work, and those who end up in the lowest-status of those jobs, like nurses’ aides who bathe patients and change bedding, are already disadvantaged in the labor market because of race and class.

Sociologists have described the phenomenon as a trap door; these men drop into less desirable jobs. At all levels of work, it seems, white Americans have more choices.

Source: More men moving into women-dominated fields of work: U.S. study – The Globe and Mail

Filed under gender, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

How a Crazy Idea About Islam Went From the Fringe to the White House | Mother Jones

2017/03/13 Leave a comment

The Islamophobia ‘industry’ and its influence:

In 2011, shortly after the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and the spread of a conspiracy theory that Shariah was taking over America, the Center for American Progress published a lengthy report titled “Fear Inc.,” which documented what amounted to a cottage industry of Islamophobic misinformation. Prominent players include Act for America, a “national security” group that currently boasts Flynn as a board member. Another is Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy, which has pushed the unlikely notion that Islamists are secretly trying to infiltrate the American government and prominent organizations—including the National Rifle Association—through a process he calls “civilization jihad.”

“These were people who were always on Fox News, being cited on Pamela Geller’s blog, who were always on Sean Hannity, the Christian Broadcast Network, the National Review, and others,” says Faiz Shakir, the national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the authors of the report. (Pamela Geller writes a prominent anti-Muslim blog.) “You had major political groups who were then taking this and getting it into the mouths of lawmakers. At that time it was Allen West, Herman Cain, and Michele Bachmann. We went through a period where we had really fought back and marginalized some of these voices,” says Shakir. “They lost some credibility and respect in Republican circles—until Donald Trump came around. He gave them the biggest platform they ever could have imagined.”

This network also had links with what would become Trump’s inner circle. Gaffney appeared on Bannon’s radio show 34 times. Gorka, a former Breitbart editor, has regularly appeared at Center for Security Policy events and on Gaffney’s own radio program. Gaffney once defended the disgraced former FBI agent turned anti-Muslim crusader John Guandolo—who has said that mosques in the United States “do not have a First Amendment right to anything” and has helped draft anti-Muslim legislation.

Trump himself has expressed some of the key tenets of the Islamophobic right. In late 2015, Trump proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country, justifying the idea by citing a debunked survey commissioned by Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and conducted by Kellyanne Conway, who would become Trump’s campaign manager. The survey claimed that 51 percent of those polled believe that Muslims in America should have the choice to be governed by Shariah, and a quarter agreed that violence against Americans in the United States “can be justified as part of the global jihad.” A few weeks earlier, he stated that the United States will have “absolutely no choice” but to shut down mosques because “some bad things are happening.”

There have already been previous efforts to prevent mosques from being built using the “Islam is not a religion” argument. “Those are all real efforts,” says Shakir. “They have been on the back burner and bubbling up for a long time, and now they have people in positions of power who can effectuate these radical ideologies that they’ve long held on to.” Until Trump provides some clarity on his true views, people on both sides of the issue may assume that he is unwilling to publicly state that Islam deserves the same legal status and protections as other religions.

Source: How a Crazy Idea About Islam Went From the Fringe to the White House | Mother Jones

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , ,

The Order of Canada and diversity

2017/03/11 Leave a comment

My latest, in Policy Options:

In Budget 2015, the then Conservative government announced additional funding of $13.4 million over five years and $2.8 million in ongoing funding for the Canadian Honours System. This aimed to “bring [honours] closer to all Canadians” by increasing the number of Order of Canada nominations from “under-represented sectors” (e.g. business) and regions (i.e. the West).

This was prompted by an Ottawa Citizen analysis that showed only 26 percent of recipients since the Order’s creation in 1967 came from the West, compared to the region’s 31 percent share of the population. In contrast, Atlantic Canada had 11 percent of recipients, about twice its share of the population. Moreover, the study showed an increasing percentage of awards had gone to those active in the arts while the share going to business people had declined.

Source: The Order of Canada and diversity (for complete article)

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Supreme Court judge [Justice Wagner] says Canadians shouldn’t worry about arrival of refugees, migrants 

2017/03/11 Leave a comment

Thoughtful and pertinent comments, particularly interesting his comments on identity:

Wagner said the notions of identity, human dignity and democratic values permeate the Charter and “lay the foundations for looking beyond our own borders.

“We can welcome refugees and migrants with the confidence that our society is able not only to manage our differences, but to thrive on them,” said Wagner.

Speaking to reporters later, Wagner acknowledged that, while his speech was delivered to a legal and academic audience, there was a message for Canadians concerned about the influx of refugees and migrants.

“We should, I think, welcome all those people and we should be willing to accommodate them and not change them,” he said.

“People should not be afraid of having migrants and refugees in their own countries. I think we’re strong enough and . . . we have strong moral values, and one of those values is the respect for human dignity. And, if we take our role seriously, we’ll look, we’ll adopt the perspective of the other, and it could only, I think, as far as I’m concerned, grow society much better in the future.”

Asked if that means there should be room for face veils and other individual expressions of religious identity, Wagner declined to answer, saying: “I don’t know if those cases will come before the court, so I don’t want to comment.”

Wagner holds one of the three high court seats reserved for Quebec. Quebec’s legislature is now studying a bill to require “religious neutrality” of those who deliver or receive public services, amid calls to ditch the bill in the wake of the slaying of six Muslims at a Quebec City mosque.

Wagner said judges have an “obligation” to try to understand the perspective of a person who says their equality rights are breached, but he added “that doesn’t mean that the claimant is right . . . that doesn’t mean that I would adopt his way, or his reasoning, or his opinion, or his end result.”

In his speech, Wagner admitted early approaches to how judges analyzed discrimination did not stand up to the task. He said Charter interpretation is still “a work in progress,” but, he added, over the past 150 years “the constitution has enabled us to navigate difficult questions of identity.

“Personal and group characteristics are the starting point of Charter equality jurisprudence, but identity is not about labels; it is a shorthand for how people see themselves, how others see them, and how those two things interact in people’s lives.”

Wagner said the Supreme Court looks to the context and experiences of a person claiming discrimination, and seeks to understand the person’s perspective, which is an especially important consideration in cases of aboriginal law or where there are overlapping characteristics of a person’s identity that influence how they experience discrimination.

Wagner said the experience of a woman who is part of a visible minority can be totally different from that of a young man who has the same characteristics. “If one of the two is not a citizen, or has a different sexual orientation, their experience could be even more different.”

“When the court eventually faces a question touching on trans-gender identity, these two propositions will provide essential frames of reference: that identity is not fixed, but changing, and that identity is not innate, but contextual,” he said.

Wagner predicted that, although the principle of “dignity” fell out of favour in judicial analyses of equality claims, it would find new traction in future Charter litigation. It is a crucial consideration when judges weigh whether a rights violation is reasonable and justified. “Equality infringements ought to be increasingly difficult to justify to the extent that it strikes at the heart of someone’s individual or group identity and, with it, their recognition as full participants in Canada’s ongoing democratic dialogue,” he said.

University of Ottawa law professor Errol Mendes said Wagner’s speech would please equality-seeking groups on the one hand, but he said Wagner also emphasized “democratic values” and “substantive” equality over any superficial concept of equality.

To Mendes, it was a signal from a judge who some suggest could one day become the chief justice of Canada, that the balance won’t always tip in favour of those who feel their rights are breached.

Source: Supreme Court judge says Canadians shouldn’t worry about arrival of refugees, migrants | Toronto Star

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Helping Immigrant Students Catch Up, Fast — It Takes A Whole School : NPR

2017/03/11 Leave a comment

US example of how schools facilitate the integration process:

For many immigrant students, the trauma of crossing the border follows them into the classroom — affecting their performance and ability to learn. And that’s where Michelle’s school comes in.

At Langley Park, in Prince George’s County, Md., 87 percent of students are Spanish-speaking. Out of 176 students, 24 countries are represented and 15 languages are spoken at home, not including English.

The school started last fall. So far, the school sits in temporary buildings, but the kids don’t mind it too much — unless it’s raining.
Her school is part of a larger network across the country called Internationals Network For Public Schools. It serves English language learners, or ELLs, and recent immigrants.

For students like Michelle, the problem is two-fold: Not only are they dealing with trauma, but they also belong to one of the most marginalized student populations.

According to a recent Stanford study, the achievement gap between ELL-Hispanic and white students is the largest in the context of race and ethnicity. And, the average high school graduation rate of ELLs is 19 percentage points lower than the national rate, 63 percent compared to 82.

In 1985, the network opened its first school to address that long-standing disparity. Since then, it has grown to 27 schools in seven states, including Washington, D.C.

And, it seems to be working. Last year, ELLs who attended the network’s high schools in New York City graduated at a rate 16 percentage points higher than ELL students in the city’s public schools, the nation’s largest school district.

As for Langley Park, it hasn’t had a graduating class, yet — it opened last fall — but results so far look promising. In the first class of students, 98 percent showed improvement in their English language skills.

Two talented young artists — Stefany Novoa (left), 16, and Frishta Wassl, 14 — work on self-portraits in Christine Wilkin’s art class.

LA Johnson/NPR

How does the network do it when so many other schools struggle to educate ELLs? It seems to boil down to three simple things:

Every teacher is a language teacher. Tammy Tatro, who teaches technology, says implementing English-language instruction into her class curriculum is “really hard.” But she does it by repeating herself and using visual aids to get concepts across to students.

Second, one of the network’s vital principles is collaboration. That’s why the classes are a mix of students with varying English language skills.

“They all want to lift each other up,” Tatro says. “When one fails, especially if they’re working on a team project, then they all kind of fail. So, they have to help each other.”

A third key principle, Principal Carlos Beato says: the school’s partnerships.

Christine Gilliard, a phys ed teacher, used to teach at a large high school where she had “a two-story gym and two storage closets.” Now she teaches out of a trailer-sized temporary building. “We may not have the best of everything, but we have each other,” she says.

LA Johnson/NPR

CASA de Maryland, a Latino advocacy organization, is one of Langley Park’s partners. The organization offers legal advice for students and their families. Students can also take a social justice class from CASA to learn about advocacy and their rights, depending on their immigration status.

Partnerships like this are crucial, given the extra challenges many of these students face — homelessness, separation from their parents and, of course, the language barrier. Without tending to all of their social and emotional needs, Beato explains, “we wouldn’t be getting any of the academics done.”

Most of the network’s schools employ a full-time social worker. At Langley Park, that’s Lesly Lemus. Her job is to support students any way she can as they cope with life outside school, whether it’s connecting them to community resources or just listening.

Source: Helping Immigrant Students Catch Up, Fast — It Takes A Whole School : NPR Ed : NPR

Filed under Integration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

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