Chicago Public School teachers in black neighborhoods say they've been ordered to give migrant students a 70 percent and pass them to the next grade, regardless of their academic performance, reports Sylvia Snowden for WGN News.
Nearly 50,000 newcomers have arrived in Chicago in the last two years, primarily from Venezuela and Central America. With state rental aid, many were resettled in low-income, black areas with affordable housing. They were enrolled in nearly all-black schools that had empty seats, but few teachers who speak Spanish or have training in teaching English as a Second Language.
Promotion guidelines are “modified to serve the specialized needs of English Language Learners," the district conceded.
Migrant students get very little instruction in dozens of understaffed schools, report Reema Amin and Mina Bloom in a report by Chalkbeat Chicago and Block Club Chicago.
"At Laura S. Ward Elementary School on the West Side, which has gained dozens of English learners, a kindergarten teacher and two custodians are translating for the whole building."
“They were dropped at our doorstep, and we’re supposed to keep it moving, accept these children, educate them and keep it moving,” said Dewanda Watt, a first-grade teacher at Ward. “There should’ve been a plan. There was no plan from Chicago Public Schools.”
Some schools are trying to launch bilingual programs, as required by state law, but that's difficult without the ability to hire qualified bilingual teachers. I can tell you from California's experience that bad bilingual programs -- typically using aides rather than teachers and dumbed-down curriculum -- are very bad indeed.
If Chicago is this unprepared for an influx of immigrant students, how do schools cope in smaller, less cosmopolitan places with proportionately more newcomers? Like, say, Springfield, Ohio.
IMO, Chicago is a cesspool of corruption and fraud, never mind this issue, but when the pension plans default within the next five years, mass chaos will occur, but not that cheating kids out of an education and lying to their parents is a problem for anyone...
The state of Illinois is suffering from a government-worker pension shortfall of over $111 billion – the worst retirement crisis in the nation. Government-worker pension costs are overwhelming the state's budget: 19 percent of the budget is going to pay for pensions, compared to 4 percent in other states (so roughly 20% of the states annual budget (paid for by current taxpayers) is only going to get worse folks (glad I don't live…
Would you send your child to a physician who always reported the results of diagnostic tests as "within normal range" no matter how far away from normal? This is fraud.
The Biden-Harris immigration disaster does not deserve reelection. Instead, these families should be returned to the region from whence they came (not all the way to Venezuela, but to neighbouring Colombia, which may deserve assistance in coping with a political catastrophe it did not create), while under-enrolled schools in Chicago should be closed, enabling the consolidation of capacity in the buildings that remain open, which should compete to attract Americans by improving their services, especially in language teaching, for which the age pictured is prime for learning.