Google Translate is the teacher: Migrants get 'busy work' in Chicago schools

As migrant families move from emergency shelters to low-cost housing, many are placed in black neighborhoods where housing is cheap and schools have low test scores and empty classrooms, report  Reema Amin, Mina Bloom and Kae Petrin for Chalkbeat and Block Club Chicago. But their new schools don't have enough bilingual teachers -- or teachers trained in English Language Development.

Schools are required to provide teaching in students' native languages, if 20 or more English Learners speaking the same language enroll in a district school. The number of schools over that threshold has been rising since 2022, the reporters write. Teachers say their schools aren't staffed to support the new students.

Many migrant students from South and Central America' are "struggling to learn after landing at segregated schools on the South and West sides that had not previously served children with language needs," Bloom and Amin reported last year.

Teachers relied on Google Translate to communicate with students and their parents.

When English Learners began enrolling at Nash Elementary three years ago, Corinne Lydon, a middle-school English teacher, felt like a "deer in the headlights," she told the reporters. The school had no Spanish-language curriculum. "She tried to find help online and assigned her newcomer students a lot of 'busy work',” Lydon said. Now, she's finished training to teach English as a second language, and is trying to learn Spanish.

The district is trying to hire more bilingual teachers and persuade veteran teachers to seek bilingual certification. Some teachers who speak Spanish are reluctant to make the switch.

I wrote about California's frantic search for bilingual teachers in 2019, after voters repealed a 1998 initiative allowing native-language instruction only if parents requested it. "Dual-immersion" has become popular with educated, English-only parents, who believes it provides a cognitive advantage. (It's less popular with immigrants, who tend to really, really want their kids to learn English.) And memories of the old, bad, bilingual programs had faded.

Bilingual education failed because schools tried to do it without enough bilingual teachers, often relying on bilingual aides -- many with only a high school education -- to teach reading. Or, there might be a bilingual teacher in kindergarten and second grade, but not in first grade or third grade.

Even bilingual education advocates now admit that was a mistake.

Expectations often were low, noted the Los Angeles Times in a 2006 editorial attacking a law proposing a simplified curriculum for English learners. “California was supposed to have learned a sad but important lesson from its years of experimenting with bilingual education: when you isolate a group of largely poor, minority students and give them different instruction from what other students receive, they tend to get a dumbed-down, second-rate education.”

If Chicago schools try to offer bilingual classes without enough teachers and without a challenging curriculum and without a stable student body -- newcomer families move frequently -- then their students will continue to do poorly.