The Emerging Diversity of Students

The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 created a major change in the number of new immigrants to the United States and in the countries from which they came. The amendments allowed massive new immigration from Latin America and Asia from the 1980s to the present. Wars in Asia and Central America and political upheavals in the former Soviet Union also produced new immigrants. Once these immigrants arrived, family unification provisions of the law allowed them to bring additional family members.

The challenges of teaching an ethnically and linguistically diverse population are being felt throughout the nation. The recent arrival of many students from Latin America, Asia, and the former Soviet Union has created a need for social services and for English as a Second Language and bilingual instruction in schools. Among the new immigrants, Spanish is the most common language (28 million), followed by Chinese (2 million), French (1.6 million), German (1.4 million), and Tagalog (1.2 million) (Shin & Bruno, 2003) Language Use and English-speaking ability: 2000. Census 2000 Brief C2kBR-29).

Since the 1970s, the number of students who struggle to learn English has increased steadily and sharply. The case of California illustrates the impact of immigration on schools. According to the 2006 language census for California public schools (California Department of Education, 2006), language-minority students comprised 24.9 percent of the total school population, up from 15 percent of the student population in 1988. The single largest group of limited-English-proficient students is Spanish speaking (85.4 percent), followed by those who speak Vietnamese (2.2 percent), Hmong (1.4 percent), Cantonese (1.4 percent), and Pilipino or Tagalog (1.3 percent), with the rest speaking 31 other languages, including Khmer, Russian, Punjabi, Farsi, and Mien. Texas has had a similar large increase in language-minority students, growing by 48 percent, to 711,000 students, between 1992 and 2002.

If you take a teaching position in California, New York, Illinois, or Texas or in almost any urban school district, you can expect that out of a class of 28 students, up to 7 will not speak English proficiently. Even if you begin your career in more rural states, such as Iowa, Utah, or Tennessee, you are likely to have a number of immigrant students in your classroom. How are you going to teach them your subject if they do not completely understand English?

Students from these minority language groups are concentrated in specific school districts and in both elementary and secondary grades. While a few of them benefit from high-quality bilingual education programs, the great majority of teachers assigned to these students are unprepared to help them. Most immigrant students receive inadequate English instruction and little academic support in their native language (Gándara, 2007).

In 2001, the Latino population (or in census terms, the Hispanic population) became the largest minority group in the nation (U.S. Bureau of the Census. May, 2001). The Latino (Hispanic) population had increased by over 50 percent in the 1990s, to a total of 35.3 million people. More than 30 percent of Latinos under the age of 18 remain poor (Children’s Defense Fund, 2001). High school completion rates for most students have improved but remain lowest for Latinos, who are less likely to attend college than any other group. Latinos and African Americans have substantially higher unemployment rates than other groups (Ramirez & de la Cruz, 2002).

In California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas, and Mississippi, the sum of all “minority” students now constitutes a majority of the total student population. Latino and Asian populations are rapidly growing in urban areas throughout the nation. In states such as Maine, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, Utah, and Wyoming, the population remains over 80% European American, but large numbers of children from new communities of immigrants have arrived at their schools.

As noted earlier, in the census of 2000, nearly 98 percent of respondents reported they belonged to one race. The largest group reported White alone (the Census Bureau considers Hispanics to be White unless they specify otherwise). The Black or African American alone population represented 12 percent of the total. Some 2.4 percent reported that they were two or more races, an indication of marriages, births, and the blending of different ethnic groups. A total of 12.5 percent of the population reported that they were Hispanic, which is not a racial category in the U.S. census. Students from all of these ethnic groups, regions, schools, and classes will have to learn to work together and to cooperate in our 21st-century society.

You can get current data and projections for your own state at www. census. gov. When you get there, look for the tables on population estimates.