WASHINGTON — English only? With Hispanic enrollment surging in schools, many Spanish-speaking parents are having trouble helping their children with homework or communicating with U.S. teachers as English-immersion classes proliferate in K-12.
An Associated Press-Univision poll highlights the language and cultural obstacles for the nation’s Latinos, who lag behind others when it comes to graduating from high school.
The findings also raise questions about whether English immersion does more to assimilate or isolate.
“The language barrier is still a serious risk factor for Hispanics,” said Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor emeritus of education who helped analyze the survey. Even with many schools replacing Spanish with English in classrooms, for a student evaluated as learning English, “the odds of completing high school, and particularly college, significantly drops.”
Families hit obstacles
The nationwide poll, also sponsored by the Nielsen Co. and Stanford University, found the vast majority of Latinos — 78 percent — had children enrolled in K-12 classes that were taught mostly in English, compared with 3 percent in Spanish.
Just 20 percent of mainly Spanish-speaking parents say they were able to communicate “extremely well” with their child’s school, compared with 35 percent of Latinos who speak English fluently.
About 42 percent of the Spanish-speakers said it was easy for them to help with their children’s schoolwork, compared with 59 percent of the Latinos who speak English well.
Children of Spanish-dominant parents were less likely to seek help with homework from their families. Fifty-seven percent of those parents said their children came to them with school questions. That’s compared with 80 percent for mainly English-speaking Latino parents, who were more likely to send their children to relatives or friends for answers.
The hardships often center on language for Latino parents, who value a high-school diploma more than the general population and want to support their children, according to the poll. But educators say the problems can be cultural, too, if some Latino parents feel less comfortable acting as vocal advocates for education, such as meeting with teachers or lobbying for an extra honors class.
Under federal law, if the parents’ English is limited, schools must provide notices and information about student activities in a language they can understand. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is now reviewing some school districts to see if students are being denied a fair education.
A growing population
The educational stakes are high.
Roughly one in five people in the U.S. speaks a language other than English at home, with Latinos representing the largest share, according to 2009 census data. Latinos also make up one-fourth of kindergartners, part of a historic trend in which minorities are projected to become the new U.S. majority by midcentury.
Still, Latinos are nearly three times as likely as the general U.S. population to drop out of high school and half as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree.
The March 11-June 3 poll of 1,521 Latinos has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
