Immigrant Students Wise Beyond Their Years

High school is tough for every kid, but when you don’t speak the same language as your peers, all the anxieties of young adulthood are amplified as your voice gets lost in the crowd. The Global Action Project brings us the story of Lobsang, a Tibetan immigrant who deals with bullying, language barriers and just plain awkwardness as a teen growing up in the city.

New York public schools are filled with kids like Lobsang, struggling to learn English and adjust to the social pressures of life on the social and economic margins of their city. A report by the New York Immigration Coalition shows that English Language Learners (ELL) have lagged far behind other students in academic performance and graduate rates:

Barely a quarter of ELL students in the New York City’s class of 2006 graduated high school– less than half the rate of English Proficient students. This represented a decrease of 9% from the 2005 four-year ELL graduation rate of 35.3%. Nearly half of ELL students drops out of school after seven years.

The lack of resources across the public education system means that students with special needs are often ignored, despite the state’s responsibility to ensure equity in educational standards and access. Read the rest of this entry →

Freeing the University: Education Occupation on May Day

2:47 am in Uncategorized by Michelle Chen

Rand School (Wikimedia)

Cross-posted from In These Times

Pop quiz: what’s the value of an American education? To some, it’s a booming industry that preys on debt-crippled students. But to the educators, youth and workers who keep the system running, school increasingly seems like it’s just not worth the struggle. This May Day, masses of working people–and students who are working to build a future for themselves–are converging in New York City to rethink education and test those ideas in the real world.

Everyone understands that merit and hard work should pay off somehow in the economy. But the narrowing and commercialization of education at every level, from preschool to postdoc, has drained people’s academic aspirations and bank accounts.

On May 1, following the massive 1T Day rally against the “student debt bubble,” the Free University of New York City will bring together various Occupy-inspired grassroots education experiments. Combined with other May Day-related Occupy demonstrations, the program of workshops and talks aims to put theories of “horizontal pedagogy” into practice by inviting regular folks to learn about and question the systems surrounding them: the economy, politics, and school itself.

The planned program, centered in Madison Square Park, will include:

over forty workshops, classes, and collective experiences during the five hour educational experiment. Attendees will be introduced to movements such as Take Back the Land, which has been occupying foreclosed housing; radical student organizing within the City University of New York (CUNY); and indigenous environmentalism. Other workshops focus on creating new ways of living, from permaculture to open access academic publishing, from nonviolent communication to immigration relief for survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

It’s kind of an anti-university, seeking to break down the bureaucratic fortress of credits and degrees. The focus is on empowering both students and teachers, through educational work doesn’t test book-smarts but expands critical thought and challenges expectations.

The Free University, together with parallel initiatives like Occupy University, Occupy CUNY (City University of New York) and Occupy Student Debt campaign, aim to democratize education in the tradition of old school union education programs and the pioneering RAND School of Social Science. The idea is to see workers as students, teachers as workers, and education as a public trust. Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: #occupy, economy, education, financial system, labor, May Day, Occupy Wall Street, schools, student debt, students, unemployment, unions
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