Wanted: ESL Teachers

Laotian alphabet

The news agency Reuters published a story about how the border surge has crushed, from coast-to-coast, the public school system. Titled “An American Education: Classrooms Reshaped by Migrant Students,” Reuters sent a survey to more than 10,000 school districts to gauge immigration’s impact on public schools nationwide. Of the responding 75 school districts that serve 2.3 million children, 33% said the increase in illegal aliens has a “significant” effect. In the real academic world, significant translates to negative.

The Reuters story did a respectable job of outlining the challenges schools face---the problems of integrating foreign-born students into traditional American education. Since 2022, more than half a million school-age migrant children have arrived in the U.S., according to immigration court records that Syracuse University collected, exacerbating overcrowding in some classrooms; compounding teacher and budget shortfalls; forcing teachers to grapple with language barriers and escalating social tensions in some communities.

Andrew R. Arthur, the Center for Immigration Studies Resident Fellow in Law and Policy and who held several important Capitol Hill positions advising on immigration legislation, estimates that the actual total of migrant children enrolled is closer to one million. Arthur searched Syracuse’s TRAC website but could not find the cited statistics. Then, Arthur turned to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. He concluded that counting unaccompanied alien children plus the released family units’ minors who crossed with their parents and are now in school, the more probable enrollment total is between 700,000 and more than one million school-aged migrant children.

Reuters pointed out the obvious---that teachers across the nation face the nearly-insurmountable task of educating non-English speaking students, a challenge that will intensify since foreign-born nationals from more than 150 countries speaking dozens of languages have either crossed the border or have been flowing into the interior via Biden’s unlawful CBP-One app. Districts will have to hire more budget-draining English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, assuming they can be found.  In Charleroi, the district will have to recruit Haitian Creole speakers, no doubt in short supply in Western Pennsylvania. But tiny Charleroi, population about 4,200, will have to find the instructors since in a little over a year, as many as 3,000 Haitians have moved into town, almost doubling its population. In 2021-22, the number of Charleroi’s non-English speaking students in area schools was 12; now it’s 220, an increase of more than 1,700 per cent. Finding suitable ESL teachers is made more difficult because, ideally, the job’s candidates will not only speak Haitian Creole but also have a teaching background. Very few who fit the bill can be found locally.

As a former ESL instructor during the Southeast Asian refugee resettlement into California’s immigrant-heavy San Joaquin Valley, I have some from-the-front observations about how the unanticipated arrivals put a school district and its long-time teachers into a state of controlled chaos. Much like the U.S. cities that are coping with huge arriving migrant totals, Chicago, Boston, Denver, etc., my district had to accommodate legally present refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand as well as itinerant laborers from Mexico and Guatemala. For teachers who had no trained background in international student instruction, the burden of managing so many kids from so many non-English speaking countries was overwhelming. One unsuccessful method of coping was called “pull outs.” A translator fluent in, for example Cambodian, would enter the classroom, take the Cambodian students to a corner, and instruct them in the lesson given to him by the teacher. Multiple problems arose---did the Cambodian aide fully understand the assignment? Did the aide convey the lesson in an effective manner? The teacher doesn’t speak Cambodian so he wouldn’t know. All of this took time away from the teacher’s responsibility to educate his traditional students. Multiple other language-related problems were ongoing---the often-transient migrant students enrolled after the school year started and left abruptly before it ended. Office personnel could not communicate with parents about important school issues. Finding and paying for appropriate language textbooks was a lengthy and expensive process.

The existing system harms everyone. The international students learn little and miss out on building a solid educational foundation. Teachers and administrative personnel cannot keep up. U.S. kids miss out on important classroom time. And taxpayers foot the hefty education bill, an estimated $800 billion in 2021 pre-invasion costs.  As long as the border remains open, citizens and international students will continue to fall behind and taxpayers will fund every open border consequence.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org