Teaching Your Children Well

Nor does academic excellence in our public schools include only the traditional “book” subjects. Our schools are big and open enough to include myriad programs for artists and performers—though due to a shortage of funds and the influence of the “anti” crowd with its rigid three-R mentality, the programs have been slashed in recent years. For students seeking careers in dance, sculpture, painting, theater, and other art forms, for example, there’s the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, nationally acclaimed for its dynamic, competitive curriculum.

Finally, in addition to the schools already mentioned, there are many excellent public institutions in the Twin Cities alone—among those often cited by parents, educators, and college admissions officials are South High in Minneapolis, Central Senior High in St. Paul, and the public high schools of Edina, Lakeville, Apple Valley, White Bear Lake, Wayzata, and St. Louis Park.

The area’s excellent private schools are always an attractive option. But parents are mistaken if they think their child would be getting a better academic opportunity than what is available through the public schools, where rigorous curricula and broad-based opportunities make dreams come true, beginning with admission to first-rate colleges, universities, and technical schools.

The Immigrant Experience
Question: How many languages and dialects are spoken in the homes of the students who attend Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools?

Answer: More than ninety in Minneapolis, more than a hundred in St. Paul. 

It fires the imagination to think of this flavorful immigrant stew—unless you happen to be a teacher trying to get a math or social studies concept across to students listening in a half-dozen languages. The Upper Midwest may be undergoing the greatest wave of immigration in a hundred years. Now as then, public schools serve as the essential portal into America’s social, economic, and political mainstream. Facing a bewildering array of immigrant backgrounds, our public schools perform this task amazingly well. And not just the big-city public schools, but, as immigrants rapidly disperse to where the jobs are, suburban and rural public schools as well.

The public schools’ immigrant programs are no longer called English as a Second Language, but rather English Language Learners, because many of today’s immigrant students speak more than one language when they arrive here. English may be their third, fourth, or eighth language. Yet some have never held a book or pencil, much less interacted with a laptop computer. Such are among the huge challenges the public schools face serving the immigrant community.

Contrary to what we like to believe, our German and Swedish grandparents and great-grandparents did not melt into the American mainstream when they arrived here a century ago. In fact, they usually tried hard to stay with “their kind.” Remember the heavy accents and fractured grammar? They rarely learned English well if they came to the United States as adults. Their immigrant children did much better. And their children’s children rarely spoke German or Swedish at all.

That’s how it went then, and that’s pretty much how it goes now—with two significant differences. Our European immigrant ancestors could quit school after the eighth grade because they could earn their living busting sod on land they homesteaded for free. And they came from a literate culture and usually could at least read and write in their native language. Many immigrants today come from nonliterate societies. What’s more, immigrants today need school-based skills because they’re going to have to function in an information-based, not agricultural, economy.

Considering those constraints, today’s school-based successes are all the more remarkable.