Oct 19, 2021
Like many pre-existing disparities that have surfaced during the pandemic, multilingual services are in crisis.
“The city has completely abandoned these kids,” said M, who has been teaching English as a New Language, or ENL, in New York City public schools for over 15 years. M, who currently serves as both an administrator and ENL teacher at a large high school in South Brooklyn, has declined to share her name or the name of her school for fear of being fired. M says that a year into the pandemic, her students, who are already among the most vulnerable in New York City’s schools, are facing even greater marginalization.
M teaches students known as English Language Learners, or ELLs, in the New York City school system. According to M, these students “are just not learning.” English Language Learners are students who, as the phrase suggests, are not native English speakers, and need support learning the language.
Like so many of her colleagues, M is not just a teacher. She is an advocate. “I am someone who cares about social justice and advocacy, which is the most important aspect of being an ENL teacher, or working with immigrant students, because they don’t have the voice,” she said.
In the country’s most diverse public school system, English Language Learners were already struggling. New York State has the nation’s second lowest graduation rate among ELLs, according to a report published by the Latino Education Advocacy Directors (LEAD) coalition. And while the New York City Department of Education boasted a 77% high school graduation rate in 2019, for those multilingual learners, the graduation rate was just 41%.
The pandemic has threatened the education of all students, but the toll it has taken on the city’s more than 140,000 English Language Learners has been especially dire. Remote learning presents a particularly difficult challenge for these students, many of whom can’t depend on help from their parents or guardians, who are more likely to have their own language barriers and to work outside the home. Exacerbating the problem, immigrant communities in the city have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. Many ELLs are dealing with overcrowded homes, sick family members, and inadequate resources.
With no unified system providing solutions, school administrators and teachers are struggling to educate their multilingual students. According to M, whose high school serves over 1,000 ELLs, the city requires students or their families to go online to request a remote learning device if they need one, leaving many students stranded. “How do you go online to request a device if you don’t have a device?” she said. Teachers at the school have worked to make sure the students have devices, but many of the ELLs have been difficult or impossible to reach.
“They [the city] gave us iPads. iPads don’t even have keyboards,” said M. At her school, students who request a device receive either an iPad, a laptop, or a smartphone. The DOE’s Division of Multilingual Learners sent 60 smartphones for M’s students. “This is the most vulnerable student population, and you’re giving me the least efficient device. It doesn’t make sense,” she said. And, if students received a smartphone, they were taken off the list to receive a laptop or iPad.
“And how can any high school student do their work exclusively on a smartphone?” M said, her tone shifting to one of incredulity. “And when they don’t even know the language?”
Unlike the laptops and iPads, the smartphones do not come with built-in hotspots, which renders them useless for the nearly one million households in the city that lack internet access, many of which are in low-income immigrant communities.
The NYC DOE has made some efforts to bridge the digital divide that afflicts so many English learners. In order to support families who are not digitally savvy, the city has set up a translation phone line. Still, educators from across the city echoed M’s concern: The families of ELLs haven’t been informed about available resources for remote learning.
“With English Language Learners, the likelihood that you’re going to be able to get in touch with the parents to set up a Zoom meeting is exponentially harder,” said Matt, a music teacher at an elementary school in Queens, where 90% of the student population is from a Central American background. For personal liability reasons, Matt did not want to share his full name or the name of his school. According to Matt, the majority of the students either came to the country at a young age or are first generation. Yet Matt has not received support for the non-English speakers that make up the bulk of his classes.
Although the ELL students lack personalized support from ENL teachers, Matt says that because most of the faculty is bilingual, they try to fill in the gap left by the lack of ENL teachers where they can. In addition, Matt and one of his colleagues host an after-school “Bilingual Success Club,” which meets once a week, to support their English Language Learners. According to Matt, the club has become a place where ELL students voice their complaints about the English-only classes. “I’ve heard, like, ‘This class is my least favorite because I don’t understand what the teacher is saying,’” he said. Even though most teachers at Matt’s school are Spanish speakers, many students are often too timid to ask for a translation.
The minimal attention given to multilingual programs has created an increasingly uphill battle for ENL teachers. “I’ve been at schools that decided to cut my budget so I’m there two days. They’ve decided that it’s not worth their money, even though I’m federally funded,” said Elana Rabinowitz, who has taught ENL at seven different New York City public schools over the past 19 years.
Rabinowitz has long felt like the DOE has ignored its multilingual programs. She says that ENL teachers are often used to cover other classes. “Before COVID, when I was in person, they had me substitute for all the other teachers that weren’t there,” she said. Ironically, remote teaching has been helpful for Rabinowitz. She has been able to host lunch-and-learns and hold office hours to support ELLs with their homework.
Even so, Rabinowitz says that attendance was much stronger in person. “There are still students who have not been online. It’s February, and I have a few students who I’ve never seen,” she said. “That would never happen in person. But there’s no amount of phone calls and things that can be done to get the students to attend,” she said.
These problems began long before COVID. Emily Kirven, a former middle school English teacher, became so frustrated with the system’s failure to address language and literacy skills that she quit and started her own after-school tutoring program. “ENL support wasn’t happening,” Kirven said. “There was a lack of communication between the classroom teachers and the support teachers,” Kirven said. But she didn’t blame the teachers.
In her experience, the way in which ENL programs were set up and conducted was the problem. “I didn’t receive enough information about [students’] proficiency status. And then kids would be pulled out of my class to go to ENL, but then they’d be missing whatever I was teaching. And so then when they would come back to class, they’d be lost again,” she said. So Kirven founded Read718 to give these students the instruction and support that the public school system failed to provide.
Teachers across the board expressed similar disappointment in the system, and belief in the potential of their students. “They are great kids. Most of them want to learn,” said Matt. “But the odds are stacked against them.” According to a 2001 study on the efficacy of the long-term success of ELLs, the highest quality ENL programs have seen ELLs reach levels comparable to or exceeding native English speakers in academic growth.
“When ELLs succeed, they really succeed,” said Rabinowitz, who, after nearly two decades in the system, continues to fight for ELL students. “But in all instances, the prejudice and misconception around immigrant students is so outdated. They think because someone doesn’t speak the language, there’s a correlation to lack of intelligence.” Rabinowitz said that in other states, like West Virginia, ENL programs are successful because students “are given a chance.”
M raised similar concerns. After 16 years of teaching ENL, M has felt like her students have never been given the necessary resources or attention. “I think that there’s a massive injustice occurring, but the public doesn’t really care about ELLs, because they don’t have, you know, the same political capital.”
New York State has the fourth largest population of ELLs in the country, yet graduation rates fall far behind those in other states, where rates are up to 89%. “There’s so much work we’re not investing in, and I’m hoping with Dr. Biden involved, there might be something that would shed some light on this,” Rabinowitz said. Like many ENL teachers, however, she worries that because these students and their families don’t speak English, many aren’t equipped to advocate for themselves. “The parents don’t cause any trouble, so the money for them is often filtered to other places,” she said. “And so they fall through the cracks.”