For my first four years in the classroom, I taught English as a second language to Somali refugees and Latin American immigrants in a small city in Wisconsin. I offer my experience teaching these children not as an omniscient viewpoint but as an informative sliver of a perspective.
Which immigrants should we let in or remove? On what criteria? What benefits should we provide or not? While important, answering those questions is not this article’s focus.
Instead, I’m interested in how many immigrants interact with our institutions once they’re here. What do they learn about our country? How do we shape them or not? For many young immigrants, their first experience with America is the public education system, an experience that is terribly flawed.
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The primary issue was chaos. Students were in constant conflict across cultures. They expressed verbal hatred toward one another, and that animosity spread to violence in the hallways. I still recall talking one Hispanic student down from choking a Somali student unconscious. You don’t quickly forget the sound of a 12-year-old gagging and wheezing.
Unfortunately, the district administration was too sheepish to enforce order. Who were they to impose their cultural norms? What were the optics of suspending a refugee? They instead tried various restorative circles and listening sessions to build community. At one listening session, a mother said that her children feared other students, yet seemingly no one was ever punished.
The tribal hatreds from their home countries didn’t suddenly disappear once they came to my classroom at the end of the hall. Warring factions threatened to disrupt the school. And without school leaders enforcing rules, these conflicts festered. Instead of softening, the hatreds hardened.
The kumbaya strategies failed, and so these refugee students walked into a Hobbesian building where only strength and clannishness could protect them from bullying and fights. What is their primary, formative experience with America then? A public education system flush with resources — they previously attended small shack schools in refugee camps — but terribly violent. A place where rules went unenforced and strong-arm tactics were tolerated.
The second biggest issue I encountered, which led to the first, was the progressive pedagogical mindset among the teachers. Grammar instruction, memorization of new vocabulary, rote practice, and explicit, systematic phonics instruction were shunned. Should we really be forcing them to learn English, anyway?
Instead, we encouraged students to learn content in their first language. All reading and writing was “taught” through exploration and self-expression. For spoken language, such “learning by osmosis” can work, but it fails dramatically when learning how to write. As a result, these children didn’t learn English, didn’t learn any other academic content, and were forever on the peripheries of the school. Without English, they were always “other.”
Third observation: immigrant students received a very negative perspective on their adoptive country. More than an honest account of history, they heard a narrative that cast America’s story as one of slavery, impoverishment, and evil. Any suggestion that gratitude is an appropriate emotion, that America is a great country, or that they should adopt the ideals in our Constitution was anathema.
It’s important to note that many of these were deeply troubled students who had come from traumatic and unstable circumstances. While that observation may offend some, it’s a reality with which schools cannot ignore. They have to reckon with it whether they like it or not. I had many students whose parents were brutally murdered by cartels or whose fathers were missing limbs from a warlord’s machete.
As a result, these students were more prone to violent outbursts and volatile emotions. It made a school full of them difficult to manage, let alone any efforts at acculturation or assimilation. It was even harder as new students came to our classrooms unexpectedly in the middle of the school year, often with little English and sometimes no paperwork to confirm their age.
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One veteran teacher contested these policies. She is herself a Latin American. She saw that students needed explicit instruction, that they needed to learn English first, that they needed strong behavioral systems, and that America was a good country. But eventually, the stressors of teaching in this environment and her unheeded calls for improvement overwhelmed her. She checked into a mental health institution sometime around spring break and never came back.
I have nothing but sympathy for these students. They are innocent of their country’s lawlessness and don’t deserve the hardships they’ve endured. We cannot return to a forced assimilation that beats students for speaking their home language, but we cannot then spurn helping them adopt different behavioral norms, learn a new language, or develop an appreciation for their new home. To do so only compounds their hardships.
Daniel Buck is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former public school teacher and administrator.
