The Atkinson Fellowship was
established in 1988 to further the tradition of
liberal journalism in Canada that was fostered by
Joseph E. Atkinson, the founder of the Toronto
Star. Winners pursue a year-long research project
on a subject of topical interest and their
articles are published by the Toronto Star.
This year, Journalist Andrew Duffy examines why
immigrant students who speak English as a second
language - particularly refugees and those from
poor families - face long odds in becoming high
school graduates.
Speak Out If you've had experiences with
ESL programs - either positive or negative - in
the Toronto area, we'd like to hear from you. You
can send us your thoughts by clicking
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Why are ESL students left behind? Journalist Andrew Duffy examines why immigrant students
who speak English as a second language -- particularly
refugees and those from poor families -- face long odds in
becoming high school graduates
ANDREW
DUFFY ATKINSON FELLOW
Although the high-school dropout rate among immigrant
students has raised alarm with some educators and parents in
Canada, the phenomenon remains little studied and poorly
understood. In Toronto, home to the largest population of
immigrant students in the country, the analysis of their
academic achievement all but stopped in 1998, the year the
citys seven local school boards were amalgamated. Torontos
once-vaunted research department when it was amalgamated,
the board had 20 analysts has been reduced to three
full-time researchers. Most of their time has been spent
introducing a common computerized records system, leaving them
little chance to answer what should be a fundamental question
for all big-city school boards in Canada: Are
English-as-a-second-language students succeeding? And if not,
why not? Elizabeth Coelho, a professor at the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education and the former co-ordinator
of ESL services for the Toronto board, contends that few board
officials want to know how ESL students fare, much less why.
"I think how immigrants are doing is a very progressive
question in a time that hasnt been very progressive in
education," she charges. "I guess people just dont want more
bad news."
Moreover, exceptional ESL students and their remarkable
stories of determination and success have often overshadowed
the dropout problem. Top academic prizes in Toronto and
Vancouver are routinely won by newcomers from places such as
China, Taiwan and Korea.
Indeed, Canadian research has shown that as a group,
Asian students perform so well, particularly in maths and
sciences, that they mask the achievement deficits of ESL
students from other countries.
"For every one of the ESL kids who makes it, there are
hundreds who don't," says Hetty Roessingh, a University of
Calgary professor and a former ESL teacher with the Calgary
Board of Education.
Although the Toronto District School Board does not
track its ESL students to determine their graduation rates,
ESL district co-ordinator Paula Markus says the dropout rate
recorded in other jurisdictions does not reflect a crisis in
the school system. She says the numbers need to be understood
in a larger context.
``You have to keep in mind that when ESL students leave
high school, it has nothing to do with the ESL and other
supports, but it has everything to do with family and economic
pressures when they arrive here,'' she says. ``It doesn't
necessarily correlate with what's happening in the school, but
rather with what's being expected of them in their lives, in
terms of helping the family make a living and get established
here.''
The research that has been done on the performance of
ESL students presents a complex, troubling picture.
Ten years ago, Roessingh and her Calgary colleague,
David Watt, conducted one of the only long-term tracking
studies of ESL students in Canada. They followed 540 ESL
students in one Calgary high school between 1989 and 1997.
About 40 per cent of the school's population spoke a first
language other than English, with Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic,
Spanish and Punjabi being the most common mother tongues.
Their study found an overall dropout rate of 74 per
cent among ESL students a rate two-and-a-half times that of
the general student population. Not surprisingly, ESL students
who arrived as beginners in English were the most likely (93
per cent) to drop out.
(There are many ways to define a dropout. Roessingh and
Watt determined the dropout rate by calculating the number of
students registered in Grades 10 through 12 who withdrew from
high school without having fulfilled the requirements for
graduation. Included in this calculation are students who are
"pushed out" of school because they haven't completed the
requirements by the time they turn 19, when they must pursue
adult education.)
They found that over the eight-year study, the high
dropout rate remained relatively stable. "The general profile
of the ESL student who can attain graduation requirements has
remained unchanged," Watt and Roessingh observed. "In broad
terms, successful ESL students have a good educational
background prior to entering the high school and have studied
English before, either in the Canadian junior high-school
system or prior to arrival in Canada."
Students who do not have strong English skills,
Roessingh says, cannot deal with the complicated language that
they encounter in textbooks and cannot translate their
academic ability into decent marks on written tests.
Watt and Roessingh also tried to determine how many of
the dropouts later earned their high-school diplomas through
adult education. The overall dropout rate fell slightly to 71
per cent.
The researchers concluded: "The loss of so many
academically competent learners needs to be understood as lost
human and educational capital."
Concerned by Watt and Roessingh's initial findings,
which were reported in 1994, the Edmonton Catholic School
Division commissioned a study of its ESL population.
University of British Columbia professor Lee Gunderson
has recently completed one of the largest Canadian studies of
immigrant scholastic achievement. Gunderson compared the test
scores of 2,213 immigrant students with a similar-sized sample
of Canadian-born students in the Vancouver School District.
The board is the most linguistically diverse in Canada.
He obtained grades for the students from 1996 to 2001.
Grades were recorded in subjects essential for university
entrance English, math, science and social studies as
students moved through high school, which in B.C., includes
Grades 8 through 12.
Gunderson made some important findings. First, he
encountered a disturbingly high "disappearance rate" of more
than 60 per cent among immigrant high-school students. (He
called it a disappearance rather than a dropout rate because
he was unable to distinguish between students who transferred
out of the district and those who left the school system
permanently; others in the study "disappeared" because they
moved off the university track and ceased taking English,
math, science or social studies.)
His study, for instance, recorded 1,576 immigrant
students in Grade 8 math, but four years later, only 498 of
them (31 per cent of the initial cohort) were enrolled in
Grade 12 math. Only 25 per cent of immigrant students were
still in Grade 12 science and 23 per cent were still in social
studies.
The disappearance rate was highest for those who came
to Canada as refugees. These students, often from impoverished
and traumatized families, frequently had significant gaps in
their educations due to turmoil in their homelands.
Gunderson said the disappearance rate represented a
"phenomenally high" number of immigrant students, but he was
unable to establish exactly why those students left high
school.
"It's obviously a concern," he said, noting work
continues at his university to uncover what happened to those
students.
Overall, the portrait produced by the existing studies
of ESL students in Canada is depressing. Said Watt and
Roessingh: "The findings of these studies suggest that ESL
learners remain disadvantaged in high school and that
graduation remains an elusive goal for the vast majority of
these students."
As for the fundamental question raised by the research
Why do ESL students drop out in such high numbers? there
are only tentative answers.
Gunderson found that ESL supports are vital for some
groups of students. In Vancouver, Punjabi students Punjabis
comprise about 85 per cent of Indian immigration to B.C. and
those from the Philippines tended to disappear soon after
moving out of ESL classes and into the mainstream. Most of the
students could not handle regular classes without language
support.
`For every one
of the ESL kids who makes it, there are hundreds who
don't.'
Hetty Roessingh,University of Calgary
"As the ESL net
disappeared, so did students," he concluded.
He also discovered a strong correlation between
socio-economic status and grades. Although it was not
initially his intent to generate race-based statistics,
Gunderson found it necessary to break down the grades of
immigrant students along linguistic and ethnic lines to better
understand his results.
He found Chinese students who spoke Mandarin
outperformed all other groups, including Canadian-born
students. Mandarin-speaking students scored math averages that
were "phenomenally high," Gunderson said. Although they scored
lower than Canadian-born students in English and social
sciences, their math and science marks made up for the
deficiencies in their overall averages.
Most Mandarin-speaking students in the study were from
Taiwan and from affluent families that could spend money on
private English lessons and tutors, Gunderson said.
By contrast, the students who scored poorest and were
the most vulnerable to "disappearing" were Spanish and
Vietnamese-speaking students, many of whom came from refugee
families that lacked financial resources.
"The causal relationships associated with these amazing
differences in achievement are complex," Gunderson wrote.
"They are associated primarily with socio-economic status and
the alternatives families have to help their children succeed
in school."
Gunderson's findings dovetail with the work of Toronto
researcher Rob Brown, who established an overall immigrant
dropout rate of 31 per cent in the former Toronto Board of
Education. For students from immigrant and single-parent
families, however, that rate more than doubled in Regent Park,
the poorest neighbourhood in the city, to 77 per cent. The
board has not tracked ESL students.
Gerry Connelly, associate director of the Toronto
District School Board, says the board cannot track those
students who have moved through the ESL system because so many
of them move to other schools and other school districts.
There was no system in place until recently that would
allow for that kind of tracking to take place, she says.
Elizabeth Coelho says the results beg more questions.
None of the studies tracked elementary school ESL
students into high school to determine their success rates.
And there is little understanding of the extent to which ESL
students are taking advantage of adult education courses to
complete high school. Similarly, few studies have tracked
former ESL students to college and university to determine
their graduation rates there.
"The only people asking these questions are ESL
teachers, who are dismissed as bleeding hearts or
self-interested," Coelho says. "Yet, if you ask immigrant
parents why they came, one of the top reasons, if not the top
reason is: `a better education for our children.' But we're
not hearing enough immigrant groups saying: `How are our kids
doing?'"
What's more, she says, too many parents and
administrators in Ontario look for answers in the results of
the province's standardized tests, administered by the
Education Quality and Accountability Office.
But the tests only offer a snapshot of how ESL students
are doing at a given point in their academic careers: Grades
3, 6 and 9. Not surprisingly, since these students are by
definition new to the country, the tests have repeatedly shown
that the majority of them cannot meet provincial standards.
Yet the EQAO does not track ESL students from Grade 3 or Grade
6 through the higher grades, a process which would allow
researchers to assess their progress.
"EQAO testing would be an ideal opportunity for us to
find out how well ESL or former ESL students are doing if we
just asked the right questions," says Coelho. "Yet, there's no
longitudinal tracking through high school, no tracking of
dropouts as well."
But researchers frustrated by their inability to track
students are about to receive a powerful new tool. The
provincial government has approved a plan to give every
student a computerized number that will follow them throughout
their academic careers. Remarkably, such student numbers were
not in place until this year.
"This is something we've been talking about for 20
years," says Connelly, of the Toronto board. "We track
graduation rates and credit accumulation (a key indicator of
future success) but we can't identify students who have moved
through the ESL system.
``We'll be able to do that much more easily once we get
these student numbers."
In the United States, immense resources have already
been poured into the longitudinal tracking of immigrant and
ESL students. Unlike Canada, American immigration is dominated
by a single linguistic group, Spanish-speakers, who make up 75
per cent of the language minorities in U.S. schools.
Among all youth aged 16 to 24, immigrants to the U.S.
are three times more likely than native-born Americans to have
dropped out of high school before completing a diploma or
obtaining an equivalency certificate. More than 29 per cent of
immigrants aged 16 to 24 did not have any kind of high-school
qualification. Among Spanish-speaking immigrants, that number
rises to 46 per cent.
Importantly, the Americans have also studied what
programs work best for ESL students an undertaking that has
not even been contemplated in Canada, even though Toronto and
Vancouver are already home to more immigrant students than
most U.S. cities.
In Canada, there is so little information about the
academic performance of ESL students that few concerns are
raised about the quality of our existing programs.
In making the case for their massive U.S. study of
210,000 ESL students, Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, of
George Mason University, wrote:
"It is urgent that federal and state governments know
what school practices are most effective for language minority
students because this demographic group is fast becoming the
largest minority group in U.S. schools ... Our data analyses
from 1985 to 2001 show that most U.S. schools are dramatically
under-educating this student population.
``As a country, we cannot afford continuation of
current practices, at the risk of under-preparing a large
segment of our workforce for the 21st century."
National Newspaper Award-winning reporter Andrew
Duffy is the 2003 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in
Public Policy. The Ottawa Citizen reporter, formerly with the
Star, recently completed his year-long study of the
relationship between immigration and education in Canada.
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The Atkinson Fellowship was
established in 1988 to further the tradition of
liberal journalism in Canada that was fostered by
Joseph E. Atkinson, the founder of the Toronto
Star. Winners pursue a year-long research project
on a subject of topical interest and their
articles are published by the Toronto Star.
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