Educational Leadership:Responding to Changing Demographics Abstract

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March 2007 | Volume 64 | Number 6

Responding to Changing Demographics

Hot-Button Issue

Marge Scherer

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Five Trends for Schools

Shelley Lapkoff and Rose Maria Li

The authors look at important demographic trends that will have an effect on schools, including roller-coaster enrollments and increasing diversity. For example, compared with 10 years ago, the average child entering a U.S. school today is less likely to live in a family with two married parents but is more likely to have a living grandparent, reside in a family with secure parental employment, encounter classmates of other races and ethnicities who speak a language other than English at home, and become obese. At the other end of the age spectrum, older adults in the United States are more educated and can expect to live longer and healthier than previous generations. Programs like Experience Corps, which channels the talent and energy of growing numbers of older adults into public and community service, provide significant benefits for the older Americans who participate and help address students' academic needs.

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As Diversity Grows, So Must We

Gary R. Howard

This article describes professional development activities in specific suburban school districts that are experiencing rapid growth in their proportions of students of color, culturally and linguistically diverse students, and students from low-income families. As the author has worked with these districts, he has identified five phases of professional development that help transform school staffs to meet the challenge of changing demographics: (1) building trust; (2) engaging personal culture; (3) confronting issues of social dominance and social justice; (4) transforming instructional practices; and (5) engaging the entire school community.

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What Families Want

Deborah Wadsworth and Michael Hamill Remaley

Public opinion surveys conducted by Public Agenda confirm that parents, students, and educators from diverse ethnic groups share the same fundamental aspirations for education and agree on the basic reforms needed in schools. The author, a senior advisor for Public Agenda, describes survey findings that suggest that all groups see education as the key to success in life. Black and Hispanic parents and students, however, report greater dissatisfaction with their schools' standards and climate. The authors suggest that the key to closing achievement gaps and responding to increasing diversity is not to redesign schools, but to “work harder than ever to provide all students with strong academic programs, qualified and motivated teachers, and respectful and nurturing school climates.”

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The Culturally Responsive Teacher

Ana María Villegas and Tamara Lucas

Over the past three decades, the K-12 student population in the United States has become ethnically and linguistically diverse. Not so with the vast majority of teachers, who are generally white, middle class, and monolingual English speaking. Successfully teaching students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds requires a new way of looking at teaching that is grounded in an understanding of the role of culture and language in learning. Teachers need to be familiar with constructivist views of learning, gather information about their students' lives, develop sociocultural consciousness, hold affirming views toward diversity, use instructional strategies that help students build connections between their lives in and out of school, and advocate for all students.

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Helping Young Hispanic Learners

Eugene E. García and Bryant Jensen

Hispanics are the largest and youngest ethnic group in the United States. Moreover, young Hispanic children make up approximately 80 percent of the U.S. English language learner population. They are a heterogeneous group, born both inside and outside the United States and having origins in Mexico, Cuba, Central America, South America, and the Dominican Republic. Young Hispanics bring a set of welcome assets to the education process: They often come from two-parent families, have a strong work ethic, are healthy, value education, and often are bilingual. Nevertheless, Hispanics lag behind their white and Asian American peers at all proficiency levels of reading and mathematics throughout their K-12 schooling. To improve their education trajectory early on requires rich language environments, dual-language programs, universal prekindergarten, and high-quality, bilingual teachers.

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Schooling, Interrupted

Andrea DeCapua, Will Smathers and Lixing Frank Tang

As the ranks of English language learners swell in the United States, the number of students with interrupted formal education (SIFE) is on the rise. In 2004–05, New York City schools estimated that 10 percent of their English language learners were students with interrupted schooling. According to the New York State Department of Education, students with interrupted formal education come from homes in which a language other than English is spoken, have entered a U.S. school after 2nd grade, have had at least two fewer years of schooling than their peers, and function at least two years below grade level in reading and math. Pull-out programs, push-in programs, and after-school and Saturday programs can help this population of students improve their English language skills and fill in the gaps in their learning. Best practices for students with interrupted formal education include sheltered instruction, content ESL, bilingual instruction, and collaborative learning. Successful programs have committed teachers; are well planned; focus on meaningful, standards-based learning; educate the whole child; and have full administrative support.

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Rethinking the Line Between Us

Bill Bigelow

As a high school social studies teacher, the author provides his students with a curriculum that helps them think about immigration issues. He describes the instructional units that he has developed to address two key questions about U.S.-Mexican immigration: What is the origin of the U.S.-Mexico border? and Why are so many people today fleeing Mexico and coming to the United States? Because the traditional social studies curriculum in U.S. schools does not give accurate or detailed answers to these questions, the author believes that “we can't simply abandon young people to the stereotypes, biases, and historical misinformation that have become so much a part of the public discourse around immigration.”

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“Tinkering” Close to the Edge

Mia Lynn Mercurio and Charles R. A. Morse

In Harper v. Poway Community Unified School District, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that a student could not wear a T-shirt to school bearing a statement that homosexual behavior is shameful. The court did not use the usual rationale, that such speech could disrupt school activities, but instead relied on the notion that such statements could inflict psychological harm on homosexual students. Mercurio and Morse argue that this rationale creates several new challenges for schools. Because the ruling only protects members of historically oppressed minorities, administrators must determine whether a student is part of a minority. According to Morse and Mercurio, the ruling may obligate some schools to silence only one side of potentially controversial discussions and even make theological judgments.

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Lessons at the Kitchen Table

Margery B. Ginsberg

Immigration is having a tremendous impact on U.S. schools, even in places like Dodge City, Kansas, where nearly a third of public school students are from new immigrant families. Ginsberg suggests that through engaging in visits to the homes of recent immigrants, the school community learns of the strengths, expertise, and “funds of knowledge” inherent in these families. Recognizing the knowledge immigrant families have to offer leads to respectful relationships. Connecting such knowledge to the school can spawn a richer and more relevant curriculum. Ginsberg outlines activities that lay the groundwork for effective teacher visits and describes an approach for analyzing teachers' observations and perceptions drawn from home visits.

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Building Partnerships with Immigrant Parents

Andrea Sobel and Eileen Gale Kugler

In 2004, immigrant-rich Annandale High School in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., launched a focused effort to bring more parents of students from immigrant families into school leadership. Nearly half of the parents of Annandale High students are immigrants to the United States—and they come from more than 80 different countries. Parents from various immigrant communities were invited to join parent leadership seminars given in English or Spanish; other programming was targeted to other immigrant communities most heavily represented at the school. Sobel and Kugler share strategies the school learned from the school's two-year effort, with special attention to communication strategies that were most effective at involving parents.

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Schools in Transition

Ellen McCarthy, Sandra R. Schecter, John Ippolito, Karine Rashkovsky, Valentine Hart, Louis Cuglietto, Robert Burke and Steven Ocasio

Four schools serving multicultural student populations and English language learners share how they created strategies and curriculums to respond to the needs of students from different cultures or countries.

Mountain View High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, whose students are mostly over 18, discovered that the young adults were not receiving the county's curriculum on family life issues because of gaps in schooling and language barriers. Mountain View created and secured county approval for a curriculum appropriate for older students, and delivered it in several languages.

Three multilingual schools in Toronto found that an after-school program of literacy activities in which English language learners and their parents participated helped raise ELL's achievement and also helped parents affirm the value of their own cultural knowledge. A principal at Deering High School in Portland, Maine, dealt with harassment against racial and ethnic groups by empowering students to recognize and resist stereotyping and racial incidents.

And a high school serving a large population of poor families and second language learners in Port Chester, New York, describes how the school provides its students physical and mental health care services. By offering such services at the school, the school makes health information an integral part of its supportive interventions with struggling students.

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The Case For and Against Homework

Robert J. Marzano and Debra J. Pickering

We now stand at an interesting intersection in the perennial debate about the merits of homework, write Marzano and Pickering. Arguments against homework are becoming louder and more popular; at the same time, research is providing growing evidence that homework can be useful when employed effectively. After reviewing three recent books that have called on schools to greatly reduce or eliminate homework, the authors summarize the results of meta-analyses that have found a link between homework and higher achievement. They discuss three issues: the appropriate use of homework at various grade levels; the optimum amount of time students should spend doing homework; and the most effective forms of parent involvement. They recommend that educators combine research findings with experience to develop their own local knowledge base.

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Toward Neuro-logical Reading Instruction

Judy Willis

Willis discusses Sally and Bennett Shaywitz's response to her February 2007 Educational Leadership article, “The Gulley in the Brain Glitch Theory.” She asserts that in their response (“What Neuroscience Really Tells Us about Reading Instruction: A Response to Judy Willis”), the Shaywitzes did not address four main problems inherent in the brain glitch model: (1) The brain glitch research is based on dyslexic readers, although all reading delays are not due to dyslexia; (2) The Shaywitz research focuses on a single area of the brain, which is not the only region involved in reading; (3) No neuroimaging evidence yet exists that can accurately distinguish between brain changes resulting from a specific intervention and the major developmental plasticity that children's brains undergo; and (4) The Shaywitz research emphasizes single-word reading as the measurable outcome, ignoring other complex components of reading. Willis asserts that federal policy mandates that rely on the brain glitch research are harming students.

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Another Bite Out of the Apple

W. James Popham

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Closing the Implementation Gap

Douglas Reeves

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Affirming Diversity

Thomas R. Hoerr

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Super Size Me: An Educational Tool of Epic Proportions

Eric K. Gill