🚀 go-pugleaf

Mobius wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/education/27education.html
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> August 27, 2006
>
> In Schools Across U.S., the Melting Pot Overflows
> By SAM DILLON
>
> STERLING, Va., Aug. 25 - Some 55 million youngsters are enrolling for
> classes in the nation's schools this fall, making this the largest group of
> students in America's history and, in ethnic terms, the most dazzlingly
> diverse since waves of European immigrants washed through the public schools
> a century ago.
>
> Millions of baby boomers and foreign-born parents are enrolling their
> children, sending a demographic bulge through the schools that is driving a
> surge in classroom construction.
>
> It is also causing thousands of districts to hire additional qualified
> teachers at a time when the Bush administration is trying to increase
> teacher qualifications across the board. Many school systems have begun
> recruiting overseas for instructors in hard-to-staff subjects like special
> education and advanced math.
>
> The rising enrollments are most obvious in districts like this one west of
> Washington, in Loudoun County, one of the nation's fastest-growing school
> systems.
>
> Thousands of government, technology and construction workers, many of them
> Hispanic, Asian and African-American, are streaming into new subdivisions
> within commuting distance of the Pentagon and the headquarters of America
> Online. They are transforming a school system that was once small and
> overwhelmingly white into one that is sprawling and increasingly
> cosmopolitan.
>
> Thuy Nguyen, a 16-year-old junior at Park View High School in Sterling, has
> watched the recent transformation. She moved with her family to Virginia
> from Vietnam when she was 9 years old, and recalls that most of her
> fifth-grade classmates were white.
>
> "I was new, afraid, and I didn't speak very well English," Ms. Nguyen said.
> "I didn't talk to anybody." Six years later she says making friends is
> easier.
>
> "What I like about a diverse school is that you don't feel intimidated if
> there are other races," she said. "I'm jumping around, talking to the
> Caucasian clique and the Middle Eastern clique. I have friends from El
> Salvador, Mexico, Peru - one girl is half Korean and half Puerto Rican, she's
> cool - and from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
>
> "There's a girl from Bangladesh; we tell each other everything. I also knew
> a Swedish guy. He happened to be very hot. So I talk to all the different
> groups. I don't want it to be, like, 'You're just in the Asian clique.' "
>
> Kathy Hackney is Ms. Nguyen's tennis coach.
>
> "My team looks like the League of Nations," Ms. Hackney said.
>
> The Loudoun County Public Schools, where annual pay for starting teachers is
> $40,986, has hired almost all the 650 new teachers it needs to fill its
> classrooms when school begins on Sept. 5, scores of them through agencies
> that recruit teachers in foreign countries, the superintendent, Edgar B.
> Hatrick, said.
>
> But some rapidly growing districts across the nation are having trouble. The
> Clark County School District in Las Vegas, for instance, where teachers'
> starting salary is $33,000, has hired 2,000 teachers. But with classes
> scheduled to start Wednesday, the district was still looking for 400 others,
> mostly to teach special education and math, said Pat Nelson, a spokeswoman.
>
> The Plainfield Community Consolidated School District west of Chicago, which
> has grown to 26,000 students from 8,700 in 1998, had already hired 300 new
> teachers this year, said John Harper, the superintendent. But in one 36-hour
> period just days before the fall term resumed this past Wednesday, 500 new
> students enrolled for classes, Mr. Harper said, forcing the district to
> rearrange student schedules and hire more teachers.
>
> "A summer's planning can fall apart when we suddenly have hundreds of new
> students," he said.
>
> Most districts eventually find the teachers they need, but in extreme cases,
> some increase class sizes or call on substitutes until they hire a permanent
> teacher.
>
> In projections published last year, the federal Department of Education said
> the nation's elementary and secondary enrollments would grow, on average, by
> about 200,000 students annually, reaching 56.7 million in 2014. Demographers
> say the current bulge moving through the nation's school systems owes to the
> children of the baby boom generation, which lasted from about 1946 to 1964,
> as well as to the children of immigrants. The enrollment trends would be
> uneven, regionally, with schools in the Northeast and Midwest losing
> students, on average, and those in the South and West growing, the
> department said.
>
> The projections showed New York State's public school enrollment dropping 6
> percent from 2002 to 2014, Connecticut's enrollment falling by 1 percent in
> the same period, and New Jersey's rising by 3.5 percent.
>
> The department outlined the most spectacular growth for Nevada, where 2002
> enrollment was projected to rise 28 percent by 2014, and for Texas, where it
> was charted to increase 16 percent in the same period.
>
> The Frisco Independent School District, north of Dallas, has seen
> spectacular growth. In 1998, the system had eight schools with 4,500
> students. When classes began Aug. 15, the district had 23,200 students in 34
> schools.
>
> "Our challenge has been to build schools fast enough," said Rick Reedy, the
> superintendent.
>
> The first years of the 21st century have seen tremendous new classroom
> construction in many regions, with school districts spending some $20
> billion annually on capital projects, said Paul Abramson, who wrote a
> nationwide survey of school construction, published earlier this year.
>
> Construction crews completed work on three schools just days before students
> reported to classes on Aug. 7 in the Flagler County School District north of
> Daytona Beach, Fla., where enrollment has doubled to 12,000 students since
> 1998. Bill Delbrugge, the superintendent, said he had e-mailed a plea for
> help in completing the work.
>
> Peter Palmer, a former teacher, said he and scores of other volunteers had
> assembled desks, hauled books and carried chairs for three days in a
> somewhat chaotic, but eventually triumphant, sprint to ready the new
> buildings for students.
>
> The explosive recent growth has forced school officials into last-minute
> improvisations in Loudoun County, too. In 15 years, enrollment in the
> district has tripled, to 47,361 in 2005 from 14,633 in 1990; the number of
> Asian students has multiplied twelvefold and Hispanics seventeenfold. The
> district has built 38 schools since 1995, including Legacy Elementary in
> Ashburn, Va., which opened a year ago on a landscape that bulldozers were
> rapidly transforming from soybeans to suburbia.
>
> As of last Tuesday the school had enrolled nearly 200 students beyond the
> 875 it was designed to accommodate.
>
> "We're in an overflow situation, unfortunately, so we'll have to put you on
> a waiting list," Corinne Mirch, a school secretary, told Luis Bermejo, a
> Mexican-born stonemason who said he moved to the district in 1996, and had
> come to the school office to enroll his 5-year-old daughter, Sofia, for
> kindergarten. Sofia would probably be assigned to another elementary school
> in Ashburn, Ms. Mirch said.
>
> One of Legacy's special education teachers for the fall term was recruited
> in the Philippines through a search firm based in Delaware, said Legacy's
> principal, Robert. W. Duckworth. The district recruited a Spanish teacher
> and an English as a Second Language teacher for Legacy in Colombia, through
> Visiting International Faculty, a group based in North Carolina.
>
> The group is sponsoring about 95 foreign teachers in Loudoun County schools,
> as well as about 1,600 teachers in 1,000 other American schools. The State
> Department issues the foreign teachers three-year cultural exchange visas,
> said Ned Glascock, a spokesman for the group.
>
> Because of its voracious demand for qualified new teachers and to broaden
> staff diversity, the Loudoun district has established a carefully
> orchestrated, year-round teacher recruiting effort. When the district
> identified a talented Navajo Indian teaching candidate, Melissa Wright, who
> was to graduate from college in Hawaii this past spring, several Loudoun
> County officials got a nice assignment: a February recruiting trip to
> Honolulu.
>
> "I think you're amazing - I want to offer you a job right now," Ms. Wright
> quoted one district official as telling her.
>
> In the weeks thereafter, former principals and others working for the
> district as "candidate care ambassadors" sent Ms. Wright dozens of e-mail
> messages encouraging her to sign on and offering her help with buying a car,
> finding a residence and other advice, she said.
>
> Ms. Wright, who signed with the district in April, said she had been
> attracted to descriptions of Loudoun County as a magnet for international
> families and a place that nurtured cultural differences as schools across
> America are rapidly becoming more diverse.
>
> Three decades ago, in 1973, 78 percent of the students attending the nation's
> public schools were white and 22 percent were minorities, a category
> including blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and "other,"
> according to Education Department statistics. In 2004, the last year for
> which numbers were available, 57 percent of all public school students were
> white, while 43 percent were minorities.
>
> The department does not project student racial and ethnic data for
> elementary and secondary schools, said Val Plisko, an associate commissioner
> at the National Center for Education Statistics.
>
> But if trends continue as they have for 30 years, minority students appear
> likely to outnumber white students within a decade or so. In six states -
> California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas - they
> already do.
>
> The nation's public schools also brought together an extraordinary mix of
> students in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they first earned
> their reputation as melting pots, said William J. Reese, a history professor
> at the University of Wisconsin.
>
> Early in the last century, Senator William P. Dillingham, a Vermont
> Republican, tried to measure diversity. He led a commission that studied the
> public schools during the 1908-9 year as part of his campaign to restrict
> the immigration of Catholics and Jews from Central and Southern Europe,
> categorizing students as native-born or foreign-born.
>
> The commission found that in the few dozen largest cities, 42 percent of
> students were native-born, while 58 percent were foreign-born, Dr. Reese
> said. The commission made no effort to count students outside cities, he
> said.
>
> Making comparisons between 21st-century schools and those operating in
> Senator Dillingham's time is difficult because reporting practices have
> changed drastically.
>
> "But," Dr. Reese said, "we can say that today's students are the most
> ethnically and racially diverse that the nation's schools have educated in
> nearly a century."
> --------------------
>
> Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
>

Melting pot? BULLSHIT! A cesspool. March or die.

ted

http://www.newnation.com/index2.html  New Nation News

http://www.halturnershow.com/  Hal Turner Show

http://www.vdare.com/  V-Dare
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