Multicultural Education Fails

I have occasionally opined about the failure of the American educational system. If children are our future, as the old saying goes, we are in serious trouble. America’s children are grossly undereducated. The pandemic school closures simply aggravated a bad situation.

Children around the world did not suffer the same abusive school closures. Thus, our children fell further behind. Recent studies suggest that making up lost ground is unrealistic. Most of the children whose cognitive development has been damaged by the lockdowns will not recover. In particular, that means minority children. 

As I said, the lockdowns are only part of the story. The other part, the part that has been in play for years now, involves multiculturalism.

As Betsy McCaughey explains clearly in a Daily Caller story, the migrant surge has been ongoing for years now. The cause, she says, is that government officials and educators have decided to teach multiculturally. Whereas in the past children who did not speak English were obliged to attend classes in English, nowadays, we favor multilingual education, allowing non-English speaking children to disrupt classes and waste instruction time having lessons translated from one to another language.

So, as more and more migrant children are added to American classrooms, the problem is going to be amplified:

But when migrant children are added to the class, the rest of the kids get less of their teacher’s attention. A teacher will have to focus on the needy newcomers who speak no English and may not have been to school before. For the rest, it could be a year of lost opportunities.

Multicultural classrooms have been underperforming for years now. In truth, McCaughey suggests, this absurdly wasteful policy explains one good reason why American schoolchildren are behind their peers in foreign countries:

Public school students’ reading and math scores have been falling for decades, hitting a new low this year, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress tests. One reason is the soaring number of non-English-speaking students, up from only 9% of public school students in 1980 to nearly 25% now. 

What does it look like in the classroom? Like a cacophony, with much time wasted.

Now typically, a bilingual teacher and teaching assistants try to teach — math, science, art, any subject — in two or more languages, speaking English at times but also answering questions in Spanish and other languages. It’s chaos. Everyone learns less.

Of course, those involved understand what is happening.

Geralde Gabeau, executive director of the Immigrant Family Services Institute in Massachusetts, explains that migrant children will be placed “in a first grade class with other students who already know their ABCs, who already know how to read, so those children are going to suffer.”

As one might expect, the United Nations has declared that children have a human right to be educated in their own language. 

But the United Nations insists children have a “right” to be educated in their native language. Nonsense. It dooms them to low-paying jobs.

The result has been, more and more parents are pulling their children out of these schools. If they can afford private or parochial school, they enroll their children there. Otherwise they homeschool.

The exodus out of New York public schools resembles nothing other than the exodus out of multicultural Egypt.

Think about that one for a bit.

Please subscribe to my Substack.