New York City is a rich panoply of peoples from the far corners of the world. Every few generations we “repopulate” our city with immigrants, dynamic folk seeking their American dream.
Teaching in New York today is akin to teaching one’s grandparents. Immigrants fleeing poverty and/or oppression who, for the most part, never want to return to their home countries, who see public schools as the avenue for themselves and their children.
Schools have scrambled to keep up with our changing student population.
Newcomers High School, the International High Schools, Manhattan Comprehensive Day and Night High School are glittering examples of schools that serve our newest Americans.
One of the new schools scheduled to open in September is the Khalil Gibran High School, a dual language Arabic-English school that is named after a Lebanese-American Christian poet. The school leader, Debbie Almontassar is a longtime NYC teacher and staff developer in District 15 (Brooklyn).
A columnist in the NY Sun, Alicia Colon has launched a scurrilous attack on the school – calling it a “madrassa” and making comparisons with the killing of a Dutch filmmaker by a Muslim extremist.
It has become commonplace in our schools to see teachers and students wearing head scarves, yarmulkes and kufi … race, religion and ethnic background only adds to the “soup” that is New York.
In addition to the NYS High School diploma requirement of forty-four credits and five Regents exams schools may chose to have students read the classics, or perform internships in their communites or with potential employers. Other schools are Career and Technical Education (CTE) schools – students must complete an additional 6-10 credits as well as complete externships in their specialty.
Dual language schools, whether Mandarin or Spanish or whatever language will only help our children in this rapidly globalizing world.
To stigmatize an Arabic-English dual language school as a breeding place for terrorists is anathema. It evokes shameful past chapters in our nation’s history which all decent Americans hope we will never see again.
8 Comments:
1 Dravitch
· May 4, 2007 at 8:16 am
Peter,
I think it is time to remember that the purpose of public education is to bring us together as equal American citizens, not to teach each group its cultural heritage.
Al Shanker was eloquent on this subject. I was with him in Prague at a civic education conference in 1996 when he warned the educators of Eastern Europe not to fall into the path of ethnic separatism that was then so fashionable in certain precincts of American education.
In a city that contains families from more than 100 different ethnic and cultural groups, it is a bad precedent to separate intentionally students by ethnicity, race, or language. The raison d’etre of public education is to bring us together. Once we give up on that principle, then public education itself is in deep trouble.
Of course, students should learn to speak a foreign language. Of course, students should learn to speak Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Korean, Spanish, German, Hebrew, French, Italian, and other languages. But that is a rationale for more education, not a rationale for encouraging ethnically separate and distinct schools in the public system.
Diane Ravitch
2 Andrew Wolf
· May 4, 2007 at 10:25 am
I agree with Diane Ravtich. This type of school is inappropriate and un-American. Please see my column on this matter which apopeared in the New York Sun on March 16.
http://www.nysun.com/article/50575
3 Dravitch
· May 4, 2007 at 11:26 am
Peter,
Al Shanker gave his speech on “The Importance of Civic Education” in Prague in 1995, not 1996.
It can be found on google, also in the archives of the Albert Shanker Institute. Here is the link: http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0796/ijde/shanker.htm.
A forthcoming biography of Al by Richard Kahlenberg, which will be published by Columbia University Press later this year, brilliantly describes Al’s ideas about the way that public education promotes (and must continue to promote) democracy, human rights, and a common civic culture.
Diane R
4 Kombiz Lavasany
· May 4, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I wanted to just chime in and split the two issues. First the column by Colon which was highly offensive and in Peter’s view as well as mine, racist. Having emigrated from Iran after the hostage crisis I’ve endured stereotypes about being a terrorist, hostage taker, suicide bomber, etc. as a school yard taunt. To see a columnist insinuate a school is going to indoctrinate children to become terrorists merely because it teaches Arabic is highly offensive.
On the second question of whether the school should exist given that it focuses on teaching students how to speak Arabic, is interesting. My understanding is that the school is open to all NYC students and that the Mandarin-English school (which didn’t elicit the same protests except maybe from Mr. Wolf) has students from different sets of ethnicities. I’ll leave the question to smarter people of whether a thinning of foreign languages in regular schools has led to educators seeking to create schools that specialize in this way.
5 jd2718
· May 5, 2007 at 8:06 am
The piece in the Sun is disgusting.
But shouldn’t we (the UFT) be saying something about opening more new schools? Each new school creates a new union-free workplace; we have been succesful in organizing functioning chapters in many of the hundreds of new schools set up over the last few years, but not all.
Further, these new schools have contributed to chaos in the system – in every aspect from high school admissions to the physical problems of many schools sharing one building (scanning, bells, you name it).
Shouldn’t we be saying that setting up a dual language Arabic program in an existing high school would make more sense?
Jonathan
6 Peter Goodman
· May 6, 2007 at 10:59 am
Jonathan:
Two years ago a UFT Task Force made up of large and small school teachers crafted a detailed Report:
http://www.uft.org/news/issues/reports/smallschooltask/
Unfortunately, and characteristically, the DOE ignored the recommendations
Diane:
Al was a nimble, evolving and challenging thinker … and, as a native Yiddish speaker I wonder what he would have thought re dual language schools …
I am more concerned when a usually responsible newspaper feels they can “savage” Muslims simply because they are Muslims … we have not moved beyond the “Great School Wars” you have so carefully documented.
Peter
7 jd2718
· May 6, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Peter,
I know that the DoE ignores us. I wonder, though, if we couldn’t pay more attention to our own report. When was the last time we challenged the opening of new small schools?
Jonathan
8 More Diane Ravitch on Khalil Gibran | Edwize
· May 17, 2007 at 1:19 pm
[...] Peter Goodman’s post and ensuing discussion on the Khalil Gibran school, Diane Ravitch had an editorial earlier during the week at the NY Daily News discussing her [...]