Interview with Sandra Del Valle
By: Nadya Shah and Lee Wang
I was in middle school so that was quite a while ago. But the shame is that things haven't changed that much. But because I'm fairly bilingual, when new students who were immigrant students and whose native language was Spanish came in to the classroom, we sat in the back of the classroom. I was told to sit with them and to translate what the teacher was saying. So I think that's an example of what's still unfortunately going on with Miriam Flores's daughter, that the educational system, it should be prepared for these children but it still isn't prepared for them. And I think that's a national shame.
Costs & Consequences
Possible consequences are what we're seeing now and it's really not surprising. When your child is educationally neglected and they don't have proper access to resources, to programs, to teachers who understand their native language or their culture, you get tremendous drop-out rates. And that's what we're seeing in New York City and what we see in Nogales, Arizona, and so it's no surprise and it's tragic because we're talking about huge disparities in drop-out rate and huge disparities in underachievement.
Overcoming Barriers
By putting in place strong programs and requiring that school districts fund them well, we are dissolving barriers. We're not just dissolving language barriers, we're dissolving achievement barriers, and when you dissolving achievement barriers, you're dissolving socioeconomic barriers, lifestyle barriers. It's a whole complicated situation, or I should say it's a whole complex. Things are related to each other. Whether its English fluency, achievement, drop out-rates, segregation, children who are given the resources to deal with those things are children that are going to be able to cross barriers, cross cultural barriers more easily.
Language Rights, Civil Rights
I think when we think about civil rights we think about race and we think about ethnicity, sometimes we think about national origin, but language is just as much an aspect of personality and an aspect of...and it's also a marker, the way race is a marker, as any of the other civil rights categories. So I think language, yes, that language should be considered part of the civil rights. And I think we put it as part of civil rights, we bring all the history of struggle that has gone before us since Brown v. Board of Education. That gives it a kind of moral standing. It makes people aware that language is as important as all those other characteristics.