Immigration v. Education

Letters: Illegal immigration leaves teachers behind
Letters to the Editor for July 18

The Register detailed the penalties and sanctions faced by 27 Orange County schools, almost all of them in Santa Ana, for missing benchmarks year after year in the "No Child Left Behind" program ["Schools hope changes pay off," July 14]. I don't work for Santa Ana schools but I have family and friends who do, and I hear about the problems all the time.

Santa Ana must educate mostly Hispanic children, many of whom are recent arrivals from Mexico and Central America. They are just now learning English. Many come from homes where parents cannot help with academics because they don't speak English at all or they speak poor English. Are the schools responsible for this? Santa Ana schools serve a population featuring economically poor demographics. Santa Ana families tend to be large, which means less parental attention for each child, and the children often must care for younger brothers and sisters after school, as parents cannot afford day care. It is not unusual for them to miss many days of school to care for siblings.

There are gangs and crowded homes, and all the problems of poverty to deal with. Santa Ana has the highest population density in the state, which is not compatible with quiet study and homework. New immigrant children are too often taken back to Mexico to celebrate extended Mexican holidays, especially in the winter, returning weeks late, missing too many classes. They go home for Christmas and then the undocumented ones have to wait for the "right time" to sneak back into Orange County to return to school. Is this the teachers' fault?

Here in Irvine parents pay for tutoring when students require it, and children benefit academically from all kinds of culturally enriching activities, from trips to museums to vacations abroad to academic camps. College-educated parents in Irvine, as in most of Orange County, work hard and pay a lot of money to help educate their children.

The most unfair part of all of this is that the federal government's failure to control illegal immigration is the cause of many of Santa Ana's school problems, and now it is the same federal government that wants to penalize teachers and professionals in the Santa Ana schools for those failures. If the Santa Ana kids were put in Irvine schools and the Irvine children were sent to school in Santa Ana, it would be the Irvine teachers and administration being damned for students who are "left behind." Not fair.