At first blush, I would have said separating non-English
speaking kids from their English speaking peers at school is a
segregationist tactic that hinders the chances of immigrant
children from success. But a New York Times story that follows
kids at the Cecil D. Hylton High School in Woodbridge, Va., a
suburb of Washington, D.C., begs the question – if kids can
succeed separately, wouldn’t throwing them in with English-
speaking kids be the real hinderance to academic success? The
story follows a group of kids in the ESOL (English for Speakers
of Other Languages) program at Cecil D., kids from a host of
Latin and South American countries plus China, Sri Lanka and
more. These kids aren’t just learning English while their peers
study Spanish; they’re in an ESOL classroom for social studies,
math and almost every other subject. And as their teacher – an
immigrant herself who was the first in her French-Canadian
family to learn English when they moved to the U.S. – points
out, there’s a vast difference between th