Gail Weinstein-Shr, a professor of education at Temple University, was working with Southeast Asian refugees in the Philadelphia area when she made a discovery: Educators were creating a rift between parents and their children by teaching the youngsters English-literacy skills the parents did not possess.
The pupils were frustrated that they had to translate for their parents, who knew little about the children’s new life. The parents reported feeling isolated from their offspring and disadvantaged by having to rely on them for information about school.
“Everyone is torn when these conflicts arise,” Ms. Weinstein-Shr says. “Every single generation has something to lose.”
In an effort to bridge the gap between the generations, Ms. Weinstein-Shr helped establish Project Learning English Through Intergenerational Friendship--or leif--in 1985. The privately funded effort pairs adult refugees with college students who teach them English so that they can teach their children and grandchildren about their native land and customs.
Today, the program includes more than 200 volunteers at four locations in Philadelphia. It is one of dozens of recent initiatives nationwide designed to reach out to the parents of students with limited English proficiency.
Although little is known about the efficacy of such programs, their supporters report a growing level of enthusiasm and funding, spurred in part by interest in the broader area of family literacy.
‘A Hot Issue’
“It’s a hot issue. It’s growing before it has had a chance to establish itself, before it has been defined,” says Laura S. Bercovitz, project coordinator of the Northwest Educational Cooperative in Des Plaines, Ill.
The nonprofit agency operated a demonstration project from 1986 to 1989 that taught lep parents basic “survival” skills and how to understand and interact with the American school system. More than 200 copies of the curriculum for that program, Home English Literacy for Parents, have been distributed since then.
In an effort to gauge the effectiveness of educational programs for l.e.p. families, the U.S. Education Department’s office of bilingual education and minority languages affairs is conducting a two-year descriptive study of 15 demonstration projects that it has funded through its Family English Literacy Program.
The study, contracted to the Atlantic Resources Council, began last October and is scheduled for completion by September 1991, according to obemla officials.
Expanding Commitment
But even without data to support the effectiveness of the Family English Literacy Program, obemla has been expanding its commitment to the initiative since it was authorized in 1984.
In the 1985 fiscal year, the program consisted of four three-year demonstration projects, totaling $500,000 annually. By fiscal 1989, obemla had funded 35 such projects, with a total of $4.7 million in grants. And this fiscal year, it provided $4.9 million in funding.
According to Mary T. Mahony, coordinator of the federal program, all of the projects attempt to improve the academic performance of l.e.p. children by teaching their parents to teach them, by maintaining the cohesiveness of language-minority families, and by getting language-minority parents more involved in their children’s schools.
The projects vary widely in curriculum and methods, however, primarily because they must accommodate diverse adult populations, Ms. Mahoney says.
‘A New Deficit Model’?
Administrators of the programs also disagree over whether the schools or the parents should determine the curriculum for such programs.
Because many lep parents are recent immigrants, such efforts traditionally have told families how to shop, cook, and otherwise care for their children. And they have urged parents to tutor their youngsters by using activities similar to those taught in school.
More recently, however, literacy programs for l.e.p. families have begun to give parents greater control over the focus of the programs, based on the assumption that most parents already possess basic parenting skills and are concerned about their children’s education.
Elsa R. Auerbach, an assistant professor of bilingual and English-as-a-second-language graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, coordinated the Family English Literacy Project at the University of Massachusetts-Boston from 1987 to 1989. Since then, she has emerged as a leading advocate of parental control over family literacy programs.
According to Ms. Auerbach, children gain literacy skills by participating in routine activities that take place in the home on a daily basis, not by engaging in special exercises recommended by the schools.
“One of the dangers of the whole attention to family literacy,” Ms. Auerbach argues, “is that it becomes a new deficit model, which blames parents for problems with education and says there is something wrong with the family, and if we could only fix the family everything would be okay,”
“The parents have a lot of strengths that may not take the form that schools are usually accustomed to,” she adds. “The starting point has to be the strengths of the families.”
Diverse Program Offerings
The obemla-funded Family English Literacy Programs are evenly divided between those that stress bilingual instruction and those that provide lessons in English. And they include an array of techniques for reaching out to lep parents. For example:
- A project begun by the Grand Rapids, Mich., schools in 1988 requests that parents and teachers sign a contract to collaborate in the education of lep preschoolers. Parents can take books home from a lending library to read to their children. Teachers assist the parents in understanding the vocabulary and concepts contained in the books.
- A program in the Baldwin Park (Calif.) Unified School District includes both English-as-a-second-language and bilingual-education techniques. It provides certificates of completion to immigrant parents who participate in the program, which they can use to help meet the language training required for U.S. citizenship.
- A program operated by the Bilinguals United for Educational Opportunity Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder attempts to reach Hispanic and Asian families in remote rural areas by collaborating with local social-service agencies.
The Family English Literacy Through Books and Beyond program, in the Solana Beach, Calif., district, is modeled after a highly successful districtwide project that has become part of the U.S. Education Department’s National Diffusion Network.
According to M. Susan Holtkamp, literacy project director for the district, participating families meet at an elementary school for two hours each week. Parents and children spend the first hour working together on an e.s.l. lesson that teaches them how adapt to American society. During the second hour, children focus on literature, while their parents receive training in English and parenting skills.
Other l.e.p. families are served through the federal Even Start program, which works with the parents of disadvantaged children under age 7.
In addition, according to Meta W. Potts, director of adult-learning services at the National Center for Family Literacy, new family-literacy programs are being established as a result of the Family Support Act of 1988. The law requires states to establish a Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training Program for welfare recipients that includes the provision of educational services.
A network of Family Learning Centers has also been created by Service, Employment, and Redevelopment--a nonprofit, Dallas-based organization founded by Hispanic groups. The centers are designed to improve the education of Hispanic students and reduce Hispanic illiteracy rates.
The centers were piloted at three sites, in Milwaukee, Washington, and Grand Junction, Colo., in 1986. Today, there are 37 sites funded with $6.5 million in federal grants and private donations.
