The Department of Education (DOE) needs to do more to help immigrant students who enter city schools with little prior formal education, according to a new report by Advocates for Children of New York (AFC).
Those students face vast challenges at school and are at high risk of dropping out, the report says.
The report looks at immigrant students who are classified by the DOE as SIFE (Students with Interrupted Formal Education), meaning they have missed at least two years of schooling and are behind their age group in English and Math when they enroll. The classification means the students are entitled to extra English classes.
There were 15,410 SIFE in city schools in the fall of 2009, of which 3.76 percent were Arabic speakers. The majority (64.3 percent) were Spanish speakers, followed by Chinese (10.68 percent) and Haitian Creole (5.42 percent).
The AFC report, based on student, teacher and DOE interviews, DOE and other data, says that SIFE students often fail to get the support they need at school, struggle to catch up and ultimately drop out of school.
The DOE has no data on SIFE performance on Regent's exams or graduation rates. SIFE are included in data about all student English Language Learners, whose four-year graduation rate was 30.8 percent in 2007, according to the DOE.
The report recounts the experiences of several SIFE students.
Isabel, for example, came to America from Mexico in 2005, aged eleven, speaking only her native Mixtec dialect. She was placed in a bilingual English-Spanish class, which she struggled to understand. By age 15, her literacy level was that of a kindergartener. She dropped out school to find work until Advocates For Children stepped in to get her placed in a different school.
The Renaud brothers, meanwhile, immigrated to New York from Haiti, aged 17 and 18. They couldn't find a high school here to teach them the basic literacy skills they lacked after years of missed school. They dropped out of a General Education Development (GED) class as they couldn't understand the work.
A DOE spokesman told Aramica that the department is preparing a response to the report. He defended the department's record of helping SIFE students succeed.
"We are very proud of the work we have done to bring national attention to SIFE," said the spokesman, Matthew Mittenthal, "by improving identification, and funding new research and innovative programs."
He added: "While we are still reviewing the report and plan to submit our response shortly, we believe that its conclusions rely on anecdotes, unconfirmed accounts from unnamed schools, and misuse of data."
