This I Believe — Change is Possible Now.

Anu Passi-Rauste, (Finland '14), George de Lama (president of Eisenhower Fellowships), Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (executive director of UN Women), and me! Photo credit: Elias Williams

When invited to talk about the importance of a multilingual America, I’m the last person that anyone expects to see walk up to the podium.  As a Black American with unaccented English, people are surprised to learn that I grew up in a language-minority community in the US.  My family is frequently stopped and asked what language we’re speaking and what country we’re from.  By now, my children (11 and 7) are accustomed to these questions and are starting to understand the nuance of our Louisiana history.

My grandparents’ generation spoke Creole French as their home language and learned English in schools.  English quickly became synonymous with education.  Even after university study, my grandmother still regularly slipped into Creole for her phone conversations, Friday night card games and Sunday morning coffee.  I felt like she was happier in Creole than in English.  As a child, I wanted to be in that language with her and decided that I would be bilingual and I would raise my children in our language as well.  I didn’t know that embracing my family’s language would put me on a path to championing diverse, integrated environments later in my life.

Soon after giving birth to my daughter, I began to realize that just raising my children to embrace a vision of integrated, multilingual America wasn’t enough to shift how the world would treat them.  How can bilingual, bicultural kids grow up and not feel like outsiders in our country? I became clearer that they would need stronger community models than the walls of our home and that our public schools have the biggest opportunity to promote an integrated future.  A few years after my daughter was born, I founded a network of intentionally-diverse, public, language immersion schools. When we opened the French, Spanish, and Chinese schools, I narrated a long-term future vision for how our integrated schools would eventually unite the region.  I knew that, as our kids from all backgrounds grew up together, they would have a more nuanced, inclusive view of the world into adulthood.  What I didn’t expect was that our work would make profound changes for the adults in our community at the same time.

One day, Ms. Elizabeth, a mom from a lower-income Black community, called me about a project.  Her video production class had an assignment on immigration.  She admitted that, before our schools had opened, she would have focused her project on how immigrants make life worse for working class Americans.  After one year of witnessing her daughter make friends across race, language, and neighborhood lines, she was inspired to film a positive perspective on the value of immigration.  During that one call, Ms. Elizabeth reminded me that, with the right opportunities, change is possible for us now.  We don’t need to wait for the next generation to get integrated communities right.

This is What I Truly Believe — Only when diverse people have opportunities to learn, live, and love together, will we fully embrace our multilingual, multicultural America.

This essay is excerpted from Building Bridges One Leader At a Time: Personal Essays by the Women and Men of Eisenhower Fellowships. I'm thankful for the EF community for encouraging us to think about our own deeply held beliefs.Rhonda Broussard, USA ’14Rhonda Broussard has a passion for education and has been a leader in diversity and international education initiatives. She helps schools transform their practices and align adult culture with key beliefs for teaching and learning. Prior to launching The Ochosi Group, she founded a network of language immersion, International Baccalaureate schools serving an intentionally diverse student population.  Rhonda explores her own wonderings about education reform at her blog One Good Question.

America Already has Integrated Schools — Here's How We Can Have More.

In his Will America ever have integrated schools ? blog post yesterday, Neerav Kingsland asked for ways to better understand the story for school integration advocacy.  Here at One Good Question, I’m usually talking to other people about their perspectives, but since I spend a lot of time wondering about his question myself, I have a few thoughts to share.Dear Neerav,I love that you’re thinking about this from personal, policy, and practical perspectives ! I am a firm believer that no culture is monolithic, so to be fair, there are parents all over the country, who go to great lengths to live in integrated neighborhoods and/or enroll their children in integrated schools, like this recent study of DCPS demonstrates. We could provide personal testimony from thousands of Black, White, and Latinx parents who advocate for integrated schools and related civil rights/social justice equity in their communities.  For the sake of this conversation, let’s assume that you don’t mean them.  Let's also assume that we're only talking about high-quality education — no one is advocating that we send children to low-performing schools for diversity's sake.

Top-down policy does not create lasting change when the people living through the change are oppositional.

We definitely see that, as court-mandated integration programs end, most communities revert back to segregated schooling.  We have bright spots in places like Wake County, North Carolina where the community – White and Black students & families – advocated to maintain their integrated school options after the court mandates ended. In St. Louis majority-white school district leaders maintained their commitment to their desegregation program for 10 years after the court mandate ended.  Those decisions take personal conviction and local advocacy/political support.  You could also look to communities like Tucson Unified (no pun intended) that achieved unitary status after 30 years of court oversight (it is a long, hard battle), and still needs an ongoing comprehensive plan to remove the traces of the forced segregation in their past.  A scalable solution has to include ways to build public will and shift personal attitudes about diversity.

Location, location, location. 

To your point that “White parents won’t send their children to poor neighborhoods” Frankenberg and Debray (2011) also argue that we should focus integrated school efforts on deconcentrating low-income housing and starting the work in more affluent communities.  White families wouldn’t have to “send their children to poor neighborhoods,” Black/Brown kids wouldn’t have to be bused all over town, districts/coalitions wouldn’t incur the exorbitant cost of said busing, and the community would avoid the White Flight tipping point that happens in more racially tense/fragile mixed communities.  I don’t know that any place is actually trying this, but it’s an interesting position.New schools – district or charter – that are intentional about their diverse population are just as intentional about location.  I’m most encouraged by the strategy at Rhode Island Mayoral Academies where they locate schools on the borders of the stratified communities that they intend to serve.  No one has to leave their greater neighborhood for a quality, diverse education.  That's a scalable practice that districts/regions could implement when they create neighborhood school assignment zones.

Rural bright spots.

For the long-term integration argument, I would actually be more focused on census projections.  Not in the antagonistic – White people you’re going to be the minority by 2044 ! way, but in the spirit that, if we don’t figure out scalable solutions to integration, our society will implode.  I would look to our rural communities, like Beardstown, IL and Carthage, MO, as bellwethers over urban examples.  Rural communities are becoming majority-minority at a faster rate than the nation, have relatively few financial resources to respond to the shift, and are using school integration to address the community’s needs.

We’re in a catch-22 here. 

What makes resistant families more apt to support school integration ? Positive experience with school integration.  To go back to the DCPS study, when everything is equal, families are more likely to choose integrated and high-performing schools.  Get the public school quality right, get the location right, launch local campaign on the academic and social benefits of New XXXXX School model and many diverse parents will come.Creating diverse schools as the new normal will take generations, but it is incumbent upon us to promote such integration now. Sustainability of diverse schools and diverse communities requires that the people who live in them have a shared value.  What's the best place to teach those shared values on a large scale?  Our public schools.Looking forward,Rhonda

When Women Succeed, the World Succeeds. #IWD2016

In honor of International Women's Day/ Journée des Droits des Femmes, a look back at  Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's talk "When women succeed, the world succeeds."

We need to get decision makers to stop seeing women as the problem or charity case. We will not overcome inequality or poverty or sustainable peace if we do not improve the lives of women. There are only 20 women heads of state in the world. if we had more female leaders we would not be in this state. Women are part of creating the world we all want. We have to invest in women. When you leave women out, you compromise the rest of the nation.

What it will take for more governments, institutions, schools, etc. to understand that improving the lives of girls and women will increase opportunities for the entire society?

One Good Question with Zaki Hasan: Move Bangladesh from Fashion Economy to Thought Economy.

Zaki Hasan, (photo credit: Mr. Saikat Majumder)

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

If you talk about the philosophy of education, in Bangladesh, we’re still like 17th century Europe – an industrial country focused on economic equities : jobs, food, survival. We’re not talking about which common social values the world should have.  After I earn the money in my skilled job, do I understand the value of human life in this world ? Unfortunately, what happens when there is not enough employment or job security, people turn to unethical means to survive. There must be some global values system that we start talking about in education.  Will that not be the number one problem when we’re trying to kill each other not from lack of money but due to lack of accepting diversity ?  Who will solve this ?  The medical system will not.  The political system will not.  Only education can do this.Bangladesh is a young country. Since the independence, I broadly categorize the generations into three: the first generation questioned the injustice and owned the country’s independence, the second generation questioned autocracy and has started the journey of democracy 24 years back , and now the third generation is questioning our journey without a vision and we are heading to a bright and shiny future. This journey would only be successful when our children are equally ready through education to make the journey. This generation and generations after this need to understand the values that the previous generations had started building this country on i.e. justice and democracy, which must continue to improve in creating a society based on equity.We need a different education investment framework and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals give us a reasonable starting point.  There are some missing focuses though. For example, in the next 15 years, when we talk about basic literacy, it has to take into account how differently we have started communicating by using technology than what it had been so far in the form of in person communication and written scripts. The long discussed issue of digital divide is becoming a much more complex issue in the coming days.   For example, a person with post-graduation education from Bangladesh today might have less exposure to new technologies than a typical elementary school child in the US.  There has to be more investment in education, especially in the methods of communication, to decrease such the global achievement gap.  The developed countries still have a lot to improve, but they are still focused on their immediate crisis of economic survival than equally having social value creation and even equally important aspect of transforming our children into thought leaders.  Least developed countries need a radical restructuring of education.  We’ll stay stuck in factories and providing good clothes to wear, but developing countries will continue to rise in thought economy.  We have to change the education system to allow people to think freely and creatively.

Photo credit: Mr. Saikat Majumder

“In Bangladesh, you've been instrumental in growing global education programming. How effective are western innovations/models in improving education gains in Bangladesh?  Are there other US education initiatives that would advance education access?”

My visits to public, community schools in US were bittersweet.  Children there have an assurance that they can go to school in their area.  Common Core State Standards had just been rolled out and it was wonderful to see that federal and state system have agreed to core common standards and still had the freedom to apply them in their own way.  The most beautiful moments I had were observing student-teacher interactions.  I visited Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy and, at first, I couldn’t understand the role of the teacher and the student.  Sometimes the student was leading the class and the teacher was in the back of the room.  The roles seemed interchangeable and that made me happy.Here, going to school is like winning a lottery ticket.  Even if you get access to a school, you cannot assure that the quality is maintained.  In the classroom, many teachers are not trying to make learning interesting, they are trying to ‘teach’ children instead of making children interested to ‘learn’. Education can be important to empower students to take control of the class. The classroom environment that I saw in the US is something that would be beautiful.  No one wants to feel inferieor, not even your 3 year old child.  I don’t know how it happened in the US and how it could happen in Bangladesh.  If the US reached consensus on CCSS in 2012, maybe we can do it here by 2022. If we can shift to more inclusive pedagogy, especially children-focused learning, the next generation will believe that more is possible in all schools.

Zaki’s One Good Question :  Bangladesh has made lots of progress to educate more people in our society, but we see that the system is not yet producing a respectful society.  Education is about creating global peace.  Are we matching what we really want to accomplish through education ?  Are we missing the way that education should be defined?

Zaki Hasan is currently serving as the Executive Director (ED) of Underprivileged Children’s Educational Programs Bangladesh (UCEP).He has worked in various sub-sectors of education including Technical Education, Early Childhood Development, Primary Education, Secondary Education, Adult Education, Girls Education and ICT-aided Education. He has been member in various boards and committees on issues/organizations involved in education. He has numerous publications including editor of more than 20 children books. He was also the founding Country Director of Room to Read Bangladesh. He has worked for several other non-profit international organizations such as Save The Children, ActionAid, and Helen Keller Intl. Zaki Hasan is an Eisenhower Fellow.

Throwback Thursday: Teaching Kids Across Language Barriers.

Kindergraten team building

From time to time, I feature an individual who has made a remarkable difference in the lives of our children. These education change agents care about one thing above everything else: the education of our children."When I had my vision for a school, I realized that as a parent, I am powerful. As a teacher, I am an expert. Armed with that realization, I knew I could start my own school." So says Rhonda Broussard, founder and president of the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools in St. Louis. Founded in 2009, Rhonda's unique school offers elementary school students a total language immersion experience starting in kindergarten. When her students enter their classroom, they are greeted by a teacher and classroom assistant, both fluent in the language for that school. From day one, these kids become engulfed on not just the spoken language, but the culture of the language -- which is exactly the experience Rhonda was hoping to provide.The seeds for Rhonda's school were sown from her own Louisiana creole roots. Rhonda's grandmother spoke French and always talked to Rhonda about the need to understand the culture of the French language. As a young girl, Rhonda resisted her grandmother's urgings and at 14, just as Rhonda was beginning to embrace them, her grandmother suddenly died. Rhonda still longingly speaks about how she always wanted the experience of the living community with her mother in the French world.Always drawn to education, Rhonda studied at the Washington University at St. Louis and earned a graduate degree in French Studies at New York University. Thereafter she reached her goal of becoming a teacher specializing in language immersion. She taught in New York, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Louisiana and Missouri. It was in New York where she became more and more connected with the idea of language immersion for her students. By then, Rhonda had a child of her own and longed to give her the cultural language learning experience that she never had with her own grandmother. When a friend from graduate school exposed Rhonda to a language immersion program in New York, Rhonda began to research those schools. Soon, Rhonda relocated to St. Louis and after many inquiries, was surprised to learn that there were no language immersion programs in St. Louis. When it became clear that she could not follow her passion inside the traditional school system, Rhonda explored using the state's charter school law to create her innovative school.At present, Rhonda offers Spanish, French and Chinese to her young students. She expects to grow those language offerings to include Japanese, German, Russian, Arabic and Farsi. While her school currently is K-4, she will add a new grade each year until she reaches her goal of K-12. Rhonda's school is incredibly diverse, in every sense of the word. Fifty-six percent of the students are on free or reduced lunch and the racial demographic is 54 percent African American, 29 percent white and 9 percent Hispanic. Walking through the halls of Rhonda's school is an amazing experience. In one classroom, I was greeted by a blonde-haired 5 year-old kindergarten student who described for me in French what the class was doing for the day. Since I had no idea what she was saying, she repeated her words in English. Thereafter, a young African American girl spoke to me in Spanish about an experiment her class was working on as I walked into the classroom. When shefinished, she noticed the dumbfounded look on my face. Whereupon, her teacher gently reminded the girl, "Now, please say it again in English for our guest." We then walked into the Chinese language classroom. Well, you get the idea.Throughout the tour, the love between students and teachers was palpable. When I mentioned this to Rhonda after I noticed the way she calmly made a couple of rambunctious boys walk quietly to their class, she said"We shower our children with care and love. Unfortunately, too many children come from homes filled with tension. Even some well-intentioned parents discipline their children by using threats. We don't threaten our students. We use love as the lever for teaching, learning, discipline, for everything."Well said, Rhonda. And thanks for running a great school for kids.This article was written by Kevin Chavous and originally published in his blog on Huffington Post.

Do Struggling Learners Belong in Language Immersion Programs?

Yes.  But what about the students who have weak L1 skills?  Them too.  Our students in poverty don’t have the home supports to be successful in language immersion.  Isn’t this a hardship for them? Nope.  These students need longer time to get academic concepts, won’t language immersion delay them in comparison to their peers?  Uh, still no.Academic conferences are typically places to validate our perspectives, and, when we least expect it, really challenge our beliefs as well.  Genesee’s opening keynote for the Brazilian Immersion Conference (BIC) was about the striving (struggling) learner in immersion settings.  In North America, this work urges us to being more inclusive of ethnic minorities, children in lower socio-economic environments, students with special education services.  I appreciate Genesee’s keynote even more in the Brazilian context, where virtually all language immersion programs are in independent schools that serve affluent majority culture kids.  All educators needs reminders and inspiration that increase their expectations for all students.Genesee’s research addresses the dissonance between popular thought and research implications for language immersion.  Common sense argues that language immersion is not successful for students with perceived hardship: academic delays, low socio-economic status, new or poor speakers of the majority language.  Why add to their struggle?  Genesee compares language immersion students with similar demographics of non-immersion students and native speakers of the immersion language.  His results consistently demonstrate that L1 performance, when compared with peers in the control group, are not diminished for “struggling” students (Genesee, 1992; 2007a; Genesee, Paradis, & Crago, 2004).

“It’s important to believe that what we’re doing is right.  If deep down teachers worry about [whether these kids should be in language immersion], it compromises their students’ performance.”

The primary message of Genesee’s talk was that building strong literacy skills in L2 not only supports literacy development in L1, but, more importantly, it increases student access to and success in the academic curriculum.  Students in language immersion are expected to study complex academic topics in the immersion language by the end of elementary schools.  The primary academic reason that students leave language immersion programs in public schools in Canada, is due to reading difficulty and related frustration in the academic curriculum. Committing to and developing literacy skills in L2 unlocks deeper learning for students over time.Genesee addressed the four most common questions raised by language immersion educators:

1. What levels of proficiency in L1 and L2 can we expect?

2. Is it preferable to teach reading in L2 first or L1 first, or both from the beginning?

3. Should we keep the L1 and L2 separate when teaching?

4. What is the importance of oral language for L2 reading competence?

Based on the research demonstrating that language immersion education (L2 literacy) doesn’t diminish the learner’s literacy skills in L1, Genesee advocates for greater, concentrated exposure to the L2 as early in the program as possible. Literacy skills transfer from one language to the next, particularly in languages with similar alphabet characters.  Once a reader learns reading fluency skills in one language that they speak, they apply that literacy understanding to another related language. If your English teacher teaches you to that you can blend letter sounds, your Portugese teacher doesn’t need to reteach that same skill.  That said, he would encourage teaching reading in L2 first, and keeping L1 and L2 separate when teaching.  Genesee cautions that elevating the status of teaching reading in L1 risks reducing L2 reading competency and related academic access in higher grades.Proficiency levels in L1 and L2 vary depending on the structure of the immersion program.  Language immersion educators often fall prey to the myth of the “perfect bilingual.”  Even with high functionality, immersion students still make grammar mistakes in both languages, and have less idiomatic language than same-age native speaker peers. Within environments where L1 and L2 language instruction are highly distinctive (two different teachers in two different spaces), constructivist instruction and cross-linguistic connections support learners in scaffolding specific concepts and vocabulary development.According to Genesee’s work, language immersion students struggle more with reading comprehension than with decoding skills.  It is much more complex to diagnose reading comprehension difficulties if students have inadequate vocabulary and incomplete complex grammar.  These two deficits become the biggest barriers for students to access academic language by grade 5.  Genesee advises that teachers explicitly teach academic language starting in kindergarten and across all disciplines.  This includes complex grammar as well as discipline-specific vocabulary.  Language immersion teachers need to know, understand, and teach academic language from the early grades to give students the tools to thrive in reading comprehension, not just reading fluency.  Early grade teachers in particular should constantly teach phonological awareness, word knowledge, content, and complex grammar to give students the specific tools they will need for reading comprehension.Fred Genesee is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at McGill University.  Prof. Genesee's primary research interests focus on bilingualism and bilingual first language acquisition in normal and impaired populations. In particular, his research examines the early stages of the acquisition of two languages with the view to (a) better understanding this form of language acquisition and (b) ascertaining the neuro-cognitive limits of the child's innate ability to acquire language. He is also interested in second language acquisition in school and the modalities for effective acquisition in school contexts.

One Good Question

"I want to ask one good question."That's all? I can ask one good question now.  That's what I thought when I heard my colleague share her intellectual goal for the new school year.  I had no idea how difficult it would be to ask my students one good question, a question that wasn't leading, that didn't tip my hand or reveal my beliefs, that didn't force students to defend a single position, nor one that allowed them to respond solely with anecdote and opinion.In the fall of 2003 I was working with new peers in the second year of Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens, NY.  This was the year that would challenge my teaching forever.  Over ten years later, I'm still challenging myself to ask one good question.  My work in international education has changed, but the need for good questions remains.  In this blog I will be exploring international education and access for all students through multiple lenses, but all with the same question: In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation's role in the world?Spoiler alert: I am completely biased. My education career is built on ways that we are increasing access and opportunity for all students to connect with the world outside of their local neighborhood: multilingualism, cross-cultural and intercultural competencies, international perspectives, peace-building, youth action and agency, socio-economic diversity.  I look forward to having my assumptions challenged and learning innovative ways that different countries, communities, and schools are answering this question.