This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2018) |
Oakland International High School | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Address | |
4521 Webster Street , 94609-2140 | |
Information | |
Type | Public high school |
Established | 2007 |
School district | Oakland Unified School District |
Principal | Carmelita Reyes |
Teaching staff | 24.00 (FTE) [1] |
Grades | 9–12 |
Enrollment | 367 (2017-18) [1] |
Student to teacher ratio | 15.29 [1] |
Nickname | OIHS |
Website | www |
Oakland International High School opened in August 2007 with the support of The Internationals Network for Public Schools, Oakland Unified School District, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The school targets a population of students, newly arrived immigrants, who have historically been under-served nationally, in California, and in Oakland.
OIHS is a member of The Internationals Network for Public Schools, a non-profit organization that grew out of the work of a group of international high schools in New York City. It now supports 12 schools in New York and California. The first international high school, located on the campus of LaGuardia Community College, opened in 1985; two more followed in the 1990s. Since 2001, the network has opened and supported nine additional high schools with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The network of schools annually serves 4,000 students immigrating from 90 countries. The network's mission is to provide quality education to recently arrived immigrants by developing and interconnecting small high schools based on the Internationals approach.
The school campus is the former Verdese Carter Middle School, built in the 1970s. The site formerly served as Woodrow Wilson Junior High School from 1926.
The mission of OIHS is to provide newly arrived immigrants a quality alternative education focused on English language acquisition in preparation for college.
100% of the student body is made up of English language learners, nearly all of whom immigrated to the US in the last four years. Collectively, students speak over 30 languages other than English. Students have come from over three dozen countries: Afghanistan, Brazil, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, China, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cuba, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, El Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iraq, Japan, Liberia, Macau, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. 52% of students are Latino, 6% African, 36% Asian, and 6% Arab or White. Approximately 25% of students hold refugee immigration status, having escaped ethnic conflicts in Liberia, Nepal, Burma, and Central Asia. More than 90% of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. Approximately 97.2% of students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. [2]
To promote a sense of community and support, class sizes are kept small, holding only 25 students or fewer. The total enrollment for the school in the 2017-2018 academic year was 360 students, maintaining a maximum of 100 students per grade level. [2] In their freshman and sophomore years, students at OIHS are kept within a tight circle of the same four teachers who strengthen their basic English skills. As upperclassmen, students are acquainted with new teachers and are given the opportunity to participate in internships at local businesses, government bureaus, and community service programs.
Experts conclude that we must infuse our textbooks with information from the minority perspective, instead of incorporating a few instances of it into a white history book, placing an emphasis on culturally relevant teaching. [3] Teachers at Oakland International High School incorporate many aspects of the students' culture into the everyday curriculum. Additionally, the school organizes "Community Walks" in which students become the teachers and educate the staff on their cultural backgrounds and customs. These Community Walks include the sharing of cultural dishes and visits to local ethnic enclaves such as grocery stores and churches.
Bilingual education was barred from the classroom in 1998 by California Proposition 227, but these restrictions were repealed by California Proposition 58 when it passed in 2016. In support of this, Professor Ofelia García of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, argued that dynamic (meaning-making) bilingualism which integrates culture and language together in the classroom can yield more desirable results in both the short and long term than complete immersion in an English-only classroom. [4] In the ongoing debate on bilingual education, OIHS chooses to implement an immersion approach, despite scholarly evidence that supports transitional and bilingual education models. [4] [5] Although OIHS is advertised as an English immersion school, language support from teachers, volunteers, and even other students is encouraged. Furthermore, teachers are trained on the refugee experience and its various narratives in order to best educate their students and help with the resettlement of these populations. Refugees may or may not have had formal education prior to arriving in the American classroom. [6]
OIHS teachers are trained in the Internationals Approach to teach students to improve their speaking, writing, and reading skills in English. This approach is built on the belief that English-language acquisition is best fostered in an academic environment in which students participate in 1) heterogeneous groups, using 2) a project-based curriculum, and where 3) English development is integrated into all content areas. Working in small groups, students learn academic content, art, music and technology through exciting, rigorous, hands-on projects as they learn their new language. [7]
25,000 new refugee students enter the U.S. public education system each year. [6] OIHS was founded in 2007, preceding the year 2008 when the United States received 70% of the world’s refugees equating to 60,190 people. [6] These figures reflect the fact that about half of the world's refugee population are minors. Through the Refugee Act, refugees upon arrival in the U.S. receive eight months of medical and cash assistance; however services for youth refugees are limited, even in schools which have been proven to be the most stable and effective institution of support for refugee families. [6]
In bilingual education, students are taught in two languages. It is distinct from learning a second language as a subject because both languages are used for instruction in different content areas like math, science, and history. The time spent in each language depends on the model. For example, some models focus on providing education in both languages throughout a student's entire education while others gradually transition to education in only one language. The ultimate goal of bilingual education is fluency and literacy in both languages through a variety of strategies such as translanguaging and recasting.
Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.
Language immersion, or simply immersion, is a technique used in bilingual language education in which two languages are used for instruction in a variety of topics, including math, science, or social studies. The languages used for instruction are referred to as the L1 and the L2 for each student, with L1 being the student's native language and L2 being the second language to be acquired through immersion programs and techniques. There are different types of language immersion that depend on the age of the students, the classtime spent in L2, the subjects that are taught, and the level of participation by the speakers of L1.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1965. Part of Johnson's "War on Poverty", the act has been one of the most far-reaching pieces of federal legislation affecting education ever passed by the United States Congress, and was further emphasized by the revised No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Transitional bilingual education is an approach to bilingual education in which students first acquire fluency in their native language before acquiring fluency in the second language, where fluency is defined as linguistic fluency as well as literacy. This is in contrast to total immersion bilingual education in which students are directly immersed in the second language. Transitional bilingual education is among those most commonly implemented in public schools across the United States. The application of transitional bilingual education in the United States ultimately resulted from an effort to officially recognize Chicano and Latino identities with the passage of the Bilingual Education Act.
French immersion is a form of bilingual education in which students who do not speak French as a first language will receive instruction in French. In most French-immersion schools, students will learn to speak French and learn most subjects such as history, music, geography, art, physical education and science in French.
English-language learner is a term used in some English-speaking countries such as the United States and Canada to describe a person who is learning the English language and has a native language that is not English. Some educational advocates, especially in the United States, classify these students as non-native English speakers or emergent bilinguals. Various other terms are also used to refer to students who are not proficient in English, such as English as a second language (ESL), English as an additional language (EAL), limited English proficient (LEP), culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD), non-native English speaker, bilingual students, heritage language, emergent bilingual, and language-minority students. The legal term that is used in federal legislation is 'limited English proficient'.
Dual language is a form of education in which students are taught literacy and content in two languages. Most dual language programs in the United States teach in English and Spanish, but programs increasingly use a partner language other than Spanish, such as Arabic, Chinese, French, Hawaiian, Japanese, or Korean. Dual language programs use the partner language for at least half of the instructional day in the elementary years.
Central Sydney Intensive English High School (CSIEHS), formerly known as Cleveland Street Intensive English High School, is an ESL high school located in the Inner Sydney suburb of Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia and operated by the New South Wales Department of Education. The school provides intensive English language, settlement, orientation and welfare programs to secondary aged, newly arrived permanent, temporary resident and international students. Settlement support and partnership programs are provided for the school's culturally and linguistically diverse parent community. The school's student and parent community come from more than 30 language backgrounds other than English. Bilingual staff support student learning and parent programs. The school's motto "Harmony and Progress" reflects the proactively inclusive education and welfare programs designed to enhance student resilience and achievement.
Early immersion is a method of teaching and learning a foreign language. It entails having a student undergo intense instruction in a foreign language, starting by age five or six. Frequently, this method entails having the student learn all or much of his or her various "regular" subject matter via the foreign language being taught.
Structured English Immersion (SEI) is a total immersion bilingual education technique for rapidly teaching English to English language learners. The term was coined by Keith Baker and Adriana de Kanter in a 1983 recommendation to schools to make use of Canada's successful French immersion programs. The Canadian model was developed to encourage bilingualism through immersing Anglophones in the minority language and replaced many English-only laws in various Canadian provinces before the 1960s, while in the United States the same approach was advocated to force minority speakers to adopt English.
Internationals Network for Public Schools is an educational nonprofit supporting International high schools and academies, serving newly arrived immigrants who are English language learners (ELLs), in New York, California, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Internationals Network also partners with other schools and districts across the country.
Intercultural bilingual education(Educación bilingüe intercultural) is a language-planning model employed throughout Latin America in public education, and it arose as a political movement asserting space for indigenous languages and culture in the education system. IBE is designed to address the educational needs of indigenous communities, and consists of various bilingual curriculum designs.
Ningbo Huamao International School, previously known as Multicultural Education Academy (MEA), is a school for international, expatriate students and Chinese nationals in Yinzhou district, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China.
Translanguaging is a term that can refer to different aspects of multilingualism. It can describe the way bilinguals and multilinguals use their linguistic resources to make sense of and interact with the world around them. It can also refer to a pedagogical approach that utilizes more than one language within a classroom lesson. The term "translanguaging" was coined in the 1980s by Cen Williams in his unpublished thesis titled “An Evaluation of Teaching and Learning Methods in the Context of Bilingual Secondary Education.” Williams used the term to describe the practice of using two languages in the same lesson, which differed from many previous methods of bilingual education that tried to separate languages by class, time, or day. In addition, Vogel and Garcia argued that translanguaging theory posits that rather than possessing two or more autonomous language systems, as previously thought when scholars described bilingual or multilingual speakers, bilinguals and multilingual speakers select and deploy their languages from a unitary linguistic repertoire. However, the dissemination of the term, and of the related concept, gained traction decades later due in part to published research by Ofelia García, among others. In this context, translanguaging is an extension of the concept of languaging, the discursive practices of language speakers, but with the additional feature of using multiple languages, often simultaneously. It is a dynamic process in which multilingual speakers navigate complex social and cognitive demands through strategic employment of multiple languages.
Children of migrant workers struggle to achieve the same level of educational success as their peers. Relocation causes discontinuity in education, which causes migrant students to progress slowly through school and drop out at high rates. Additionally, relocation has negative social consequences on students: isolation from peers due to cultural differences and language barriers. Migrant children, defined as those who relocate because of involvement with agriculture-related industries or other seasonal work, are also at a disadvantage because the majority live in extreme poverty and must work with their parents to support their families. These barriers to equal educational attainment for children of migrant workers are present in countries all over the world. Although the inequality in education remains pronounced, government policies, non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and social movements are working to reverse its effects.
English immersion programs have students to be fully immersed in the American culture, which starts by learning its language — English. A number of those who enroll into English immersion programs are immigrant children. Due to the fact that more ambitious choices are made by immigrant students than nonimmigrant students regarding academic choices, secondary effects, such as these English immersion programs, create positive outcomes. Immigrant children is defined as children who have at least one foreign born parent. Some immigrant students show proficiency in English after being in the program for only 2–3 years while others take longer. There are not many other resources provided by schools that students can go to if they want to learn or improve their English. As a result, it can possibly affect immigrant students' proficiency in English.
Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population, about 42 million out of a total population of 318.9 million citizens in 2017. First and second generation immigrant children have become the fastest-growing segment of the United States population. Compared to the native-born population, young adults aged 15–34 are significantly over-represented in new immigrants. Children and immigrants ages 35–44 are in similar proportion to native-born Americans, but older people are under-represented in new immigrants.
In bilingual education, students are taught content areas like math, science, and history in two languages. Numerous countries or regions have implemented different forms of bilingual education.
Newcomer education is the specialized teaching of refugees, migrants, asylees and immigrants who have resettled in a host country, with the goal of providing the knowledge and skills necessary to integrate into their country of refuge. Education is the primary way by which newcomers can adjust to the linguistic, social, and cultural environments of their new communities. Newcomer education aims to empower newcomers with a sense of self-efficacy and social integration, as well as giving them the skills to pursue employment or higher education. Newcomer education also aims to help address trauma, culture shock, and other negative effects of forced displacement. Education for newcomers can provide long-term prospects for stability of individuals, communities, countries and global society.