One-Size-Fits-All Requirements Hurt Laredo Children

Guadalupe Cortes     Photo by Nicki Roberson

Guadalupe M. Cortes and her fellow teachers in Laredo, Texas, understand what it's like for the students who must straddle two worlds. All of the teachers at the J. Kawas Elementary School in Laredo's Independent School District must be certified in K-12 bilingual education. Roughly 95 percent of the children in the heavily Latino school do not speak English as their first language.

And now that a culture of one-size-fits-all, standardized testing has reached this district, Cortez says she and her fellow teachers feel even more pressure to teach to the test under No Child Left Behind.

"When are we going to teach?" said Cortes. "In the end we will have little to measure if I haven't taught anything and I am just giving tests."

For half of her 20 years in teaching, Cortez has served the children in this Webb County community. She's seen many challenges.  Some class sizes in the elementary school are as large as 29 students in the younger grades.  At the high school, the dropout rate has risen.

Like thousands of school districts across the nation, a new burden has landed on this Laredo district in the form of cost federal regulations that do little to address, let alone even recognize the challenges to bilingual students. And the law often gives little credit to schools for any progress bilingual students make in learning English as their second language.

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