Racial prejudice can be institutional as well as individual

By Ashley Schiller

October 22, 2008 | His name is Daniel Josue Fonseca. He must not speak English.

That seems to have been the assumption at Fonseca's Salt Lake County high school. His parents are Columbian, but Fonseca was born and raised in the U.S., speaks squeaky-clean English and participated in the honors program at his school. For three consecutive years, he was called out of his honors or advanced placement classes to take a basic English ESL test.

"The test was elementary stuff, kind of like what they would teach you in a Spanish 1 class. It was just ridiculous," he said. The second year, he tried to explain that the test was unnecessary as he was fluent in English, but he was told to "just take it real quick."

Fonseca is now a junior at Utah State University, majoring in international business. He speaks not only English and Spanish, but also Chinese.

After hearing his story, I issued myself a mission to get to the bottom of this institutionalized prejudice. My first phone call was to Fonseca's high school. I was connected with a saucy administrator within the ESL department. In response to the question of why a student who was fluent in English may still have to take the ESL test, she replied, "Probably his test scores are low and he sluffs a lot."

I continued to explain that the individual was an honors student and attended class. Although the conversation was a bit edgy, it resulted in good information. I found several possible reasons why Fonseca had to take the test every year, and I even began to feel more sympathetic toward Ms. Sauce, who has more than 500 language-learning students to monitor.

There are four questions answered during registration process that will determine a student's testing future: What language do you primarily speak? What language is spoken in your home? In what language should documents sent home be written? What language do people most often speak to you?

If any of these questions are answered with a language other than English, the student's name is put on a language-learner list, regardless of whether or not the student is enrolled in ESL classes. These students can expect annual language proficiency testing until they graduate high school, unless they manage to get off the list.

There are a few ways to be removed from the list. First, parents may write the school a refusal of services letter. But most families don't know about this option--in fact, most students don't even know they're on the list. Fonseca, for example, had no idea.

The second way to get off the list is to score well on the test. If a student gets an exceptionally high score, administrators should put him or her on monitor for two years and then exit the student from the program. But there are so many students and so much paperwork, it often doesn't get done. That's most likely what happened to Fonseca, his high school's administrator explained.

So someone didn't follow through on his paperwork, so what? What's the big deal? We must look at the messages being sent the school's ESL students, Fonseca and the other English-speaking students.

What is the motivation for the true ESL students to do well on the tests if they have no hope of escaping it the next year? There is no reward for good performance, only a bleak memo: "Good, but still not one of us." What these students need is recognition for progression. And despite the dismal picture sometimes portrayed, there are many who progress.

Also, there are many who do not fit the stereotype, like Fonseca. He was the only Latino in his honors classes, but he was lucky never to have been the brunt of verbal prejudice from his peers. He was just a normal honors student -- until the administration came in and reminded him and all his peers that he was Latino, someone perceived to require special attention and testing to keep him up to speed.

We can't afford to send this message to our students. But the solution is not a simple one. The ESL employees at Fonseca's high school are overloaded, according to administrators. The amount of paperwork required is unrealistic for such an office.

"If we didn't have so much paperwork, we wouldn't lose so many students," one administrator said, whose tone testified that she was indeed worn out.

These offices likely can't afford to just hire more people to handle the paperwork. But they can analyze their systems and seek for a more organized approach. Also, student office aids could be enlisted to help run the office and ease the load of administrators. Parents and students should be made more aware of the list and how one may be removed from it, so that students like Fonseca could formally remind the office that he had no need to take the test.

If we cannot rid our schools of institutionalized prejudice, we are slinging bricks around our students' necks rather than giving them a foundation for success.

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MS