Identification Procedures of Hispanics in the State of Michigan
Arnold, JoAnn
1987-06-29
Abstract
As of January 1986, a tutorial program was developed and implemented to serve bilingual and migrant students, K-12, not served in the three bilingual magnet schools in the Flint Community School District, Flint, Michigan. The need for this study, a more accurate identification procedure, arose from working in this program. Many discrepancies were found in the procedure used in the Flint system. The first problem that was encountered was trying to match printout names to the students in the schools. The printout listed, for example, seven Hispanic names. When checking the schools for these seven particular students, not seven, but fourteen students were found. Cases of misidentification or non-identification were: a sister's name on the list, but not the brother, in the same school; mixed marriages, giving children in the same family, different surnames, not necessarily Hispanic; racially mixed marriages with children's names not necessarily Hispanic; students identified by race rather than by home survey and Hispanics misidentified as black; students not identified, reason unknown. Since funding for these programs always seems to be in a crisis state, the need for an accurate means of identification is critical. The State allocation is based on numbers so identified and each local district's funding base is determined by the number of students identified and served. It is most essential to identity these students in order to provide services as early as possible. The discrepancies found, overall, in the Flint program led to the question of what other districts in the State were doing and if they were experiencing this haphazard approach in their identification procedure. To date, no definitive research has been done in the area of the efficiency of the Home Language Survey instrument used in the identification process of minority language students. If census figures project Hispanics to grow to be the largest minority in the United States by the year 2000, we need to tighten our identification procedures to identify that population. It is necessary for bilingual education programs to adequately identify the LEP population from the general population to be able to address the needs of as many LEP students as possible. The question to be answered in this research is: IS THE HOME LANGUAGE SURVEY AN ADEQUATE INSTRUMENT FOR IDENTIFYING HISPANICS IN THE STATE OF MICHIGAN FOR BILINGUAL EDUCATION PURPOSES? The answer simply will be "yes, it is" or "no, it is not." While the answer may appear to be simplistic, the implications of a majority of "no" responses will be of enormous consequences. These consequences will be addressed that will result in failing to identify students in need of bilingual education. The research carried out for this project is in such areas as education, population growth, voting and registration and unemployment and policy issue.Subjects
Flint Community Schools Districts Flint, Michigan Hispanic student identification
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