One of the biggest omissions of NCLB, said Suárez-Orozco, is guidelines to address the needs of immigrant students. “NCLB never thought about the fact that 23 percent of children are immigrant students.” Many of these students are at a disadvantage when taking standardized tests because they come from households where English is not the principal language or they themselves are limited in English proficiency, she said.
Although the U.S. educational system was the envy of the world during the middle of the last decade, the United States is now the only industrialized country in the world where kids are less likely to graduate from high school than their parents, said Suárez-Orozco. “If we don’t pay for it up front, we’ll pay for it in the penal system.”
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