“Educators must consider students as individuals”

No! Why should it be? Immigrants are normal boys and girls that have been to normal schools in their countries of origin. The only thing that may cause tensions or similar problems at school are students who arrive when they are teenagers, with very little schooling, and who want to work not study. Take a 14-year-old Moroccan boy, for example, who arrives in Spain hidden under a lorry seeking a better life. He is intercepted by the police and sent to school. He doesn’t want to go to school and doesn’t understand why he has to. These cases are a minority, however. The relationship is not explosive… it is actually much better! Immigrant families and their students have higher expectations and are more interested and motivated to learn. The education system is one of the social subsystems in which immigration processes produce fewest tensions. The job market, for example, didn’t use to be affected by these problems but this changed with the onset of the crisis. Things are getting complicated and there is a lot of tension now. Why do schools have fewer problems? Well, for one, because they have many resources. The birth rate in Spain has been declining for some years now, which means that there are fewer children in the classrooms. The amount of money invested in education, however, has increased fourfold in the past 30 years. Schools work like clubs. Once the facilities have been built, they can be used by 100 or 200 people. School also experience fewer problems because there is consensus about what needs to be done with immigrant students—they need to be taught—and the students also know what they have to do in this environment—they have to learn. What has happened is that the number of students per class has risen from 20 to 22. Logically, if you ask the teachers, they would prefer to have 10 students than 20 but then again they could have as many as 40! Spanish teachers were neither prepared nor trained in this respect. But... they couldn't possibly be before the arrival of foreign students! They have had to train themselves. There is no specific training on how to deal with immigrant students. What could they have learned? Foreign languages maybe? There are so many and they’re all so different! Learn about customs? They are also all so different. Immigration is not a problem and in my opinion, it is not a challenge as such. It does, however, imply extra work for teachers. Today's classrooms have more students whose native language is different to that used to teach the subjects. This means that before students can learn about physics or chemistry, they have to learn the language that these subjects are taught in. The aspects that influence whether or not immigrants are more difficult than other students are language, level of academic performance on arrival, and differences between customs followed at home and at school. From the student’s perspective, this is not a problem. They are happy to learn! Language allows them to progress, to make friends, to work in the future... What's more, it is something they are all successful at. How long do they have to spend learning a new language? If they arrive when they are very young, almost no time whatsoever. If they arrive later, when they are 10 or 12, for example, it takes them about six months, however ‘foreign’ the new situation is. It should be remembered, however, that almost 50% of immigrant students come from Latin America and therefore already speak Spanish. Immigrants have both language-specific needs and needs derived from educational lag when they join a new school. But let us not forget that the Spanish school system and the Catalan system in particular are among the best in the world, both in terms of results—learning—and processes—teaching methods, freedom of choice… We can still obviously learn things from some countries, but who can't?! We obviously mustn’t overburden the teacher. Regular classes should be formed by regular students, i.e., students who speak the language used in the classroom. What can be done? Extracurricular activities, opportunities for interaction… I don’t think that spending three months in a separate classroom is a traumatic experience for someone who has left his country, his people... particularly if opportunities for interacting with Spanish students are provided, such as recreation time and excursions. There are plenty of options but it is important to remember that immigrants have normal not special education needs. They are not considered special-needs students. Why not? Because the situation they are in is not the result of psychological or physiological constraints. Their problems are temporary and we know how to deal with them. Immigrant and foreign are not educational concepts or categories. The phenomenon is real: students come from other places and interrupt learning flow. We shouldn’t therefore talk about the students themselves but rather about the effects they have. Immigrant students have very diverse characteristics but they are no different from native students. Everything that makes an immigrant different also makes a native student different. That there are students who are lagging behind in terms of performance when they arrive? Here too! That these students move around a lot and arrive when the course has already started? There are also Spanish families who start school halfway through the year! They must be treated as individual cases. Educators must consider students as individuals. Immigrant students must be treated in the same way as Spanish students; the fact that they are immigrants should be given no additional importance. We must differentiate between impact on learning and impact on education. As far as learning is concerned, if the teacher has extra work, as we have already mentioned, but no additional resources, then the arrival of immigrants will obviously affect the level of the class. But only minimally and for very little time. Let us not forget that immigrants only arrive once and once they have adapted, the fact that they are immigrants is no longer of consequence. The truth? The arrival of immigrants has an imperceptible effect on the performance of other students. What’s more, according to data I have analyzed from the Pisa 2006 Report—the most comprehensive source of information in this area—whether or not there is actually an effect is highly questionable. It is not certain that it actually has an effect. The association between immigration and decrease in performance detected may be because more able native students—and not students with a higher socioeconomic background as many people thought—changes schools when immigrants arrive, or it may be due to a selection effect, with immigrants choosing schools with lower performance levels. This would mean that immigrant students lower the average performance of a school but not that of individual students. The Pisa 2006 Report also showed that, contrary to what was thought, immigrants do not have a lower socioeconomic background than that of native students. And the parents of these 2 groups of children also have a very similar level of education. It is very similar. The effects detected are not the result of the poorer conditions of the immigrant students. At least not in Spain. Immigrants tend to go to the same schools, regardless of whether they are from a low or high socioeconomic background. They don’t lower the level because they are poor or uneducated. Sharing a classroom with immigrants allows students to see people they would have only seen on the television in the past. And we know that it’s not the same to see the sea on television as to swim in it, or to hear English in the cinema or hear a classmate speaking it, or to know that there are Chinese people in Spain as to see them in your class, or to hear that Muslims don’t eat pork as to actually see this in the school canteen. In this case, students can learn how prohibitions are applied…and ignored, for example when they see a Muslim classmate’s father drinking a beer. They discover a lot about relationships, customs, and also see that we are also a little strange in some ways. Our holy day is Sunday, for example, but for other people it’s Saturday What’s the difference between one and the other? When you open a window in the morning, you see the same sky. Students also learn about values such as tolerance and the relativisation of culture. But care must also be taken not to use students as an educational tool in the classroom. It wouldn’t be very ethical. The ideal situation would be to have a universal curriculum adapted to the local context rather than a multicultural or intercultural curriculum. The concentration of immigrants is not widespread, as the data show once again. In actual fact, it affects immigrants more than native students. In Spain, for example, the proportion of immigrants is 20% in just 6% of schools, 30% in 3%, and 1.2% in 40%. A percentage of between 20% and 30% corresponds to between 3 and 5 immigrants per class. In Catalonia, the proportions are somewhat higher: with 13% in 20% of schools, 3% in 30%, and 1.4% in 40%. Immigrants, however, are affected by concentration as the proportion of immigrants per class is 20% for 40% of immigrants, 25% for 30%, and 40% for 15%. None of Spain’s private schools have been found to have a proportion of immigrants of over 40%. This means that the number of students per class has increased from 20 to 22. Some schools were going to close but haven’t thanks to immigrants. The problem of class size is therefore a problem of certain schools but not of the education system. Immigrants concentrate mainly in public schools, and large cities. Concentration affects some but not all public schools. Schools that take in more immigrant students must therefore be given more resources. But….! Not all public schools need more resources… I must stress again, however, that immigrants are not a problem, they simply provide extra work for the teachers. Special measures may be needed to ensure that students and teachers understand each other and that students understand what they are being taught. If concentration has an important effect on academic performance, it doesn’t matter whether the school is public or private. Additional resources are the answer. If concentration does not have an important effect on performance, which is what the data seem to show, we have to dispel the belief that concentration is a problem. We must avoid generating false alarms. Concentration isn’t a bad thing for immigrants. They prefer to go to school together, for reasons of family logistics, or to feel supported. And I think that schools’ primary purpose is to teach. So if concentration doesn’t have a significant effect on learning, there’s nothing to worry about. In my opinion, it’s a mistake to put education before learning. But we obviously have to ensure that students don’t become frustrated. We must be clear about one thing: frictions arise with families not students. A 5-year-old child does not have a culture. Young children adapt easily to different customs. I’m sure that we won’t have to adapt and that they will adapt easily. They are sponges, who can absorb everything such as different family and school cultures and adapt effortlessly. The situation is more delicate when they’re teenagers as this is when they are building their identity and may react against the system. Just like many teenagers! But I have to stress that I am convinced that the friction is between families and communities. Where’s the limit? Political agreement. There aren’t that many problematic issues. Most of them are related to sex and marriage. Customs sanctioned by religion. The problem that always emerges is related to the use of the headscarf. Why is this? Because of the existence of strong, united communities that call for its acceptance in public spheres. I remember a case in a convent in Madrid in which a student wanted to wear a headscarf to school. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. The nuns agreed. After all, they wear a habit… wearing a burka might cause difficulties but because of practical issues. The security forces will not allow it. It is a question of political dispute, of power between communities. But it is also related to the attitude of some teachers, who put a limit on what students can wear to school. Why are hats banned for example? Because of our preconceived ideas. We have been taught that taking off your hat is a sign of respect. It is a question of establishing agreements. But I don’t think that we are at that stage yet in Spain. These situations will only occur when there are powerful communities with political ambitions calling for acceptance of certain customs. According to the results of the Pisa 2006 survey, there are not always differences between native and immigrant students and the differences that exist are highly variable. There are even countries where immigrants outperform native students. Immigration was associated with a decline in performance such as that seen in Spain in just 23 of the 55 countries that participated in the Pisa survey. And most of these in European and western European countries in particular. What we have to see, though, is that the academic level of immigrants is very similar to that of their peers in their countries of origin. Turkish students in Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg all had a similar level. And this level was similar to that in Turkey.