Sunday
May 04, 2008
In this guest blog post, Greg Michie, a Golden Apple Fellow, invites us to consider our role as educators in the national debate on immigration.
During my years teaching 7th and 8th graders in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, I avoided decorating my classroom with motivational posters.
“Success is 99% hard work.”
“Education is the key to every door.”
“When I let myself dream, anything is possible.”
Common as such platitudes are on school walls, I figured they’d ring hollow to my students’ ears. Many of the kids I taught had seen poverty and hardship up close. They knew the world was more complicated than feel-good slogans could convey.
Still, I did my best to make my classroom a place of hope. I tried to help my students see college as a real possibility down the road. And I tried to impress upon them that, clichéd or not, working hard and doing well academically would give them more options after high school.
Turns out that I lied.
You see, most of my former students are from Mexican immigrant families, and some—more than I realized at the time—are undocumented. So even if they remain focused, stay out of trouble, study, and graduate from high school with exceptional grades, going to college is still a long shot at best. For many, it’s simply not possible.
That’s because current U.S. law dictates that the estimated 65,000 undocumented students who graduate from U.S. high schools each year are not eligible for federal work study programs or loans to help fund their collegiate studies. Their immigration status also precludes them from receiving many private scholarships, and they cannot work legally to support themselves through school.
But legislation known as the DREAM Act would change that. The DREAM Act would allow undocumented students who entered the U.S. before the age of 16, have lived here for at least 5 years, and demonstrate “good moral character” to become legal residents on a conditional basis when they are accepted to a 2- or 4-year college or university. The conditional status would allow students to get work study jobs, receive federal loans (but not Pell grants), and seek legal employment. In short, it would make college a real possibility.
Unfortunately, the DREAM Act failed again last year to become law, a casualty of the contentious broader debate over comprehensive immigration reform. But the struggle for its passage continues, and teachers and educators should be a major voice in the conversation.
Write your senators and representatives. Educate your colleagues. Let them know that we need to take action to support undocumented youth who’ve been in this country much of their lives doing the right things.
These are kids who have worked hard. They’ve grabbed hold of their educations. And despite evidence around them that sometimes mocks their devotion, they’ve continued to believe in the promise of America.
Question is, how much do we believe in them?
Our answer will speak volumes about whether the dreams we propagate in schools are the stuff of reality for undocumented students, or simply fodder for a poster on a classroom wall.
Gregory Michie teaches in the College of Education at Illinois State University. He is co-editor of City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row, to be published this summer by The New Press. He is also the author of Holler if You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students and the co-author of See You When We Get There: Teaching for Change in Urban Schools.
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