A struggle for understanding

    Cramped in a small second floor classroom, walls the color of Mexican stucco, English as a Second Language teacher David Swanson speaks slowly. “What is it?” he asks the class of 12, pointing to a picture of a furnace. “What does it do?” Notebooks, pens, and small Styrofoam coffee cups litter the plastic tables. Behind them sit 12 eager adults, annotating worksheets filled with objects you find in a basement, slowly repeating words to themselves. “It is for heating the air?” one student ventures.
    Esther, Lino, Jose and their classmates come four days a week to the Erie Neighborhood House class in Little Village, in hopes that some day they will be able to grasp grammar, understand idioms, and live an easier life in the United States.
    But the plastic seats they sit in are becoming fewer and fewer. With Illinois Community College Board (ICCB) funding for adult education cut from $57.5 million in 2002 to $54.9 million in 2008, free ESL classes for immigrants are less available and in higher demand than ever before, according to a study recently released by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). The ICCB had room for only 69,689 ESL students in 2008, despite the 575,000 or more Illinois adults in need of English education. These limited seats are a marked decline from the 87,448 available in 2002, the study shows.
    As a result, a large number of Illinois’ immigrants are going without English education.  In 1990, 49.4 percent of Illinois’ foreign-born population spoke English “less than very well,” according to U.S. Census data. That number has risen, with 55.9 percent struggling with English as of 2007 U.S. Census projections.
    Erie House student Manuel Perez has lived in the United States for over 30 years, but only learning English for the past four months. Two years ago, Perez finally found time in his busy work schedule to take classes, but was turned away by the first organization he visited. “At Instituto del Progreso Latino, when I go there they told me full,” he says. Perez was put on a waiting list, and spent another year and half not speaking English. Now a student at Erie House, Perez shows up late to work everyday after class and admits it’s a problem. “[But] I want to be better in my work,” he says. “We need to talk.”
     With more and more students like Perez being told each day that classes and waitlists are full, immigrant advocates at ICIRR are hoping to change the way adult education funds are allocated. “There hasn’t ever really been a strong adult education advocate in this state. So no wonder the funds are dropping, there’s been no one to stand up and say, we need to do something about this,” says Lisa Thakkar, New Americans Policy Project coordinator for ICIRR. “There are programs that understand the need, but [this] should have happened years ago.”

    When Jose Aburto wanders in 15 minutes late, Swanson pulls an attendance sheet from his stack of teaching materials. Jose sits down next to his friend Manuel, and signs in the blank space next to his name.
    “We need to give the students the impression it’s important they’re showing up every day,” Swanson says, as to why they bother to take attendance in a voluntary class. “As a not-for profit we get audited, and we need to keep track of how many students are passing, how many days they’re showing up.” Erie House tests its students before beginning classes as well as after to mark progress. The results are then reported to their funders. “It’s very results-driven,” Swanson says.
    As a frequent drawback to results-based funding, struggling programs may be even further marginalized. Lower budgets are having the biggest effect on staffing for many ESL programs, with fewer trained and paid teachers, and a higher reliance on volunteers. Of the 4,188 ESL teachers in Illinois adult education programs, only 254 are full-time, according to the ICIRR report. And even those paid teachers are seeing forced furlough days and lower pay as a result of recent budget cuts.
    “Because these programs are so underfunded, there’s a really high turnover in staff. We really need to have that staff development,” says Christine Kenny, longtime ESL teacher and executive director of Literacy Works, a volunteer tutor training service. Last year was particularly difficult for many literacy programs, Kenny says, with some organizations only receiving state checks recently for the 2009 fiscal year. “They had to run an entire program [from January] until May without a check from the state,” Kenny says, funding that provides both teaching materials and teacher salaries. “For a stand alone literacy program, it can mean [they] are in jeopardy.”

    After the vocabulary warm-up, Swanson’s class moves on to more difficult material. “We’re going to start the past tense,” he announces, as his students shuffle papers. “This is the very difficult part of English.” Swanson continues, explaining with a pen on the white board the difference between was and wasn’t, were and weren’t. “We will study it maybe for a few weeks, maybe for a few months, maybe for a long time.”
    That’s assuming his students will still be enrolled. The ICIRR report also shed light on alarming dropout rates in adult ESL classes. According to the study, Up to 20 percent of ESL students drop out within four weeks of starting classes. Only 36 percent of ESL students gain at least one level in English proficiency each year, and only 8 percent ever transition into college-level education.
    With less available funding, many programs have to skimp in supplementary programming. According to Terri Cusick, program manager for Literacy Education for Adults and Families (LEAF), it’s support services that are usually cut first. “We can’t help with transportation, we cut down our day care. Everything becomes bare bones.”     
    While they may not be directly teaching English, in many cases, it’s these types of support systems that allow students to take an unpaid class. Obligations to work and family often keep students from coming regularly. “I think a lot of them want to learn English, just for a lot of them it is not necessarily a first priority,” says Nelson Aguiar, associate director for ESL & Immigrant Issues for the Illinois Community College Board. “They need to survive right away. They need to get a job. A lot of time they find a job in a place where they don’t need to speak English. And they stay.”
    Without regular participation in class and constant conversation practice, the difficult task of learning English can seem even more insurmountable.  Maria (last name withheld) has been learning English in a church basement with a volunteer teacher for the last three years. But Maria only has class three days a week, for two hours, and she speaks only Spanish at home.
     Even after three years, Maria still relies on her young son Gustavo to translate. His high school ESL education has taught him perfect English in the time Maria has managed to graduate to learning the past tense.
    This generation gap reflects a fundamental reason behind the lack of funding for adult education programs. “We’ll get the next generation. Don’t fund the adult education, we’ll get the kids,” Kenny says, explaining a common misperception of policy makers and funders. “[But] by educating the parents, we’re going to nurture the entire family. If you leave the parents out of the equation, the kids won’t get the support they need to be successful.”
    Swanson agrees. “In general, people always try and pour all their resources into the children, just because they see it as the future.”

    Swanson passes extra sheets of paper to those that forgot theirs from last session. The handouts read “The 100 Words,” listing words the students can expect to encounter on a daily basis. The list includes “people,” “each” and “number”. Swanson strolls around the tables, as students fill crossword boxes with words from the list.
    But what about words like “mammogram” or “insurance policy”? Basic English classes, while necessary, still do little to aid in students’ daily struggles and their search for a decently paying job.
    And yet this is what most ESL students are looking for when arriving that first day of class. For Maria’s classmate Ana, it was a mammogram appointment with a non-Spanish speaking technician that motivated her to seek education. For Erie House student Lino, it was a desire to speak with his co-workers, and more fully assimilate into life in the United States. For many, it is in hopes that learning English will increase their salaries, with English speakers earning at least double, on average, what a non-speaker would make, according to Thakkar.
    In the wake of their published report, ICIRR hopes to work with ICCB and policy makers (Illinois representative Cynthia Soto a champion of the cause) to more directly tie English education to employment education and citizenship. ICIRR sees this as the main way in which to further invest students in their own education, while demonstrating the utility of adult education to government and private funders.
    “Learning English all by itself is not sufficient, unless you link it to a need, like a job,” says volunteer ESL teacher and immigrant advocate Rachel Heuman. “This is what they’re trying to do, is work in partnership with other groups to pair the instruction with the prospect of a job where they’re going to have to speak English. I think it will help people move up the ladder.”  

    Swanson always allots time toward the end of his classes for conversation practice. Today, his students are working on the past tense of to be, asking each other what they were like as a child. Slowly, somewhat nervously, they rise from their seats, and navigate between desks to prompt each other with questions. “Teacher,” Lino asks, reading his list. “Were you a serious student?”
    “No, I wasn’t,” Swanson replies. “I played a lot of video games,” a pantomimed controller in his hand.
    “Esther, were you happy?” Lino’s desk mate asks from across the room, reading each word with purpose and thought.
    “Yes,” she replies with a smile, her mouth finally grasping the difficult verb. “I was happy.”