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Mexican lesson plans crossing the border
Immigration - Some Oregon schools are using curricula from Mexico to aid Spanish speakers
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
ESMERALDA BERMUDEZ
The Oregonian
Oregon is counting on a new tool to educate Spanish-speaking students across state schools: Mexico's curriculum.
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/new...ml&coll=7&thispage=1
Already in place at three Oregon high schools, the programs aims to use textbooks, a detailed online Web site, DVDs and CDs provided for free by the Mexican government to teach math, science and even U.S. history to Spanish speakers in Oregon.

Conversations are under way between the Oregon Department of Education and Mexico's secretary of public education to align the curriculums of Oregon and Mexico so many courses in Mexico will be valid here and vice versa. The innovative move puts Oregon on par with other educators nationwide who have launched similar ventures in Yakima; San Diego, Calif.; and Austin, Texas.

"Students come to us with such complex issues," said Tim King, director of Clackamas Middle College and Clackamas Web Academy, where a virtual course using Mexico's learning materials got off the ground this week. "We've had to change in order to fit into each school scene, become more complex and open ourselves up to new situations."

Oregon officials say the new approach is intended as a supplement to keep students on track by learning subjects in their native language while also gaining English skills. Until now, school districts statewide have generally relied on bilingual aides to teach and translate English material or used Spanish material that was not necessarily equal to the English material mainstream students were studying.

"That's not enough," said Patrick Burk, chief policy officer with the superintendent's office of the Oregon Department of Education, adding that the goal is to "minimize disruption" for immigrant Latinos.

"The availability of resources is astounding," said Burk, who flew to Mexico with a team of Oregon curriculum officials in August to discuss making equivalency standards official. "We're able to serve the students so much better if we're working together."

Learning abroad

Mexico has made its national curriculum available to communities across the U.S. since 2001. The idea was to encourage Mexican adults and youths living abroad to continue an education often abandoned back home due to limited resources.

The Mexican government provided the learning material and, as incentive, validated the education by certifying its completion in Mexico.

"We wanted people to be aware that they have to study," said Patricia Ramos, the director of national affairs for Mexico's Institute for Adult Education and National Advisory of Education for Life and Work. "You have to dare to study and make use of technology because that way, it will be easier to adapt to where you now live."

The "community plazas," as the Mexican government dubbed the learning programs, evolved in different ways in the U.S. Non-profits dedicated the resources to adults, giving them a chance to use Mexico's lessons to graduate from sixth grade, junior high and high school.

In other places, the curriculum was used to educate students' parents, rescue dropouts and even teach inmates at correctional facilities. A program exists now at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn.

Seeing results

Soon enough, the program caught the attention of public schools such as Reynolds High School in Troutdale and Marshall Night School, an alternative school based at Marshall High School.

At Marshall, the learning material was used to teach during night school and may soon move into daytime classrooms.

At Reynolds, educators began using the elementary portion of Mexico's curriculum to teach a Spanish literacy class. Students learned punctuation and to build sentences in Spanish and then saw improvement in their English learning classes, said Dale Bernardini, a teacher who handles programming of Oregon and Mexico's partnership for Reynolds School District.

This fall, textbooks, DVDs and Mexico's curriculum Web site made its way into Francisco Rico's math classroom at Reynolds High School. After testing the new tools over the summer, Rico said he expects his two classes to make gains.

"We're just ahead with all the materials," he said. "We have the Web site where students can do exercises . . . they can learn through visual and audio. We were having trouble bringing something that would be familiar to their culture."

In Washington, nearly 30 schools have already implemented Mexico's curriculum into the classrooms. Yakima School District was among the first, drawing educators from across the state who traveled to the schools to learn about the new method.

"We're seeing them score higher," on standardized tests, said Jorge Herrera, the coordinator who manages the programs for the state. "And more are staying in school." Annually, staffing the programs in Yakima schools costs an estimated $60,000, he said.

In Oregon, it may be too soon to measure cost because the program is in its infancy. Learning materials are free, but school districts must pay for staff. So far, two computer servers used to support Mexico's Web site cost the state about $10,000 to install and about $2,200 annually to maintain.

One of the biggest challenges will be finding more Spanish-speaking instructors, Burk said. State education figures show that about 15 percent of Oregon students are Latino, compared with 2 percent of teachers.

"People are aware of what we're doing," Burk said. "The more they find out about it, the more interested they are. But we don't want this program to explode. It does not work by just handing out materials to schools. It needs to increase slowly in order to work."

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