The News-Sentinel reports this morning on a Knox County Schools proposal to “cluster” students who are learning English as a second language:

Knox County school officials are considering busing hundreds of immigrant students to a small number of schools rather than having teachers travel around the county to teach them English.

The difficulty is that 16 ESL teachers serving 76 schools means that the teachers spend a large portion of their time traveling between schools rather than teaching. There is no question that more instructional time would result in more learning, and it would seem a better use of limited funds to pay these teachers to teach rather than drive.

I admit to have struggled somewhat with the issue of instruction for ESL students, because “immersion” is unquestionably the fastest way to learn a new language. As an exchange student in Venezuela at the age of 14, it took only a few weeks before I was quite comfortable conversing only in Spanish. Why, then, are so many of our immigrant students struggling?

It was a colleague’s comment last week that caused me to look at it in another way: she lived in France for two years just out of high school, working as an au pair (having studied Spanish rather than French). Although she quickly became fluent in spoken French, she did not similarly master the written word, because French, like English, is not spelled like it sounds.

Spanish is much simpler; each letter has only one sound, and therefore, the written language is not very different from the spoken word once one has mastered what sound is produced by each letter.

Thus, students learning English from any other language may learn to converse, but still not meet the standards we expect and demand in our core curriculum.

There will inevitably be debate on the advantages and disadvantages of clustering these students into just a few schools. Maximizing instructional time would be a huge benefit, but the loss of “immersion” through primary interaction with English-speaking students could be a detriment, depending on the amount of time spent with others who spoke their primary language.

It will be an interesting challenge for the Knox Co. school board to decide, but at this point, clustering the students in need of these services seems like a better use of resources.