Reflection and Rethinking Retention

Last week I participated in the 2012 Annual California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) conference in Sacramento, CA. CABE, a non-profit organization, was first realized in 1976 to promote bilingual education and provide meaningful educational schooling. It is composed of 5,000 members and 60 chapters who advocate for qualitative education experiences for students who come from a variety of cultural, multi-lingual backgrounds. The conference was composed of keynote speakersworkshops, student art contest, student essay writing contest, CABE store exhibit, and special events. The majority of participants are educators, administrative educators, parents (and maybe a few undergraduate students, although I did not meet any). The workshop that spoke to me the most was about the problem with retention at schools and the damage it does to children as young students and older students. Although it rarely happens, there are a few cases where students who are retain do great in consecutive years, but these are very minimal since there has to be a tremendous amount of support from the teacher, administration, and parents.

I had been waiting impatiently for this moment to come since last semester when I found out I was attending it. I began Thursday as a volunteer, distributing and collecting evaluation forms for a few workshops. In between this distributing and collecting I made sure to attend workshops that seemed interesting. The first workshop I went to addressed the issue of retention, and how many students, whether they are English Language Learners or not continue to be retained. This issue is prevalent in low-income, non-English speaking communities where parents do not necessarily question the teachers because they believe the teacher is always right. Unfortunately, because of pre-conceived misconceptions that some teachers may have about a particular race it is easy for them to give up on the student and retain them. What they don’t know is that when a teacher retains a student, the teacher and other administrative educators involve in the process do not take into consideration the amount of baggage the student will carry with this.

The presenter stated that research demonstrates that when a student is retained, that student is less likely to succeed not because they can’t but because they believe they can’t since they were already retained once. These are also the students that teachers tend to send to the office more often and who are labeled with behavioral problems and with learning disabilities. It is easy for a teacher to subject the student to a label than to work with the student and treat him or her as a human being who may have a slightly different way of learning than the rest of the students.

One of my two sisters’ kindergarten teacher was considering in having her retake kindergarten. I am unsure of the reason why her teacher was considering this. Her teacher spoke only English and could not communicate very well in Spanish with my mom, who cannot carry out a conversation in English. My mom was also unsure of the reason why her teacher was considering in retaining my sister half way through her kindergarten year. My little sister is intelligent and self-disciplined; participating in the Head Start Program (Pre-School) helped to be well prepared for kindergarten. I think what might have occurred was that she probably felt a little shy and didn’t speak much to the teacher. I’m not sure. Now she is in first grade, and she loves to read and write. When school is over her and my little brother participate in an after school program; once she is home she picks up a book to read or she goes straight into writing her own stories. She loves to write. Her current first grade teacher cannot understand why her kindergarten teacher would have wanted her to re-do kindergarten if she is a brilliant student. Had her kindergarten teacher retained her, I don’t think she would have grown as a student as much as she has now.

As a future education, I will continue to be reflective of my family experiences, and my very own experiences throughout the educational system to promote qualitative educational experiences for my students. Becoming aware of the many issues that continue to deprive student’s development as learners helps me to know what are some prevalent issues affecting our communities, especially those that are most vulnerable in fighting the injustices. The conference was composed of the majority women, which is a representation of the lack of representation within educators. There is a great need for representative role models in the education system.

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