In a second-floor classroom of John Adams High School in Ozone Park, Queens, global history teacher Solaman Chowdhury explained the Treaty of Versailles to his sophomore students one morning — in both English and Bengali.
He compared European history to the history of Bangladesh, noting that just as the Allied Powers came together to defeat Germany during World War I, India joined forces with Bengali nationals to defeat West Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. As Chowdhury lectured and asked questions, the students answered in both English and in Bengali, their native language.
Once a struggling English learner himself, Chowdhury knows the challenge of learning the language; he was in kindergarten when he came to the United States. Now, as a teacher of teenagers, he tries to learn the dialects from their home villages in Bangladesh so he can better communicate.
“I feel I can finally give back,” he said.
But most Bangladeshi immigrant students in New York City do not have a teacher like Chowdhury to help ease their way. While the Bangladeshi population has exploded — the city’s schools now enroll more than 6,500 Bangladeshi students — the number of Bengali-speaking teachers and bilingual programs has not kept pace.
There are only three Bengali bilingual programs in the New York City schools. By contrast, there are more than 40 Chinese programs and upwards of 400 Spanish ones.
There’s one major reason for the dearth of Bengali programs: a lack of certified teachers who speak both Bengali and English well. Abul Kalam Azad, who has taught at City College and helped several Bangladeshi immigrants train to become teachers, says there are a few different reasons for the shortage. Chief among them: many native Bengali speakers struggle with the English proficiency portion of the teacher certification exam.
“We have many highly-educated people from all over the world in the city who are interested and were teachers in their home country, but they cannot become teachers” in New York, he said.
Azad has lobbied for changes that would make it easier for foreign-born New Yorkers to get certified as teachers, particularly in high-needs areas like high school math or physics. “Foreign people don’t understand English at the same level,” he said. “For a math or physics teacher it is not necessary, we can lower the bar for them.”
In addition to the hurdles of helping native Bengali speaking teachers pass the English portion of the certification exam, many Bangladeshi immigrants say teaching is not particularly valued as a career in their community.
City College student Sabrina Yeasmin, for instance, planned to go into medicine until hearing stories of Bangladeshi immigrant students who couldn’t complete their homework because there wasn’t anyone to help them. She talked with her husband and decided to train to become a Bengali bilingual teacher in the United States. By all accounts, that was a rare decision in her community. Yeasmin came to the United States in 2010 after finishing high school. English is still challenging for her and she worries about passing the English-language portions of the test necessary to become a bilingual teacher.
“It’s not just the English speaking,” she said. “I really struggle on research papers.”
In a statement, Department of Education officials said they have increased “recruitment efforts of Bengali-speaking teachers in teaching schools, and we are committed to ensuring that there are no barriers between students, their families and a great education.”
With so few Bengali bilingual programs, most of the students receive English as a Second Language (or ESL) services. That means they might get extra support in school, such as vocabulary reviews from their math and science classes, but don’t have access to teachers or classes where their native language is spoken.
“When you have a teacher who speaks your language, who understands your language and to whom you can express your feelings well, you know it gives a student confidence in himself,” said Sujoy Bhowmik, a Bangladeshi student who graduated last spring from Long Island City High School. He came to New York City almost four years ago.
“This school has a lot of Bengali-speaking students and they’re really struggling,” he said.
He is not the only one in his family who wished there were more Bengali-speaking teachers or staff at his high school. His mother, Radha Datta, spoke to her son’s teachers every week when they lived in Bangladesh; in New York, she had to rely on her son to translate.
John Adams High School, where Chowdhury teaches, is the only public high school in New York City with a Bengali bilingual program. The school’s students, many of whom have arrived from Bangladesh within the last five years, have it easier than those not in the program. In 2010, the former assistant principal of foreign language at John Adams, George Badia, noticed the increasing number of South Asian students enrolling in the school. More girls in colorful hijabs walked the hallways with books under their arms; more students teased each other in a language Badia, who speaks Spanish, didn’t understand.
“I spoke to my principal and I started calling people,” he said. “The only way you can open a bilingual Bengali program is if you have bilingual teachers.”
But finding teachers certified in Bengali bilingual education proved difficult. Badia encouraged two Bangladeshi teachers he knew to pursue the certification process to become bilingual teachers; he also recruited a Bangladeshi who was teaching at Columbia University. Within two years, Badia had hired three Bengali bilingual teachers at John Adams. Word spread throughout the community and parents, particularly those newly arrived from Bangladesh, flocked to the school’s transitional bilingual program.
Within just a few years, the program had almost 150 students — the same as the school’s Spanish bilingual program.
“Once students saw we had a Bengali bilingual program, the whole dynamics of the school changed,” Badia said. “Students felt they had a voice. They felt people were listening to them.”
Just over half of New York City’s English learners who enter at the high school level graduate within six years of enrolling in public school. At John Adams High School, the number is higher, 68 percent, a fact administrators attribute to the bilingual program.
Schools chancellor Carmen Farina has assured parents and educators that increasing bilingual programming, finding teachers and getting parents involved in bilingual education are priorities of her administration. Last October, the Department of Education signed an agreement with the state’s education department that it would increase the number of bilingual programs and support for English learners.
Many Bangladeshis say they want more Bengali programming not only to help ease students’ transition into English, but also to preserve their own language in the US. “If you don’t know the language, you don’t know the culture,” said Yeasmin.
In the 2013-2014 school year, English learners made up 14 percent of the New York City’s public school population; some 140,000 students speak their first language at home.
This article was first published in www.wnyc.org
