Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times: Bilingual Education and Dominican Immigrant Youth in the Heights - Paperback

by Lesley Bartlett (Author)

Additive Schooling in Subtractive Times documents the unusually successful efforts of one New York City high school to educate Dominican immigrant youth, at a time when Latino immigrants constitute a growing and vulnerable population in the nation's secondary schools. Based on four and a half years of qualitative research, the book examines the schooling of teens in the Dominican Republic, the social and linguistic challenges the immigrant teens face in Washington Heights, and how Gregorio Luperon High School works with the community to respond to those challenges. The staff at Luperon see their students as emergent bilinguals and adhere to a culturally and linguistically additive approach.

After offering a history of the school's formation, the authors detail the ways in which federal No Child Left Behind policies, New York State accountability measures, and New York City's educational reforms under Mayor Michael Bloomberg complicated the school's efforts. The book then describes the dynamic bilingual pedagogical approach adopted within the school to help students develop academic Spanish and English. Focusing on the lives of twenty immigrant youth, Bartlett and Garcia also show that, although the school achieves high completion rates, the graduating students nevertheless face difficult postsecondary educational and work environments that too often consign them to the ranks of the working poor.

Front Jacket

An unusually successful approach to bilingual education for Dominican immigrant teens in a New York City high school

Author Biography

Lesley Bartlett, co-director of the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies at Teachers College, Columbia University, is the author of The Word and the World: The Cultural Politics of Literacy in Brazil and co-editor of Critical Approaches to Comparative Education.

Ofelia Garcia is Professor of Urban Education and of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Among her recent books are Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective and (with Jo Anne Kleifgen) Imagining Multilingual Schools; Language Loyalty, Continuity, and Change; and The Multilingual Apple.