February 27, 2007

Demand for English Lessons Outstrips Supply

By FERNANDA SANTOS
MOUNT VERNON, N.Y.

Two weeks after she moved here from her native Brazil, Maria de Oliveira
signed up for free English classes at a squat storefront in this
working-class suburb, figuring that with an associate's degree and three
years as an administrative assistant, she could find a good job in America
so long as she spoke the language.

The woman who runs the classes at Mount Vernon's Workforce and Career
Preparation Center added Ms. Oliveira's name to her pink binder, at the
bottom of a 90-person waiting list that stretched across seven pages. That
was in October. Ms. Oliveira, 26, finally got a seat in the class on Jan.
16.

''I keep wondering how much more I'd know if I hadn't had to wait so long,''
she said in Portuguese.

As immigrants increasingly settle away from large urban centers -- New
York's suburbs have had a net gain of 225,000 since 2000, compared with
44,000 in the city -- many are waiting months or even years to get into
government-financed English classes, which are often overcrowded and lack
textbooks.

A survey last year by the National Association of Latino Elected and
Appointed Officials found that in 12 states, 60 percent of the free English
programs had waiting lists, ranging from a few months in Colorado and Nevada
to as long as two years in New Mexico and Massachusetts, where the statewide
list has about 16,000 names.

The United States Department of Education counted 1.2 million adults
enrolled in public English programs in 2005 -- about 1 in 10 of the 10.3
million foreign-born residents 16 and older who speak English ''less than
very well,'' or not at all, according to census figures from the same year.
Federal money for such classes is matched at varying rates from state to
state, leaving an uneven patchwork of programs that advocates say nowhere
meets the need.

''We have a lot of folks who need these services and who go unserved,'' said
Claudia Merkel-Keller of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce
Development, noting that her state has waiting lists in every county, ''from
beginner all the way through proficient level.'' New Jersey, like New York
and many other states, does not keep statewide figures on how many people
are on waiting lists.

Luis Sanchez, 47, a Peruvian truck driver for a beer distributor in New
Brunswick, has been in this country 10 years -- and on the waiting list for
English classes in Perth Amboy five months. ''You live from day to day,
waiting to get the call that you can come to class,'' Mr. Sanchez said in
Spanish, explaining that he knew a little English but wanted to improve his
writing skills so he could apply for better jobs. ''I keep on waiting.''

Mr. Sanchez is unlikely to get the call soon: Perth Amboy's Adult Education
Center recently discovered that it was operating in the red and canceled 9
of its 11 evening classes in English as a second language, including all at
beginner and intermediate levels. In Orange County, N.Y., where the
immigrant population doubled in the past 16 years, the Board of Cooperative
Education Services' adult education program has stopped advertising for fear
its already overflowing beginner classes will be overwhelmed.

In Framingham, Mass., 20 miles west of Boston, hundreds of people used to
spend the night in line to register for English as a second language, so the
program now selects students by picking handwritten names from a big plastic
box.

''With the lottery, everyone has the same chance,'' said Christine Taylor
Tibor, director of Framingham's Adult E.S.L. Plus program. ''Unfortunately,
you might have to enter the lottery several times before you get in.''

Census figures show that in the United States there were 32.6 million
foreign-born residents 18 years or older in 2005, up about 18 percent from
the 27.5 million counted in 2000 (and nearly twice the 17.1 million in
1990). Federal spending on adult education, about $580 million last year,
has increased 23 percent since 2000 and more than tripled since 1990; some
45 percent of the money is devoted to English.

But financing varies widely across the states, which are required to
allocate at least one quarter of what was provided by the federal
government: Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas spent the
minimum in 2003, according to the Education Department, while California and
Connecticut each spent about seven times that.

In New York, the state Education Department added $76 million to the federal
government's $43 million for the 2005 fiscal year. That year, according to a
recent report by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group
based in Manhattan, there were about 86,500 people enrolled in
government-sponsored adult programs for English as a second language,
serving about 5 percent of the state's 1.6 million adults with limited
English skills.

Last fall, Arizona voters approved an initiative banning illegal immigrants
from benefiting from all state-financed programs, including English
instruction; administrators of English-as-a-second-language classes in
several other states said they do not check for documentation when
registering students and thus do not know how many of them may be in the
country illegally.

Advocates for more English classes say the state-federal financing split
leaves an adult education system whose quality and reach vary widely from
place to place -- and is lacking most everywhere. Senator Lamar Alexander of
Tennessee, where the immigrant population has tripled since 1990, largely
because of an influx of Mexicans, sponsored a bill last year that would have
given legal immigrants $500 vouchers to pay for English classes since so
many of the free ones were full.

''Most education policy is the prerogative of state and local governments,
but I would argue that the prerogative to help people learn our common
language is a federal responsibility,'' said Senator Alexander, a Republican
who was education secretary under the first President George Bush. ''If we
make it easier for people to learn English, they will learn it. I think that
ought to be a priority of our government, and I don't think it has been.''

The government-financed classes are most often run by school districts or
worker training centers and generally require only a registration fee of
perhaps $10. Libraries, churches and community centers often also provide
free or inexpensive classes, like the English Language Institute at
Westchester Community College in Valhalla, N.Y., which offers nine levels of
instruction for $76 to $247 per three-month session. Then there are private
programs like the one at Pace University in Pleasantville, N.Y., which costs
$790 for two classes a week for 14 weeks.

With immigrants accounting for half of the growth in the nation's labor
force from 1990 and 2000, and expected to make up all of the growth in the
two decades to come, ''the issue of English proficiency has become an issue
of economic development,'' said Tara Colton, the author of the Center for an
Urban Future report. Indeed, some business owners, frustrated at the lack of
low-cost classes, have begun teaching immigrants English at work.

At Skyline Furniture Manufacturing Inc. in Thornton, Ill., a suburb of
Chicago, about half of the company's 60 employees have learned English at
the factory over the past five years, under a state program in which the
government pays to bring teachers to work sites if companies pay workers for
the hours in class.

''It makes sense to us because our workers can do their jobs better, and it
makes sense to them because they can advance in their jobs,'' said Cinthia
Nowakowski, the plant's manager, adding that three of the company's eight
foremen were promoted after completing the program. ''Besides, it's
convenient. The guys don't have to worry about having to arrange
transportation to get to school or getting there and finding that there's no
room in the class.''

In Newburgh, N.Y., an Orange County town where one in five of the 29,000
residents are immigrants, Blanca Saravia has amassed an impressive portfolio
of odd jobs since arriving from Honduras in 2004: gas station attendant,
office janitor, cook's helper, and, for the last 14 months, packager at a
local nail-polish factory. Speaking in her native Spanish, Ms. Saravia said
that she has been able to get by with co-workers' translating, but that
''when the boss gives orders, I don't understand.''

So earlier this month, Ms. Saravia joined 30 others in a cramped classroom
learning to conjugate the verb ''to be'' as part of the adult English
program in Orange County, where the immigrant population doubled in the last
decade -- and the number of free English classes has jumped to 26 from 2 in
1995.

''If I tell her, 'We're full, come back in a couple of months,' chances are
she'll get discouraged and never come back,'' said Ramón Santos, who runs
the Newburgh program.

Carl DeJura, director of adult basic education at Brookdale Community
College in Long Branch, N.J., said he has lately crammed as many as 40
students into a class -- ''double what it should be.''

''If you have to cut back on textbooks, supplies and materials to serve the
people who need it,'' he said, ''that's what you do.''

In Mount Vernon, Haitian, Chinese, Somali, Arab, Mexican and Brazilian
students flock to the beginner class each morning at 8:30 before heading out
to work or to look for work. Ahmed Al Saidi, 49, who works at a gas station
and moved from Yemen in 1994, said in halting English that he wants to learn
the language ''for better work and to talk to people when I go to the
store.''

Ms. Oliveira, the immigrant from Brazil, said she still knows too little
English to venture into the marketplace; her husband, who is American born
and supports the couple financially, encouraged her to enroll in the
classes, held five mornings a week.

''I hope that when I'm speaking a little better, I'll be able to find a job
where I can use the English I learned here and the skills I have from back
home,'' she said in Portuguese. ''When I was on the waiting list, there were
times I thought this time would never come.''

Copyright © 2007 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.