In the wake of the tumultuous arrival of millions of immigrants to the United States around the turn of the last century, between 1890 and 1920, children streamed into the public school system. Joining the already arrived, they were faced with a "sink or swim" choice, and, with determination, most forged ahead.

For the past few decades, particularly the past 15 years or so, U.S. immigration has brought to the nation's shores countless newcomers representing countries, languages, traditions and religions underrepresented here in the past. At the same time, the schools have continued to acknowledge the need for inclusionary programming -- not only for immigrants, but also for those with special needs, including children with disabilities of one kind or another, and youngsters of varying educational achievement levels.

As a result, the U.S. classroom -- in primary and secondary schools -- is more diverse than at any time in the nation's history, with more issues needing to be explored, more challenges needing to be met and more attention needing to be paid.

Providing a solid education for all has not been a goal easily accomplished. Controversy over issues of one kind or another, parental advocacy, U.S Government and state policymaking and use of the judicial system to enforce rights have all played a role in the march toward a universal system of education. The important message, however, is that the goal remains strong and is central to changes taking place in American education from kindergarten through the 12th grade, traditionally the end of secondary school (K-12).

One of the United States' eminent researchers in this field, Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, summed up the challenge in her 1997 book, The Right to Learn:

If the challenge of the twentieth century was creating a system of schools that could provide minimal education and basic socialization for masses of previously uneducated citizens, the challenge of the twenty-first century is creating schools that ensure -- for all students in all communities -- a genuine right to learn. Meeting this new challenge is not an incremental undertaking. It requires a fundamentally different enterprise.

A Bit of History

To understand the evolution of diversity in the K-12 school system, one needs a brief introduction to how schools are governed. The early colonizers tutored their children at home or pooled monies to hire a teacher for several families. As more and more settlers moved to the West, the U.S. Government required new communities to establish schools and set aside parcels of land for that purpose. In return for paying taxes to educate other people's children, citizens were promised local control of their schools. Thus, to this day, what happens in schools and for children depends very much on local decisions. This independence is tempered somewhat by court decisions and U.S. laws affecting all schools, as well as by a growing influence by state governments. Nevertheless, every community basically decides how its schools will address diversity in its schools.

That might explain why a school in one of the New England states may have few students receiving special education, while one in Utah has a special education enrollment far above the national average. A school in Connecticut may include a fourth or more of its students in gifted and talented programs, while a school in Colorado may be closer to the national average of three to five percent. California might limit bilingual programs, as it did in recent legislation, but Texas and Florida, also heavily affected by the presence of language-minority children, may strongly support bilingual education. Where a child lives in the United States largely determines what policies will govern how schools deal with diversity.

At one time, resources usually went into educating a mostly white, upper-class population. In the Southern states, for example, for the most part, African-American slaves were denied an education. Even after the U.S. Civil War ended slavery in the 1860s, public schools established for African-American children were separate and poorly supported. In the middle of the 19th century, waves of immigrants, mostly from Western Europe, began to fill schools in the cities or move into farming communities of the Midwest, such as Germans in Wisconsin or Scandinavians in Minnesota.

By the turn of the century, immigrant children defined city school systems in the Northeast and Midwest. A 1908 study in New York City, for example, found that 71 percent of the students had foreign-born fathers. Nearly a century later, great diversity again characterizes urban school systems. Only this time, students come from all parts of the world, joining a great migration of African-American families out of the South that had begun during World War II.

Student Ethnic Demographics

The new language diversity in American schools contrasts significantly with that of previous influxes of immigrants. It is extensive. For example, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Arlington, Virginia, both within the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C., enroll students whose families speak more than three dozen languages. In Long Beach, California, once known as a haven for people moving from the U.S. Midwest, more than one-third of the total enrollment of students in the public schools, K-12, today is from Southeast Asia. Furthermore, ties with the "old country" are easier to maintain. Modern transportation and communication allow immigrant families to keep up contacts and, thus, their languages and culture. In one middle school in Long Beach, Cambodian families helped establish daily lessons in Khmer for their children.

Recent immigration is responsible for most of the diversity in American schools. Yet, the schools would be diverse even without it. About 17 percent of K-12 students are African American, and about one percent are Native American. The families of many of those listed as Hispanic, or Latino, can trace their heritage to ancestors living in the areas that became the U.S. Southwest. Among the many sub-groups within the Hispanic school population, the highest percentage of native-born students are of Mexican ancestry. Other large sub-groups include Puerto Ricans and Cuban Americans, whose migration started before that of Central American families. Altogether, Hispanics will become the largest minority group in American public schools by the year 2005.

At one time, the goal of the schools was to foster the "melting pot," a policy that minimized one's cultural background in favor of assimilation. Today, schools still stress literacy in English, but they also focus on understanding different cultures. Textbooks and other classroom resources attempt to provide a wide exposure to diverse cultures, and many teacher recruitment efforts are aimed at building much greater diversity among the teaching force.

Federal and some state programs provide funding for bilingual education. This strategy -- of learning some academic subjects in the native language while studying English -- was used in the early part of the last century to keep German-speaking students in midwestern U.S. cities in the public schools. Fear of foreigners after World War I led to a backlash against bilingual programs. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1970s guaranteed language-minority students an appropriate education, thus supporting a return of bilingual or similar programs. Concern about the surge in immigration in California, however, contributed to voter approval of a referendum that severely limits bilingual classes in that state -- preferring a quick transition to English-only as the approach to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. On the other hand, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley recently endorsed dual language immersion programs to help language-minority students maintain fluency in their home language while learning English and to give English-speaking students a full opportunity to learn another language.

The impact of racial and ethnic diversity in the schools varies among the states. Five states -- California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois -- are experiencing the largest growth in language minority enrollments. Diverse enrollments also tend to concentrate in central-city schools (almost all large urban districts now have more minority students than white students). Yet, even rural schools in such states as Alabama or Kansas may find a growing number of language-minority families in their schools, attracted to the communities by low-skill industries.

What also is different, and most significant, about the racial/ethnic diversity in U.S. schools is how these institutions are responding. In the past, school officials usually expected minority student achievement to be lower than that of white students, which resulted in large percentages of ethnic and racial-minority students being placed in remedial and/or vocational programs. They dropped out of school before obtaining a high school diploma at much higher rates than white students.

Education reforms that began more than a decade ago focus on higher standards for all students. The reforms present a special challenge to low-performing schools, which enroll mostly low-income and/or minority children. "Closing the gap" in achievement has become a priority for these schools, and there is some evidence of progress. The graduation rate of white and African-American students is now almost the same, although Hispanic students still lag far behind. Some states, such as Texas, require schools to show improved achievement among sub-groups of students, meaning that overall scores cannot hide problems with minority students. Where schools are focusing special help for low-performing minority students -- such as smaller classes, research-based early reading strategies, and motivation to prepare for college -- minority student achievement often exceeds national averages.

Becoming Truly Inclusive

From living in segregated institutions to segregated classrooms in public schools to inclusion in regular classrooms -- this has been the history of education of students with disabilities in American schools. Most of the success in getting disabled students accepted into regular classrooms has occurred since the 1950s, when parents and other advocates -- heartened by court decisions that struck down racial segregation in the schools -- began to organize on behalf of students with disabilities.

Several court decisions and federal laws finally led to a significant policy change: major legislation requiring that schools provide "a free, appropriate public education" to all handicapped children. Now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), it guarantees that each disabled child receives an individualized education program agreed to by parents and educators. As more has been learned about educating students with disabilities, the law has been amended to emphasize "full inclusion" of students with disabilities in regular classrooms and their access to the same curriculum and standards as other students.

The nature of disabilities among students changes over time. When IDEA began as the Education of All Handicapped Children Act in the mid-1970s, speech problems accounted for the largest percentage of students with disabilities (35 percent) and mental retardation was second (26 percent). Twenty years later, in the 1990s, learning disabilities was the largest category (46 percent), while speech problems had fallen to 18 percent and mental retardation to 10 percent. During this time, medical and educational research determined that there was a new category among the disabled -- attention deficit disorder (ADD), which is now covered by U.S. Government programs.

Programs to diagnose developmental delays in very young children and give them early help prevent many children from being labeled disabled. Also, federal investments in the education of children with disabilities include teacher training and research on new technologies. The latter effort has led to assistive technologies, such as the use of computers that enable physically disabled children to better remain on grade level in regular classrooms. Other U.S. laws make school facilities physically accessible to students, through ramps, in place of stairs or elevators in multi-floor buildings.

Approximately 12 percent of the K-12 enrollment receives services under IDEA. About three-fourths of them are taught in regular classrooms. Often regular teachers are helped by teachers trained in special education, either in the classroom or in resource rooms where the challenged students receive extra help. Almost one-fourth of students with disabilities attend separate classes in regular school buildings; a small percentage enroll at special schools or are placed in residential institutions.

Diversity in Achievement

While schools are moving toward higher standards for all students, there is a time-honored tradition in American K-12 education of providing for the exceptionally gifted and talented as well. In the early days of the nation, before there was legislation that provided public education for everyone, families pooled their resources to educate their children in the parlors at home or in other facilities. (Today, on a comparatively modest scale, home schooling for children still exists across the United States.) Affluent families maintained this separate education through exclusive private, college-preparatory schools. But the expectation and legislative fiat in the last century that all students attend school through the age of 16 stimulated the educational system to provide a range of programs for all levels of ability.

This led to the development of programs for the gifted and talented. Because of differences in state laws and local practices, the number of students enrolled in these programs varies greatly, from 5 percent in some states to more than 10 percent in others, but all except a handful of states either fund or require gifted education. While advocates always say more efforts and better funding are needed, schools employ a number of methods to challenge the gifted. For example, there are "pull-out" programs -- in which students leave their regular classrooms several times a week to participate in enrichment activities. This is most common on the primary school level. Magnet high schools that focus on the arts, math or the sciences offer students more intensive work in these areas. Schools such as Bronx High School of Science in New York City, and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C., abound nationally. Eleven states have created residential schools for advanced instruction in math, science, or the arts. "Governors' schools," which function during warm-weather vacation periods, are open to highly gifted and talented students. Some states, such as Minnesota, allow proficient high school juniors and seniors to take post-secondary classes on college campuses at state expense.

High schools also offer a number of ways for high-ability students to be challenged. They might take part in such national programs as Future Problem Solving, Odyssey of the Mind or the Great Books reading series. More than 60 percent of public high schools and 46 percent of nonpublic schools participate in the Advanced Placement (AP) program of the College Board. Highly qualified teachers volunteer to teach AP courses, which offer more intensive, advanced work in academic subjects than the regular high school curriculum. In 1999, more than 700,000 high school students enrolled in AP classes and took the AP exams. A good score on the exam, a three or above, qualifies the student for credit and/or enrollment in advanced courses at almost all four-year colleges and universities.

About 30 percent of the students in AP courses in 1999 were minorities. Efforts are underway to encourage high schools without AP courses -- most of them in high-poverty, high-minority areas -- to prepare teachers and students for AP courses.

Addressing the Gender Bias

As part of the general demand for greater equity in the schools stimulated by the civil rights movement, attention turned to the exclusion of girls from certain programs. While most of the lawsuits and focus on discrimination on the basis of sex took place in higher education, Title IX, an amendment to the Higher Education Act in 1972, barred discrimination "under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Because most K-12 schools benefit from U.S. Government aid in some form, Title IX applied to them as well. Consequently, schools began offering more athletic programs for girls, selected textbooks and other materials that promoted gender equity, and opened up enrollment in traditionally male-oriented vocational programs to girls.

The goal of gender equity resulted in ongoing scrutiny of girls' participation in school life. The attention to inequities probably accounts for the higher enrollments of girls in advanced math and science courses at present, and the efforts that are underway to ensure that girls have as much access to computers as boys. Research on the gender issue also influenced teacher preparation and professional development programs, since findings have shown that teachers sometimes slighted girls in their instruction -- without being conscious of it. The research reveals, for example, that teachers may ask boys to respond or participate more in classrooms and, at the same time, accept less complex answers from girls.

Religious Diversity

Unlike educational systems in many other countries, the United States conducts a strict separation of church and state in schools. Public funds are for public schools only, although a few states and cities now are experimenting with voucher programs that allow public funds to be spent at schools outside of the public system, including parochial (religious) schools. Most of these plans are being challenged in the courts.

Because of this separation, there is a healthy private and parochial school sector in the United States. About five million students, or ten percent of the K-12 enrollment, attend private primary and secondary schools. Catholic schools comprise half the private school enrollment; other religious denominations account for 35 percent. Within parochial school education, the most rapid expansion is within the Muslim community, which now has about 200 schools across the United States.

Conclusion

Responding to the needs of diverse students in the public schools is an issue that never sits still in the United States. Policymakers, educators, the courts, and parents constantly search for the best ways to educate all students. Court-ordered desegregation and affirmative action, for example, are giving way to initiatives that improve the quality of education in all schools and especially the preparation and support of teachers to teach in highly diverse classrooms. Assessment programs are being expanded to include appropriate testing of language-minority students and those with disabilities. Instead of excluding them from testing, policymakers who design the accountability systems are saying that true progress in the schools can be measured only if all students are included in the accountability. Bilingual education remains controversial, but it also has a strong hold in most communities, and there is a growing demand among parents in general to improve the foreign language instruction for all students.

This persistent commitment to meeting learners' needs, no matter their differences, will be needed to prepare American schools for a future in which, as projected for the end of this new century, minorities will account for 60 percent of the population in the United States.

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Anne C. Lewis is an education policy writer and national columnist for Phi Delta Kappan, a leading U.S. education journal.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.