Those actively studying ESL make about 13 per cent of the school population in the Greater Toronto Area and 25 per cent in the Vancouver School Board. Language experts contend more immigrant students need support, but don't get it.

Indeed, while demands for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) instruction have increased, school board resources have not kept pace. Many boards have curtailed their spending. And the classrooms where immigrants learn English have been particularly hard hit, with Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia cutting deep into ESL budgets during the past decade.

In recognition of the needs of ESL students, the Ontario government recently increased its funding for them. The province will spend $225 million on ESL services in 2004-05, an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year.

But how that money is spent still depends on school board trustees and individual school principals, many with a track record of dipping into funds earmarked for ESL services to finance smaller class sizes, improved library services and other school priorities.

To make matters worse for immigrant students, many provinces have embraced standardized testing. Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia all have at least one provincial English exam that students must pass to graduate from high school.

Concerned parents and teachers fear that the combination of reduced services and rigid provincial standards will drive an already troubling dropout rate among ESL students — particularly those from poor families — still higher. "That we're wasting all this talent is a tragedy; it is scandalous," says University of Calgary professor Hetty Roessingh, who co-authored one of the country's most detailed studies tracking ESL students between 1989 and 1997.

Her study of one Calgary high school pegged the dropout rate for ESL learners at 74 per cent (as opposed to 30 per cent for the general population of high-school students). Those findings have been echoed in other studies.

"ESL learners are consistently over-represented in dropout statistics, failure and enrolment in non-academic track programs in both Canada and the United States," Roessingh wrote in a recent study.

"It would seem that 20 years of program development and research into best practices has done little to alter the pernicious effects of chronic underfunding of these programs. An entire generation of ESL learners has passed through our school system who may never come to realize their potential."

What makes the situation more maddening, she says, is that Canada has successfully structured its immigration system to draw the best and brightest from other countries, yet it seems willing to squander both their talent and that of their children.

"We're getting immigrants with double the number of university degrees than the general population. But the parents are having a really hard time integrating into the economy because credentials aren't being recognized because of higher language thresholds and a lack of Canadian experience.

``So, the next big hope is for the immigrant kids to make it in school, but the evidence suggests that by and large, they're not making it,'' Roessingh says.