Elizabeth Coelho, a University of Toronto professor and the former co-ordinator of ESL services at the Toronto Board of Education, says post-war immigrant students could drop out in Grade 8 and still live a life of full employment. "Well, that's absolutely not possible anymore," she says.

University of Calgary professor Roessingh's work has helped to establish the importance of intensive English-language training in an immigrant student's academic chase.

While a teacher at Queen Elizabeth High School in northwest Calgary, Roessingh was disturbed by how many immigrant students had stalled in their language development at or near a Grade 5 level. She saw many of them later drop out of high school.

With the help of her principal, Roessingh re-ordered the resources at Queen Elizabeth to more than double the annual hours of ESL instruction. With 750 hours of ESL instruction, the success rate soared. Roessingh tracked her students through high school and found that 78 per cent of them (47 out of 60 in the study) managed to pass the Grade 12 high school English literature exam and enter university.

"I think ESL kids need not only a good teacher, but a good language teacher," Roessingh says, "since all the other kids who come to school have the language and have the basic grammar."

In many places, however, immigrant parents are beginning to fight back.

In Toronto, Somali-Canadian parents, worried about the academic achievement of their children, have started to advocate on their behalf. They feel that too many Somali students are being sent to special education classes and into applied programs that rule out university. What the students need, the parents insist, is more help with English.

"We need more ESL," says Maryan Abdi, who once had to move schools to get the appropriate language help for her 11-year-old daughter, Asha.

Immigrant parents in Calgary are the best organized. They created the Coalition for Equal Access to Education in the wake of school board cutbacks in 1992-93 that decimated ESL services.

"No other program suffered the same kind of destructive cuts," says coalition co-ordinator Hieu Van Ngo, who estimates that more than 50 per cent of ESL services were slashed. "We realized it was too easy for them to do it since nobody fought for the immigrant children and youth."

Van Ngo says school boards have steadily replaced qualified ESL teachers with other instructors who have no formal training in the complex learning needs of immigrant students. The cuts have been such that for every qualified ESL teacher in Alberta, there are now 119 ESL students, according to the coalition's statistics.

The government of Alberta recently increased its annual per student funding for ESL students to $1,028 from $736 — something the coalition considered an important victory.

But Van Ngo says much remains to be done. Among other things, the coalition wants school boards to track ESL students through high school to determine how many succeed; it wants the provincial government to establish ESL as part of the core curriculum to make it harder for boards to dismantle the program in times of restraint; and it wants the federal government to develop national benchmarks for ESL and set a national ESL curriculum.