Toronto District School Board budget chief Don Higgins concedes administrators have had to rethink their delivery of ESL — and deliver more of it in regular classrooms — because of other budget demands. "That's the only way we've been able to manage it," he says.

An award-winning teacher and ESL researcher from Toronto, Mary Meyers, has authored a scathing criticism of the handling of immigrant students' educational needs.

Her report, Myths and Delusions: The State of ESL in Large Canadian School Boards, contends governments and school boards have sold to the public a false bill of goods: that the wholesale integration of ESL children into regular classrooms is appropriate to bring their language skills up to speed.

The move, she says, has allowed boards in Ontario and B.C. to curtail the growth of expensive ESL programs and to redirect money.

But Meyers says most classroom teachers are not trained to deal with the needs of ESL students. Teachers' colleges in Canada offer ESL instruction only as an elective.

To complicate matters, most ESL students are assessed on the basis of the same tests administered to native English-speakers. Meyers believes it "sets the ESL students up for failure" and leads to many being streamed into applied education and special education programs designed for those with learning disabilities, emotional and behavioural difficulties.

"The state of ESL in large, multi-ethnic school boards is abysmal, and in essence, a betrayal of public trust," Meyers concludes. "The reality is that ESL students are denied access to supports necessary for their academic success, and contravene Canadian laws for equal rights."

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National Newspaper Award-winning

reporter Andrew Duffy is the 2003

recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. The Ottawa Citizen

reporter, formerly with the Star, recently completed his year-long study of the

relationship between immigration and education in Canada.