Mark Gerzon describes the challenge of deliberation: "As citizens on the eve of the next millennium, in a nation exploding with diversity, our challenge is to listen to fellow citizens who anger us, disturb our thoughts, expose our preconceptions, and even impugn our integrity" (Gerzon, 1996, p. xxii). Public deliberation offers communities the opportunity to change the way they approach problems. It encourages people to be involved and to make acting together a community habit and responsibility.

The education of all children is a community responsibility. Educators, along with community members and organizations, are working together to create schools that will work more effectively in our changing and diverse society. School reform is fundamentally about widening the circle of the traditional, formal school system to include the concerns, expectations, desires, and wisdom of the greater community. Parents, business people, religious and civic groups, retired persons,
recent immigrants, policymakers, and average taxpayers must join public schools to help educate our forty million school children.

Today, the school reform movement affects students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and the general community. Educators and policymakers are looking beyond the schools for support in helping all students to achieve high academic standards. Current reform calls for establishing positive school relationships with parents and communities and making them partners in the education process.

The vision of school reform is to achieve a high-quality education for every child. David Perkins, in his book Smart Schools, aptly describes how difficult it is to meet this challenge in light of current school demographic changes: "We want schools to deliver a great deal of knowledge and understanding to a great many people of greatly differing talents and with a great range of interests and a great variety of cultural and family backgrounds " (1992, p. 2).

The American school system faces two major problems as it considers school reform amidst the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students: (1) the system's growth that includes large numbers of native-born minorities and recent immigrants whose first language is not English, and (2) the system's historical failure to achieve academic success with many minority students.

The shifting demographic patterns are already seen in the country's urban school districts. Most minority students attend school districts with enrollments of 10,000 students or more. During the period 1988-1991, public school enrollment increased by one million students. Over three-quarters of this growth is due to Hispanic and Asian students. Hispanic student enrollment increased by 645,000 and Asian student enrollment increased by 140,000. Slightly more than 30 percent of students in public schools are members of minority groups. One in five school children comes from a home in which a language other than English is spoken. By the year 2035, white non-Hispanic students will no longer be the majority of the nation's school-age population (NCES, 1997).

Hispanic and Asian students bring with them much diversity. Ten years ago Hispanic immigrants came from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Mexico still dominates this group, but significant numbers also come from Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Dominican and Central American countries (Valdivieso & Nicolau, 1992). Asian immigrants also come from many different locations, such as Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Many of these immigrant students enter the educational system, from preschool to high school, speaking no English. Some immigrants are illiterate in their native language, while others have had excellent schooling (McLeod, 1995).

Many minority students in schools underachieve academically. They take fewer academic courses and lag behind in reading and writing skills. Many explanations for the school failure of minority students are shaped by the assumptions that the student's sociocultural background is deficient and impedes academic success. Most minority students are economically disadvantaged. Some students are fourth, fifth and sixth generation native-born ethnic minorities who may or may not be limited English proficient. Others are limited English proficient whose families rarely speak English at home. Because the lack of English language skills is often equated with the lack of academic potential, recently arrived minority students are typically placed in the lowest-level classes with the least demanding curriculum, almost guaranteeing low achievement levels. Because of IQ tests that did not consider language and cultural differences, Hispanics have been mistakenly placed in special education, where they are overrepresented. Fortunately, many schools today are abandoning instructional practices based on these assumptions. There is growing recognition today that a variety of factors play a role and influence the outcomes of minority students (Ovando & Collier, 1998).

D

Schools are trying to retain the hundreds of thousands of culturally and linguistically diverse young adults that leave the educational system each year without successfully completing high school. According to Dropout Rates in the United States, (NCES, 1996), 3.6 million young adults ages 16 through 24 were not enrolled in high school and had not completed high school. This accounts for 11.1 percent of the 32.5 million population of 16-through-24-year-olds in the U.S. in 1996. The table shown here presents the 3.6 million dropouts of the three largest race-ethnicity groups.

Do students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds need special policies? Probably not, but schools need to address both the strengths and needs of these students. The challenge of educating children from these different backgrounds is complex. Motivation, social organization, and ways of thinking and speaking that vary with education, income, and class status impact school experiences and participation. Schools are striving to better understand the cultural characteristics and the socioeconomic variables that affect these students' learning. Educators are developing new ways of teaching diverse students and connecting with their families. In fact, the success of the reform movement will be measured by how accurately schools determine and respond to the needs of all students, including the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students.

Today's students are expected to become critical thinkers, to possess a high level of technological skill, to apply their knowledge to daily problem solving, to be able to work in cooperative or team situations, and to become lifelong learners. Helping them meet these expectations when so many linguistically and culturally diverse students do not gain a solid grounding in reading, writing, mathematics, and science is a major challenge for school reform. Clearly little progress will be made unless schools and communities face the challenge of a broadened dialogue about the kinds of systems needed to produce those outcomes. Meeting these expectations requires a better understanding of how culture, race, language, and national background affect the lives and needs of linguistically diverse students (Olsen, et al., 1994). Educators and the community must work as partners and begin a dialogue that creates plans and practices that are inclusive and provide all students with an equal educational opportunity.

The magnitude of the current demographic changes in schools, coupled with the notion that the process of education involves every segment of society, requires educators, parents, and the greater community to come together in new roles and partnerships.