Secondary teachers as cultural mediators for language minority students.

The low rate of academic achievement and high dropout rate among language minority youths in U.S. secondary schools has been a cause for concern and the subject of numerous publications (Fry 2003; Morse 2005; Ruiz-de-Velasco and Fix 2000). With increasing numbers of new immigrants from non-English speaking countries entering the United States, schools across the nation are struggling to educate their children (Morse). The burden of meeting the No Child Left Behind Act's mandated expectations for student achievement and school performance has clearly fallen on the shoulders of K-12