English-Language Learners: Public School’s Forgotten Kids
High school graduation rates across the country are at a 40-year high, with 75 percent of students making it to the finish line. Between 2000 and 2010, 46 states saw substantial gains.
And the upswing in graduates also spans minority students, even as the nation’s schools become more diverse. More Latino and African-American students are taking hold of high school diplomas, shrinking the achievement gap (however slightly) with their white cohorts.
But the marching beat of “Pomp and Circumstance” grows faint when it comes to English-Language Learners (ELL)—students for whom English is a second language—who make up 10 percent (3.5 million) of all enrolled students. Unlike their English-speaking peers, these students are among the most likely to drop out before the 12th grade.
The U.S. Department of Education found that nearly half of states graduated less than 60 percent of students with limited English proficiency in 2010-2011. Arizona had the most abysmal record, graduating only 25 percent. Nevada, the state with the highest percentage of ELL students, graduated 29 percent of them. Vermont and South Dakota tied for the top spot with an 82 percent matriculation rate.
California has the most English learners in the country and is at the 60 percent mark. With 1.5 million ELL students, the state accounts for nearly half of the country’s ELL population. That means the 600,000 ELL students who fail to don a cap and gown make up 17 percent of all ELL students.
Educators have several explanations for why schools do such a poor job at educating immigrant children.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who controls the largest school district in the country, said the drop in graduation rates for ELL students is partly due to higher graduation requirements recently set by the district. Graduation rates for ELL learners decreased by five percent in the last year, while the overall rate went up.
Bloomberg also pointed out that ELL students’ five- and six-year graduation rates continue to increase. But he also acknowledged that most of the state’s ELL students are concentrated in a handful of New York City’s most underserved and under-resourced public schools.
That’s why, said Bloomberg, starting this fall the department will address the shortfalls by providing extra funding for approximately 25 schools, “that need the most support for teachers on best practices ELL instruction.”
Hilda Maldonado, Director of the Multilingual and Multicultural Education Department at the Los Angeles Unified School District, agrees with Bloomberg. But she adds that it’s unfair to judge the success or failure of English-learner programs by looking at their graduation rates alone since the goal for English learners is to achieve literacy levels that allow them to be reclassified as proficient in English.
So, she said, while the ELL graduation rate for LAUSD went down by eight percent this year, the percentage of reclassified students who graduated went up—from 76 percent last year to 80 percent this year.
“You really have to look at both groups to get the real picture. And when you do that, you see we are making a lot of progress.” Maldonado said.
Last year about 171,000 of the district’s 655,000 students were English learners. Fewer than 25,000 were reclassified as Fluent-English-Proficient.
The debate over the most effective methods to teach English to non-native speakers has been raging in schools and at the ballot box for decades.
Immigrant and bilingual advocates argue students need to access their primary language in order learn a second language. English-immersion proponents disagree wholeheartedly and contend that speaking with students in their native tongue only prolongs the acquisition of a new language. Therefore, an intensive English-only curriculum is the fastest path to proficiency.
Voters in Arizona, Massachusetts, and California have taken the latter view and passed ballot measures banning bilingual education in each state.
“The truth is because of the law in California, school districts have one hand tied behind their backs in trying to work with ELL students,” said Jose Moreno, a professor at California State University Long Beach and an expert on Hispanic education.
“As a teacher, you work off what they already know in their own language and treat that as an asset. That builds a bridge for kids to transfer the skills for how to learn to other academic work.”
Moreno, once an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who now holds a doctorate in education from Harvard, helped launch several “dual bilingual” classes within Anaheim Unified School District by taking advantage of a provision in the California law that allows parents of ELL students to seek waivers opting out of the English-immersion curriculum.
The waivers are also available in Arizona and Massachusetts, but very few parents make use of the option.
“Parents just don’t know, and they’re not told that they have the right to ask for something more for their kids,” Moreno said.
Joking, he continued, “I think it’s written in 10-point font on page 142 of the parent handbook given out by district. In other words, you’re not going to find it unless you know it’s there.”
Anaheim’s dual-immersion classes serve about 400 students from kindergarten through seventh grade and they operate under a 50/50 model. Students alternate from English to Spanish on a weekly basis across all subjects. So if a fifth-grade class is studying rock formations on Friday and the instructor closes out the lesson on page 32 in English, come Monday morning students open their books to page 33 in Spanish.
Moreno said the students enrolled in the program are performing as well or better than their non-English-learning peers on all standardized tests. ELL students are also reclassifying at a faster pace than those who are not in the dual-immersion classes. In general, ELL students take five to seven years to become Fluent English Proficient, but Moreno said students in the bilingual classes are reclassified by the third or fourth grade.
That is a significant marker for most ELL researchers who have found that the longer students remain classified as English learners, the more likely they are to abandon school. Whereas the earlier ELL students are reclassified as proficient, the more similar they are to non-English learners in academic achievement and dropout rates.
Moreno said the program has been praised by the top brass of the district despite some skepticism and resistance. Next week, the superintendent and the school board will consider expanding the program to include another 90/10 kindergarten class, where students receive 90 percent of their instruction in Spanish.
Next year LAUSD will also be trying a new approach for getting ELL students on the reclassification track, an objective Superintendent John Deasy has said, “is among the highest priorities for the district and for me personally.”
Earlier this month LAUSD unveiled a new Master Plan for English Learners 14 months in the making. It is the result of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education that found a disproportionate number of ELL students were dropping out of school almost twice as often as their non-ELL counterparts.
Under the new system, said Hilda Maldonado, the district is creating two new courses in middle and high school for the explicit purpose of addressing the instructional needs of long-term English learners, kids who have been in ELL classes for five years or more.
The new courses are “maintenance bilingual,” which closely mirrors a dual-immersion program and is intended for students who live in communities without sufficient English-language models. These students can typically read English well but have low comprehension. The second course is called “transitional bilingual” and is designed for students still struggling with English. In these cases, teachers will use the primary language for the first two years of instruction and transition them to become reclassified by the end of the third year.
“For the first time, we’re going to be treating [long-term English learners] as distinct groups of students and not putting them all in one class,” Maldonado said. This will allow teachers to more effectively tailor their instruction, she said.
Subdividing English learners by ability and language acquisitions seems like an obvious and logical step, but one Maldonado says no other district is taking.
Maldonado added she expects the rest of the country will be watching as LAUSD embarks on this new experiment.
“We know we are leading the country, and we are excited to be in this position.”
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