California: Why is the Los Angeles Unified School District lagging in reclassification of English learners?

Fri Nov 30 15:15:50 UTC 2007

The language gap

Why is the Los Angeles Unified School District lagging in
reclassification of English learners, and what's the secret of
successful districts? Russlynn Ali and Richard Rothstein continue
their debate on California's achievement gap.
November 29, 2007

Today, Ali and Rothstein discuss ways to educate students who aren't
fluent in English. Previously, they debated devoting resources to
closing the achievement gap, the No Child Left Behind Act and reasons
for lagging minority performance. Tomorrow, they'll discuss policies
to boost students' achievement.

If it works for all students, it can work for English learners
By Russlynn Ali

Richard,

Since the last census, the Los Angeles Unified School District has
reclassified as English proficient 13% of its formerly English
language-learning students. In truth, that number compares favorably
with a 9% reclassification rate for California public schools as a
whole.

That said, nobody should be happy with reclassification rates that low
or with the huge achievement gaps between L.A. Unified's English
learners and their English-speaking counterparts in reading and math.
On the 2007 fourth-grade California Standards Tests, L.A. Unified's
English learners were 41 points behind their English-speaking peers in
English language arts and 30 points behind in math.

Mind you, L.A. Unified isn't doing very well for its African American
students either — only 38% of its African American students are
proficient or advanced in fourth-grade math, compared with 34% of
fourth-grade English-learner students. White students, too, don't
perform as well as their counterparts in other urban districts. Yes,
the district is improving — faster than the state as a whole. But
clearly, L.A. Unified still needs to do far better by all groups of
students.

All of my experience tells me that these poor results are not
occurring because L.A. Unified's teachers don't care about their
students, including their English language learners. Most care a lot.
But California public schools educate almost one-third of all
English-learning students in the U.S., and we've devoted far too few
resources — as a state and as a country — to studying and measuring
what works, then helping teachers do more of it.

Teachers of English-learning students are hungry for tools that will
help them succeed. But it's not even clear how long such students who
enter school at different ages typically should take to become
proficient in English. And evaluations on the effectiveness of
alternative approaches are spotty at best.

Last year, however, California took an important step forward by
releasing school-level Academic Performance Index scores for English
learners. With these new data, we can start identifying the schools
throughout the state that are doing a better job of educating
English-learning students to high levels, and we can learn more about
their strategies for success. Despite the challenges such students
bring with them, success is possible.

Emerging analyses (PDF) provide some helpful hints (PDF). It turns out
that schools that work well for English-learning students look quite
similar to schools that work well for other groups. They have strong
teachers who are well equipped to teach English-learning students, and
they have high expectations for their students to master academic
English and work hard not just to meet but to exceed state and federal
accountability goals for student achievement.

Schools that do best with English learners consistently measure
student performance, not just on assessments designed to measure
mastery of English but in core academic subjects. Principals and
teachers use that data to drive instructional change, develop
strategies to help their students and themselves succeed, and better
inform and engage parents. These higher-performing schools provide
their English learners with strong supports, including extra
instructional time and quick interventions for students who start to
slip.

Schools that work for English language learners deliver strong,
standards-aligned curricula. They include a framework for building
academic vocabulary, including — as wonderful work by Phil Daro and
Uri Treisman has shown — specific advice on the words in each content
domain that English learners typically don't know. These schools give
their teachers the support and professional development they need.
Most important, they don't see English learners as impossible to
teach.

This last point is especially important. Many people believe that most
English-learning students are new immigrants who "can't possibly be
expected to speak the language and catch up quickly." This is a
destructive stereotype, and it is wrong. The majority of students
enrolled in our state's English-learner programs are not immigrants,
let alone new immigrants.

More than 1.5 million students in California K-12 school system are
classified as English learners. Yet according to the Migration Policy
Institute, only about 637,000 children in California between the ages
of 5 and 17 are foreign-born. That means that more than half of the
students enrolled in English-learning programs were born and raised in
the U.S. This isn't about whether we can educate new immigrants to
higher levels; this is about whether we can educate all students, new
immigrants included, to higher levels.

Even when English learners are in our schools for a long time, we
don't teach them what they need to know. Indeed, in L.A. Unified's
graduating class of 2006, two-thirds of English learners who didn't
pass the California High School Exit Exam had been languishing in
English-learning programs for more than 10 years.

We can do better. For our state's future, we must do better.

Russlynn Ali is the executive director of The Education Trust-West, an
Oakland-based think tank focused on closing the achievement gaps
separating low-income students and students of color from other young
Californians.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The politics of reclassification
By Richard Rothstein

Russlynn, you properly state that schools doing better with
English-learning students have invested in better curriculum, teacher
training, extra instructional time and quick interventions for
students who slip.

I also agree when you say, "It's not even clear how long such students
who enter school at different ages typically should take to become
proficient in English." But then how can you conclude that a 13%
reclassification rate is too low? How do the age distributions of
immigrant children in Los Angeles compare to those in the rest of the
state or the nation? Wouldn't time needed for fluency also depend on
how much English reinforcement immigrant children get at home and from
peers, how much English is spoken in their communities and how much
access they have to interesting English reading materials outside
school? We should answer these questions before jumping to conclusions
that reclassification rates are too low. They could be too high when
schools are pressured to reclassify children before they are ready to
study in English without additional support.

California districts have different reclassification criteria. Some
use score cut-offs on California's standardized test. Others do not.
Earlier this week, you agreed that using cut-off points on
standardized tests can be "statistical trickery and gaming." Does Los
Angeles' higher (than statewide) reclassification rate stem from
better instruction or lower criteria? We should know this before
jumping to conclusions about where reclassification rates are better.

Reclassification is, itself, an arbitrary standard. If children get
the support they need after reclassification, higher reclassification
rates should be expected. But if they don't, reclassification can be
disastrous. Nationwide, reclassification rates differ widely, partly
because of different instructional quality, but also partly because of
different arbitrary reclassification criteria.

You express shock that more than half of the students enrolled in
English-learning programs were born and raised in the U.S. This
statistic seems shocking, but the reality is that many immigrants
(especially from Mexico and Latin America) come to California to work
as young adults, with children born soon after they arrive. These
children, born and raised in homes of recent immigrants who don't
speak English and in communities made up mostly other recent
immigrants, are indistinguishable for educational purposes from
immigrant children.

To know how well our schools assimilate Latino children, we need
better data. Schools should record mothers' country of birth and
educational attainment. We'd then likely find that few, if any,
children born to non-immigrant mothers were enrolled in
English-learning programs. How well these children do in school is
probably comparable to how well non-Latino children do — those who
come from families with higher literacy levels perform, on average,
better.

There's a widespread myth that schools did better with earlier
immigrant generations. Were it true that schools were once more
successful, panicked reactions about today's English-learning students
might be more understandable. But in the first decades of the 20th
century, there were enormous achievement gaps between immigrants and
the native-born. Italians, for example, like many Mexicans today, came
here for unskilled work, with little literacy in their own language.
In big cities 100 years ago, 80% of native white children, but only
58% of Italian children, stayed in school another year. As late as
1931, only 11% of Italian students who entered high school graduated,
compared to more than 40% for all students. This was a much bigger
native-immigrant gap than we have today.

Instruction in students' home languages was once commonplace,
abolished not because it wasn't working but because of public
hostility to immigrants after we went to war with Germany in 1917.
Have you ever wondered why we use a German word, "kindergarten," to
describe early education? American kindergartens were first
established in the 1870s and taught solely in German to give
immigrants a head start in school. English was introduced gradually in
later grades.

Public schools teaching only in German were everywhere. In Texas,
there were even Czech-language public schools.

San Francisco established segregated public schools taught in Chinese,
Indian, Mongolian and Japanese. German, Italian and French immigrants,
on the other hand, were taught in their native languages in regular
public schools. But an "anti-immigrant" school board majority in 1873
fired all French- and German-speaking teachers. After immigrant
protests, bilingual instruction was reestablished in 1874. In 1877,
the California Legislature enacted a prohibition on bilingual
education, but the governor refused to sign it.

I've reviewed this history to show that fights about when to
reclassify students have been historically more about politics than
pedagogy. Russlynn, you are right about the kinds of quality
instruction children need, but until we do better at answering your
question about how long it should take immigrants of different ages
and family literacy levels to become English-fluent, politics will
continue to trump pedagogy.

Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy
Institute in Washington and author of "Class and Schools: Using
Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White
Achievement Gap" He was formerly the national education columnist for
the New York Times.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup29nov29,0,1796210,full.story

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