Texas: Rio Grande Valley likely to be affected by language ruling

[Harold Schiffman]

Valley likely to be affected by language ruling

  July 31, 2008 - 4:07PM
Ryan Holeywell | The Monitor
July 31, 2008

McALLEN — A federal court ruling last week could affect every school
district in the Rio Grande Valley. The ruling forces the Texas
Education Agency to overhaul its system for teaching and monitoring
the progress of students with limited English proficiency by Jan. 31.
The impact could be especially strong here in the Rio Grande Valley,
where 39 percent of students are LEPs, and every district has at least
some students with limited English skills. "...TEA has not met its
obligation to remedy the language deficiencies of Texas students,"
wrote U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice in a 95-page opinion.

More than half the students in the Valley View, Hidalgo, Rio Grande
City, Donna and Roma districts are classified as having limited
proficiency with the English language. "Obviously, we're not doing
something right," said Ofelia Gaona, director of the bilingual
department in Donna. "The only ones paying the price are the
children." The League of United Latin American Citizens and the GI
Forum, which advocate for Hispanic-American equal rights, were the
plaintiffs in the case. Justice wrote that "the statistics for
secondary LEP students are undeniably egregious."

The ruling cited a 16.3-percent dropout rate for LEP students who
should have graduated in 2004, compared to 3.9 percent of all
students. The ruling also cited disparate test scores and retention
rates between secondary LEP students and their peers.
"The failure of secondary LEP students under every metric clearly and
convincingly demonstrates student failure, and accordingly, the
failure of the ESL secondary program in Texas," Justice wrote.

Suzanne Marchman, a TEA spokeswoman, said the agency was disappointed
with the judge's decision and would likely ask the Attorney General to
appeal the ruling. Marchman declined to respond to the ruling's
specific criticisms of TEA, citing the pending litigation. David
Hinojosa, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he is hopeful - but not
optimistic - that TEA will make changes that "give teeth" to the
state's ESL programs. Those changes must be implemented for the
2009-2010 school year, according to Justice's ruling.

"These students have long been ignored, and it all starts with the
state," Hinojosa said. Hinojosa said if the state does not meet the
Jan. 31 deadline, it would likely face some sort of sanction from the
federal court. Arizona faced financial sanctions in 2005 for failing
to comply with a deadline set by a federal judge in a similar case.
Justice also described "fatal flaws" in TEA's system for monitoring
LEP students' performance, which fails to identify all LEP students
and masks poor performance by aggregating data between multiple grade
levels.

In Texas, LEP students receive bilingual education through sixth grade
and take ESL instruction in grades seven and higher.
That system was implemented 25 years ago, but Justice wrote it is
clear that TEA "failed to achieve results" in that time. Nearly all
LEP students in Texas are Hispanic, but according to the ruling, just
13 percent of them are classified as immigrants. The ruling even cited
a deposition of former TEA Commissioner Shirley Neeley, who said
there's "not anybody in their right mind that would say these are good
scores."

Hinojosa said there are no statewide standards that define what an ESL
program really is, and ESL is implemented "at the whim of school
districts." Gaona said she believes the bilingual and ESL programs
schools use should be based on solid research. "You can do practically
anything to satisfy an ESL program," Hinojosa said.

http://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2008/08/valley-likely-to-be-affected-by.html

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