November 2011 Archives

UPDATE: I did a quick Google news search to see who else might be writing and discussing the Council of the Great City Schools' report on Latino students. I came across one interesting take on a blog called Latina Lista.

Blogger Marisa Treviño found a statement about immigration in the study that I missed and it's a really important one to bring to everyone's attention. The study says that Hispanic students "face constant suspicions about whether they are in the country legally."

I'd love to get all of you who teach Latino students, especially those who are English-language learners, talking about this issue and how you think it is impacting their achievement. Please discuss.

A brand-new study examining the nation's fastest-growing population of students—Hispanics—is out today, and the findings are pretty bleak.

The Council of the Great City Schools has just published "Today's Promise, Tomorrow's Future: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Hispanics in Urban Schools," which takes a close look at how Hispanic students in urban school systems are faring compared with their white peers nationally.

The report also delves into the achievement of Hispanic students who are formerly English-language learners and compares how they are doing with their Hispanic peers who are ELLs and their Hispanic peers who are not.

Among the key findings, according to researchers with the council:

•When it comes to "readiness to learn," Hispanic children face several disadvantages compared with their white peers. Thirty-three percent of Hispanic children in 2008 lived in families where no parent had full-time employment compared with 21 percent of white children. And in 2007, 27 percent of Hispanic children lived in poverty compared with 10 percent of white children. Those factors and others translate to Hispanic children being less likely than their white or black peers to recognize letters of the alphabet, knowing how to write their name, or being able to count to 20 or higher.

•On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Hispanic and ELL proficiency rates in reading from 2003 to 2009 were at least 26 percentage points below the rates for white students in 4th grade and 24 percentage points below white students' in 8th grade. For math in those same years, the proportion of Hispanic students performing at or above "proficienct" was at least 29 percentage points lower than for white students in 4th grade and 26 points lower in 8th grade.

•The average scores for Hispanic students who were former ELLs were significantly higher than their Hispanic peers who were ELLs in both subjects.

•Overall, reading and math achievement for Hispanics and Hispanic ELLs on NAEP in certain large city school systems was generally lower than their respective peers in public schools nationally. But some urban systems were an exception—Austin, Texas; Miami-Dade; and Houston among them—and generally produced higher scores in 2009 among Hispanic and Hispanic ELLs than their peers in other large cities.

•Hispanic students in 2008 were much more at risk of dropping out than their white and black peers: 21/2 times more likely to drop out than white students and almost twice as likely as black students. And in 2010, fewer than two out of 10 Hispanic students took an Advanced Placement exam compared with six out of 10 white students.

The council makes no recommendations for how to tackle these difficult issues for Hispanic students, but does intend to bring together a panel of leaders to brainstorm and provide advice on how to improve the school experience and outcome for them.

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Of the 11 states that met last week's early deadline for waivers from the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law, Florida is the one with the most English-learners.

That's why I wanted to read its waiver proposal and look for nuggets that shed light on how much English learners would figure directly into the state's strategy for winning a reprieve from NCLB. From what I can discern from the 151-page application (which doesn't include the appendices), English learners don't receive any particularly special attention. They comprise 9 percent of the state's public school enrollment.

Several things jumped out at me, but none more than the new Annual Measurable Objectives, or AMOs, that Florida outlines in its proposal. Specifically, AMO #3. Under AMO #3, Florida would lump students who fall into one of the traditionally low-performing subgroups, such as ELLs, into one group labeled "lowest-performing 25%." Schools would have to demonstrate that half of their students who are among the lowest-performing 25 percent have made learning gains in reading and math.

Florida rationalizes this approach by saying that schools frequently don't have enough students in a given subgroup, such as African-Americans or English learners, for their performance to factor into the school's accountability bottom line. That can lead educators to focus only on those low-performing students who do make a difference on how schools are judged. And that, says the Florida application writers, could lead to students being overlooked. In other words, a school with a small number of ELLs may not bother to develop instructional strategies to help them improve if, in the end, how they perform on a test doesn't impact the school's overall rating.

While it doesn't appear that this approach would do away with the schools setting targets for, and reporting, the performance of the larger individual subgroups, I'm not entirely certain how this AMO will impact the disaggregation of performance data for students. If it means that ELLs usually get swept into a larger category of underperforming students, I think a lot of folks will find fault with it.

Which brings me to another notable feature in Florida's application: Collaboration with outside stakeholders.

The only identified "stakeholder" that Florida appears to have collaborated with on issues related to English learners was the state chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC. I know that LULAC has been active in Florida on requiring professional development for teaching English learners for all teachers, but I don't have a sense of how representative their view is on ELL issues statewide. By comparison, the state consulted with six "stakeholder" groups in special education.

And I have one final observation.

In their discussion of how they will put college- and career-ready standards into practice and tie state tests to them, Florida education officials indicate that they intend to ensure that ELLs will be able to achieve the common standards, but don't spell out concrete steps to make that happen. The application states that Florida "is planning to conduct an analysis of the linguistic demands of the Common Core State Standards" to help the state shape new English-language proficiency standards that correspond. That's almost verbatim what the Education Department says in its FAQs about the responsibilities states and local districts have when it comes to serving English learners under a waiver.

As a first step toward developing such proficiency standards, Florida cites its membership in a 15-state consortium (led by California) to design a new generation of tests to measure English-language proficiency. But that group—formed earlier this year to compete for a federal grant to create the assessments—did not win funding from the U.S. Department of Education, and has not apparently found a surefire way to continue working together to develop new proficiency tests or standards.

There's much more to parse in the Florida proposal (as well as the 10 other states), so please, have at it, and let me know what you think.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The latest data dump from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals interesting changes to immigration patterns, especially some shifting in the countries of origin of newer waves of immigrants and where these newcomers are choosing to live.

There are 40 million foreign-born residents as of 2010, the majority of whom came to the U.S. prior to 2005. But 17 percent are "newly arrived," which by the Census bureau's definition means they came to the States between 2005 and 2010.

And while the traditional gateway states of California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas are still home to the most foreign-born residents, the most recent immigrants have scattered to more states than their predecessors. Notably, states with small immigrant populations overall have had much higher proportions of recent entrants than the traditional gateway states. That happens to include Alabama—now home to the nation's toughest immigration law—where 33 percent of its foreign-born population has arrived just since 2005.

Digging into the "Newly Arrived Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 2010" report, which the Census released yesterday, you'll find that since 2008, immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for just 41 percent of newcomers. Prior to 2005, immigrants from that region constituted 54 percent of new arrivals.

It's especially striking to see what's happened to the flow of Mexican immigrants in just a few years. The foreign-born from Mexico accounted for 30 percent of newly arrived immigrants who entered prior to 2005, 28 percent for the 2005 through 2007 period, but only 19 percent of those who entered since 2008. One researcher's hypothesis is that the expansion and improvement of schooling in Mexico has stemmed the flow of immigrants to the U.S.

I would think, though, that the ferocious drug war raging along the Mexico-U.S. border has discouraged many would-be immigrants from crossing the border illegally. And the downturn in the American economy has most likely had a major impact too.

It's also notable that the percentage of immigrants from China and India has steadily risen, constituting 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively, of the newly arrived foreign born.

All of this shifting, of course, impacts K-12 schooling. As we know, more and more schools around the country are seeing children in their classrooms who do not speak English and must learn the language.

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I've been covering the English-learner beat for one month now, barely enough time to decipher the menu of alphabet soup and acronyms associated with this complex and specialized field.

But in every conversation I've had so far with policymakers, scholars, and practitioners, one issue ALWAYS comes up: the so-called revolving door of the English-learner subgroup. Because new English-learners are always entering and students who've been reclassified as proficient are always leaving, the ELL subgroup is in a constant state of fluctuation and under NCLB, districts only continue to report on the achievement of ELLs for two years after they've been reclassified as proficient. That cuts two ways: For schools that have done right by ELLs, they don't get credit for the students' longer-term success, and for schools that haven't done right by ELLs, they aren't held accountable beyond that period.

Earlier this week, as I was reading a summary of the series of "national conversations" held earlier this year in six major hubs of English-language learners, there it was again, listed as the #1 concern/complaint/issue under the broad category of accountability.

And, finally, in an informal conversation this week with Rosalinda Barrera, the director of the Office of English Language Acquisition in the U.S. Department of Education, and her deputy director, Joanne Urrutia, the issue came up as one of a range of challenges vexing the field.

We've established that this is a hot topic in the world of ELLs, and that most folks seem to believe there should be greater disaggregation and reporting of ELL achievement.

So what's the hold up? Sticking point? Barrier? Do people worry that by keeping former ELs in the same subgroup as newly entering ELs, that those on the lower end of achievement will be shortchanged? Is it too difficult to parse the data to show the nuances within the English-learner category?

A group of prominent ELL scholars urged members of Congress to address this issue in the reauthorization of ESEA and even explained how to go about it. No traction so far. The reauthorization bill pending currently in the Senate doesn't do it.

So where will the momentum for this change come from? Who doesn't want this to change? Discuss and enlighten me, please.

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The public school system in Durham, N.C., under pressure from federal civil rights authorities, must overhaul how it communicates with its large and growing population of Spanish-speaking parents.

With a population of about 5,300 students whose primary language is Spanish, the district has had just three qualified interpreters to communicate with those students and their families. The school district is home to about 33,000 students.

In a "voluntary resolution agreement" reached with the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights, Durham schools officials must take several concrete steps to improve the flow of information to non-English-speaking parents, as well as train all staff on how to identify and track the families that need school-related information —whether written or oral—provided in a language other than English.

The complaint about Durham came originally from the Southern Poverty Law Center last spring, which brought it to the attention of the civil rights office. In addition to the center's complaints about the district's failures to communicate with non-English-speaking parents, it alleged several instances of educators discriminating against Latino students because of their national origin.

Durham officials have to deliver on these changes swiftly. Many of them require draft plans—for things like developing a system to identify and catalog every parent who needs information in a language other than English—to be submitted to OCR for review within a month.

This case is just the latest action from the OCR. Last month, it announced this same kind of voluntary agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School District to overhaul its services for English-language learners. Under the leadership of Assistant Secretary Russlyn Ali, the office has been aggressive about investigating a range of complaints about school system practices.

When I spoke to Ms. Ali a few weeks ago about the agreement in Los Angeles, she said the office has about 75 active investigations going in districts around the country. Many, she said, will likely lead to these same "voluntary resolutions" that occurred in Los Angeles and Durham.

That's because the civil rights office is working closely with school districts to help them resolve issues around discrimination and other civil rights matters and craft long-term solutions, she said.

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A few weeks back, I wrote about a new study from University of California, Berkeley, researchers who concluded that educators in California may be funneling too many young students into English-language learner programs.

The researchers said the state exam used to judge the English-proficiency of 4- and 5-year old students entering school is leading to an overclassification of students as ELLs. A major problem, they said, was using an exam that takes more than two hours to complete—and one that tests reading and writing—on such young kids.

But one California-based advocate for English-learners has pointed out several shortcomings with the Berkeley study.

Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, the executive director of Californians Together, a nonprofit coalition of parent and civil rights groups that advocates for improving services for English-language learners, sent me an analysis that largely finds fault with the study's methodology.

"The report is based on survey data where the authors garnered comments from school district personnel regarding EL identification practices," the analysis says. "The authors do not present their survey instrument, and do not disclose data on characteristics of the universe of 134 districts or on those 37 districts (24 percent) who responded to the survey."

The analysis also notes that the study does not indicate whether the school personnel who were interviewed in the responding districts were qualified to do so or whether their answers were accurate.

There's much more to the Californians Together response to the Berkeley study. And the study, of course, does not include a response from the Berkeley research team. But dig into it and let me know what you think.

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The Education Department has unveiled the 23 likely winners in Round 2 of its Investing in Innovation, or i3, competition, and judging from the project descriptions, there isn't much focusing directly on the needs of English-language learners.

Of the 23 finalists, 10 of them offered proposals that met the Department's competitive criteria for addressing "unique learning needs," which is the category that includes English learners and students with disabilities. And within that group of 10, I count only three that have any specific mention of ELLs in their project descriptions.

One of them is a biggie, though: the Old Dominion University Research Foundation, based in Norfolk, Va., which is poised to receive nearly $25 million to provide challenging math courses to high-need middle school students. There's just one line in the Old Dominion project summary that mentions ELLs and it states that math achievement will go up and close gaps for "limited-English-proficient students and students with disabilities."

Of course, that one line doesn't reveal anything about how the needs of ELLs would be particularly addressed. On the other hand, the Department hasn't made the full proposals available so we can't make a complete judgment. All we have to go on are the project summaries.

The two other finalists with mentions of ELLs in their project descriptions are the Fresno County Office of Education (no surprise there given the large population of Mexican immigrants in that part of California) and Temple University.

I know that many people would argue that a good number of these projects are focused on priorities such as turning around low-performing schools, which by definition would include large numbers of English learners in many school systems. But I'm surprised not to see more for the fastest growing subgroup of students in these proposals.

If i3 lives on to see a third round of funding, perhaps the Department might make the needs of ELLs—more than 5 million nationwide and growing— an "absolute" priority rather than a "competitive" one.

Below are the seven other finalists whose proposals purport to address the needs of English learners and/ or students with disabilities.

Boston Public Schools

Del Norte Unified School District

Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative

North Carolina New Schools Strategy

Success for All Foundation

Texas Tech University

University of Alaska

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According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, roughly 1 million children who are learning English in public schools nationwide also have a learning disability and many of them are at risk for receiving inadequate services or no services at all.

To help fill a gap in information and resources about this student population, NCLD has rolled out a new online initiative for Spanish-speaking parents whose children have, or may have, learning disabilities.

Called "Recursos in Español," the online parent guide developed by NCLD offers more than three dozen resources that are meant to help parents recognize the signs of learning disabilities, seek help and services for their children and advocate for them in school. It appears that much of what the website offers are translated versions of informational documents already widely available in English on NCLD's website.

It includes links to a few other organizations that also offer resources on learning disabilities in other languages, including more in Spanish, as well as Hmong and Somali.

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I am blogging from the Education Trust conference this afternoon in Arlington, Va., where one of the few presentations focused on English-language learners featured student voices.

Dr. Betty Smallwood from the Center on Applied Linguistics presented a fascinating video of students from Arlington County, Va., talking about what teachers can do better to teach them English. The video is part of a professional development program developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Students were asked to explain what makes learning English easier, what makes it harder and what teachers can do to help them.

Four middle schoolers, all of them beginners in learning English, said that when teachers talk too fast, they struggle to learn. That seems like something that can be relatively easy for teachers of ELLs to fix, if they just are made aware that it's a problem. Students said distractions in the classroom—such as noisy classmates—are also a hindrance.

They all said that working with their peers in small groups is very helpful, a strategy that Dr. Smallwood said is supported by research. Aeydis from Mexico said teachers need to be more patient with her and not give up on her if she doesn't understand or get it the first time. Hababo, from Ethiopia, said teachers sometimes give her too much information and confuse her about what is most important.

Elementary students from Arlington County also had advice for teachers. From Beza, who is from Ethiopia: Give us more time to read what we want to read. And David from El Salvador said encouragement from his fellow ELL students was important for his success. They all talked about the importance of being able to talk to their teachers individually or in small groups. And teachers who take the time to define things for them during instruction are considered most helpful.

Rene Bostick, a principal in Arlington County whose school is full of ELLs, said what helps ELLs most in her experience are having teachers who were ELLs themselves and working with parents to help them learn English, read with their children (in any language) and use the Internet.

Currently, Dr. Smallwood takes this professional development program on the road, but hopes to have it available soon online for teachers and schools to access easily.

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As the edu-world now well knows, the 2011 NAEP results are out and the news is somewhat promising in math and disappointing in reading.

Let's take a look at how English-language learners fared on this year's exam. In 4th-grade reading, 70 percent of ELLs scored below basic and 7 percent were at or above proficient, an ever so slight uptick from 2009 when those percentages were 71 and 6, respectively. In 8th grade reading, 71 percent of ELLs were below basic and just 3 percent scored at or above proficient. In 2009, 75 percent of 8th grade ELLs were below basic, with 3 percent scoring at or above proficient.

In 4th grade math, 42 percent of ELLs were below basic (compared to 43 percent in 2009) while 14 percent were at or above proficient (compared to 12 percent in 2009). In 8th grade, 72 percent scored below basic and 5 percent were at or above proficient, which represents no change from 2009.

But just how reflective of the overall ELL population were NAEP test takers in 2011?

This is an important question because 2011 was to be the first administration of the NAEP since the exam's governing board began pushing states and school districts to exclude fewer students who are English-language learners and who have disabilities.

In 2011, 11 percent of 4th grade ELLs were excluded from the reading portion of NAEP in the nation as a whole (See Table A-9), compared to 16 percent two years ago, when the NAEP reading and math exams were last given. For 8th grade ELLs, the exclusion rate dropped from 17 percent in 2009 to 14 percent. That seems like real progress. For the math exam, (See Table 9) 4 percent of 4th grade ELLs were excluded, compared to 6 percent in 2009; and 7 percent of 8th grade ELLs were excluded, compared to eight percent two years before.

State by state, the rates of exclusion on the reading test (the exclusion rates were generally smaller on the math exam) lay bare the wild variation in how representative a slice of the overall ELL population ends up taking the test. In California, home to the most ELLs in the nation, 4 percent were excluded from the reading test this year, down a single percentage point from 2009 when 5 percent were excluded.

In Georgia, more than 30 percent of ELLs were excluded from the reading test, a rate that has changed little in the last several administrations of the test. I'm sure the ELL population in Georgia has grown significantly and may explain in part why the number of exclusions hasn't changed more. Kentucky—and I'm not sure why, so perhaps someone can enlighten us—excluded 63 percent of ELLs from the test, up from an already high figure of 43 percent in 2009.

The states with the lowest rates of excluding ELLs from NAEP—with a rate of 1 percent each—were Arizona and Nevada, both home to large numbers of English learners.

I am interested to hear from the experts about these NAEP results for English-language learners.

Posted by Lesli A. Maxwell at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights has opened a new investigation related to English-language learners, this time looking into whether the state department of education in Massachusetts has failed to enforce laws intended to provide better services for ELLs in Boston charter schools.

This probe comes on the heels of several others that OCR has recently conducted looking into the education of English-language learners, including an investigation in the Los Angeles Unified School District that led to the school system's agreement to overhaul its ELL program. Federal civil rights authorities have found numerous problems with the education of ELLs in Massaschusetts in the last year. They reached a settlement with the Boston district last year to address shortcomings in its ELL programs, and earlier this year, found that there was a statewide shortage of teachers adequately trained to teach academic content to English-language learners.

Federal civil rights officials have opened at least 16 investigations into services for English-language learners since President Obama took office in 2009.

OCR opened the new investigation last week after Multicultural Education, Training & Advocacy (META) Inc., a civil rights group based in Somerville, Mass., filed a complaint. META's lawyers contend that the state department of education has a history of approving applicants for Boston-based charter schools that enroll few, if any, English-language learners in a city where the public school enrollment is about 30 percent ELLs. Specifically, META says that the education department is not enforcing a new state law meant to address the lack of adequate services for ELLs in Boston charter schools.

Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that OCR will find merit to META's complaint. But the state's batting average so far on these issues has not been stellar.

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