Standards, Sanctions and New Attention to English Language Learners

 

New federal content standards, new language assessments, and new curriculum that “hasn’t reached down into the classrooms” are among the big challenges facing schools trying to teach English language learners or ELLs, according to Kathleen Leos of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition.

 

The first-ever federal standards for language proficiency pose many challenges for school administrators and educators, Leos told fellows. But the clock is ticking. Under NCLB, students will be expected to master academic content at the same time they learn English and “teachers will be teaching differently than in the past.”

 

Those are among the changes that have to occur to meet NCLB’s overall goal: 100 percent of U.S. students are expected to be proficient in academic content by 2014.

 

With 5.5 million ELLs in U.S. schools, and their population increasing by about 10 percent a year, ELL's academic success has big implications for schools. (Consider the growth of the Latino youth population; in 2000 alone, 46 percent of Latino students were ELL.) Once they arrive in a U.S. school, students have three years to become proficient in English and take subject-normed tests. If they haven’t mastered the curriculum, their school may fail to meet AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) for that standard. Beyond the cost to the student, the repercussions of school failure make the stakes so high. (See federal data on school performance.)

 

“We have 11,000 schools identified by states as ‘in need of improvement’ and over 20,000 that haven’t met AYP,” said Roberto Rodriguez, senior education advisor to Sen. Edward Kennedy and the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “We have some funding to intervene and facilitate … but we haven’t had the focus at the federal level to really intervene in a more meaningful way and provide resources that schools need. Until we rise to that challenge, we’re identifying where the gaps are but not doing as good a job at addressing those challenges.”

 

Rodriguez added that NCLB “holds a lot of promise for the next generation of standards-based reform.” But there are many questions about how states are managing the specific challenges that ELLs place on schools. (See more in the report, “From Capital to the Classroom: Year 3 of the No Child Left Behind Act.”) He and other panelists raised issues that reporters could explore with their own school systems, such as:

 

• How do schools assess the educational competence of recent immigrants to ensure appropriate instruction? How many tests do students have to take, and at what ages? Are schools prepared to accurately evaluate a child's content knowledge in his native language? Using what tests or tools?

 

• What about ELLs with learning disabilities? What resources are made available to them and what are the standards for their performance?

 

• How are states supporting professional development? What are the local plans? Can schools find or create an adequately trained teaching pool to support new instruction?

 

• What is the mechanism for moving schools off the AYP list? If an elementary school is failing AYP because of its ELL scores, what is happening as those same students move into middle and high school?