Cover Story
English Lessons

When students don't speak English, what's the best route to classroom success--and high test scores?

At Chandler Magnet School in Worcester, Massachusetts, a sign outside the main office reads, in bold red letters, "¿Qué necesitas para pasar el MCAS? Asistencia, Aspiración, Ayuda, Asignaciones, Actitud." (What do you need to pass the MCAS? Attendance, aspiration, help, homework, attitude.)

Many students here don't speak English yet, so they'll be taking the third and fourth grade versions of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), the state test, in Spanish. And, of course, the school and its educators will be judged on their performance.

Motivational signs like these may be popping up nationwide in the next few years as the revised federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act takes effect with its new testing mandates. English-language learners (ELL) will be expected to reach the same levels of achievement as fluent English speakers, and schools where they don't will face escalating penalties (see below).

The number of ELL students is growing fast nationwide--up 27 percent in just two years.

Some educators feel the best way to help ELL students achieve is to "immerse" them in English instruction, with little or no use of their native language, even if that means they can't follow what's going on in class for a while.

Others favor teaching in the native language while also teaching English part of the day--"bilingual" education.

Worcester schools have advocates of both points of view and many more in between, but in Massachusetts, the decision on how to educate these children may not be made by educators at all. It may be determined at the ballot box next fall if a referendum severely restricting bilingual education passes.

Bankrolled by Ronald Unz, the Calif-ornia software tycoon who underwrote anti-bilingual campaigns in several other states, the referendum is opposed by the Massachusetts Teachers Association. If passed, the restrictions would take effect in the fall of 2003.

Passage of the proposal would throw a monkey wrench into Worcester's varied and sophisticated language instruction system where the guiding principle is, one size doesn't fit all.

Here, 10 percent of school children are not fluent in English, and the ranks keep growing. Worcester educators have responded with bilingual classes, two-way bilingual classes, "structured" English immersion, after-school tutoring, and many more variations, depending on students' ages, their skill level, the number of other students speaking their language, the availability of bilingual teachers and teaching assistants, and the preferences of their parents.

Angelique Rivera, who teaches kindergarten at Chandler Magnet School, strongly supports bilingual education because of her own experience growing up in a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican family in Florida. "I had total immersion in school, and I was shuffled to the back of the room," she says. "I basically learned English by myself. But I didn't learn to read until sixth grade."

Rivera teaches Spanish-speaking children. She often speaks English with them, but when she's talking about academic content, she uses their native language.

"I teach how to make graphs, how to read, and critical thinking skills," she explains. "I'm preparing them for MCAS in kindergarten." She notes they couldn't master such complex material in English.

Most of these children, Rivera believes, will be ready for all-English instruction at the end of the second grade. If the Unz proposal passes, she says, "I'm going to feel sorry for teachers who are given 15 kids, don't understand their culture, and can't speak their language--they won't be able to teach them. And I'm going to feel sorry for the kids."

But maybe she won't have to. Chandler Magnet School also has teachers who can't speak their students' languages in a pilot "structured English" program. Joanna Voyiatzis has 16 children, grades one through three, who speak six different languages. They started the year knowing no English.

"These kids are doing fine," she says. "I'm very impressed by their success." She teaches grade level math, coping with the language problem by drawing lots of pictures. And the children use simpler reading materials than native English speakers do.

Home support is the key to learning English fast and well, and Voyiatzis says most of her parents are educated and eager to help. "They are always coming in to talk with me, through aides who speak their language: ÔHow's my child doing? Is there anything you need?'" she says.

But many immigrant parents can't be so helpful. "I have students whose parents leave for work at 6:30 a.m. and get home at 6 at night, just to make enough money for basic needs," says Juan Matos, who teaches a sixth grade bilingual class at Chandler.

At City View School, three miles east of Chandler, Joan Didzbalis teaches English to small groups of children, 40 minutes to an hour at a time, kindergarten through sixth grade. She cautions that children who can converse in English may not be ready to learn their academics that way. If they have to labor to understand each word, they may not grasp the meaning of the whole passage.

Didzbalis speaks a little Spanish, and she puts herself in the student role to help the children understand the challenge they must overcome on the MCAS.

"I read to them from a Spanish story, and they say, ÔYou did good, Miss D!' But I tell them I have no idea what I just read." Then they practice strategies for deciphering the difficult questions they can expect on the test.

Didzbalis believes MCAS scores for many children will be lower if they can't learn their academics in their native language. "Ten percent of language learners will make it no matter what," she says. "Others definitely learn better in bilingual. Some need it for one or two years. Others need five to seven years.

"Each child is looked at differently in Worcester."

--Alain Jehlen

For more: Visit the NEA Web site at www.nea.org/issues/bilingual/, the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs at www.ncbe.gwu.edu, and the National Association for Bilingual Education at www.nabe.org.

Small's World

A Nevada teacher works hard to adjust to rising numbers of non-English speaking students.

In many ways Theo Small is living his dream as a fourth and fifth grade teacher at Mountain View Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada. He loves his students. He has "aha!" moments almost every day. His colleagues are great. And because he's at an outdoor school--the classroom doors open to the breezy blue yonder--he never goes wanting for big splashes of sunshine and air.

But here's the rub: In the eight years since he began teaching at Mountain View, Small has seen his classes shift from majority white to 98 percent limited- and non-English speaking Hispanic. Not that this is bad; it's just that Small is a Utah born-and-bred Caucasian who doesn't speak Spanish. Needless to say, the way he taught just five years ago has been turned on its head. "It's completely changed my classroom," says Small. "Everything I do is different."

In the Clark County School District, the sixth-fastest growing urban district in the country, Small is nowhere near alone. A booming service economy that has lured hundreds of thousands of job-seeking Hispanics to the area--there's been a 250 percent surge since 1999 alone--is also testing the backbone of the school system.

School officials project that by the 2004-05 academic year, the number of non-English speaking students will have more than doubled, from 40,000 to nearly 90,000 out of 245,000. But in a district that long has struggled with funding and teacher shortages, the challenges are already formidable. And for teachers like Small, things are sure to get tougher under the new English proficiency demands of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Testing each year, pressures to bring non-English speaking students along faster--it all makes Small wonder about the fairness of it.

"If I'm getting a student who's been in a U.S. school for two years," says Small, "I know that he may have basic language ability and can understand when I give directions, especially if I'm using lots of visuals.

"But for the most part, he's not going to be able to take a fifth grade test and succeed. It's understanding abstract concepts that's so hard. You're talking about developmental language." And that, he says, just doesn't come overnight.

It takes time and patience to cultivate developmental language, says Small. It also takes resources and lots of support--and in his district, both are in short supply. At Mountain View, where more than a third of the students are English-language learners (ELL), only a handful of the teachers are officially certified to teach them. That's because the school district doesn't pay for the training, even though an ELL-trained teacher is required to be in every class where ELL students number more than half.

Officials insist they'll be more funds next year for teacher development and a host of new testers, but meanwhile the result has been this: Eager professionals like Small who forked over their own money to pay for training have been forced to absorb as many ELL students as possible to keep their schools compliant with the law.

At Mountain View this has effectively meant the segregation of most ELL students from English-speaking students, which has curtailed the kind of interaction Small is convinced would help build their English skills faster. "When my class walks down the hallway, we're like Ôthe little brown class'," he says. "It really frustrates me."

But that's just the start. Small's classes are big--he has 34 students now, two years ago he had 42. Many come and go; 30 percent of the school, as throughout the district, is transient. A quarter of Small's own students had left by March, and new ones were coming.

There's no aide and not enough of certain books. In addition, few parents speak English, making it difficult to support language development at home. Small usually relies on the goodwill of a couple of bilingual staff members to help him forge relationships with parents.

There's one last issue, too, says one of Small's colleagues, first grade ELL teacher Mary Francis Ringstad. Though she speaks fluent Spanish and is fortunate to be teamed with an English-speaking class during certain periods of the year (Mountain View is year-round), Ringstad says she deals with large numbers of students who come to school with no skills at all--even in their native language.

"It's incredible," she says. "It makes it doubly hard because you can't translate when they don't even know what it is in Spanish."

So she worries about whether the new law will take these kinds of intangibles into consideration. "I think we may be looking to accomplish something too quickly," she says. "It's impossible to think that many of my students are going to be at grade level by third grade."

He says he just hopes help--not harm--is on the way.

--Marilyn Milloy

Under the recently revised Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), children who have attended school in the United States for at least three consecutive years will be tested in English for reading and language arts. They must meet the same standards for proficiency as other students.

If any subgroup of students--such as English-language learners--in any school do not make rapid progress toward meeting these standards, the school will be subjected to escalating sanctions that may include replacing some staff after four years and complete reorganization after six.

The ESEA, also known as the No Child Left Behind Act, neither encourages nor discourages teaching children in their native language while they learn English.

What's the Score on English-Only?

Two years after California's 1998 referendum to eliminate bilingual education, a New York Times article reported that Spanish-speaking students in all-English classes were making "striking" progress, demonstrating that these classes were better than bilingual classes.

Angry bilingual education supporters denounced the article, saying it distorted state test results. Indeed, other newspaper reports drew very different conclusions from the same data.

So what really happened?

Studies from Stanford University and from Arizona State University show that scores on the California test jumped for all groups of students. Children placed in all-English classes did score higher, but so did children who stayed in bilingual classes.

The researchers suggested the higher scores could be due to the state's class size reduction program, or to teachers under pressure to "teach to the test," or both.

Under the law, students should receive a year of "structured English immersion" before being mainstreamed. During that year, teachers use simpler reading words, pictures, and other techniques to help children with a limited grasp of the language. A second year is allowed, but supporters of the law predicted that most children would become proficient in one year. The most recent state figures, however, show only 9 percent of English-language learners achieving proficiency per year.

Even before Proposition 227, just 29 percent of California's English-language learners were actually receiving bilingual education, in part because there weren't enough bilingual teachers.

After the new law took effect, the percentage of English learners in bilingual dropped to 12. It did not fall to zero because the law allows parents to get waivers and keep their children in bilingual classes.

The California referendum campaign was paid for by Silicon Valley multimillionaire Ronald Unz. The California Teachers Association opposed Proposition 227, but the organization is now trying to make it work. CTA created a program that has trained 7,000 teachers in structured English instruction.

For more:
Read the series on Proposition 227 in California Educator, the magazine of the California Teachers Association, at www.cta.org/cal_educator/v6i2/feature_fallout.html. Read the Stanford study at http://www.stanford.edu/~hakuta/SAT9/SAT9_2000/
analysis2000.htm and the Arizona State study at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n7/.

A Nation of Immigrants

Students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP)