August 16, 2007 – Earlier this year, two reports emerged that put the challenges facing today’s educators into stark perspective.

One of these reports was “The Condition of Education 2007,” the federal Education Department’s annual account of the state of American schooling. Driven primarily by a huge influx of Hispanics, the report says, the nation’s population of minority students has swelled to 42 percent of public school enrollment–up from 22 percent three decades ago. This demographic transformation has been most pronounced in the West, where minority students have outnumbered whites since 2003.

But all areas of the country have seen an enormous growth in minority student enrollment in recent years–especially by Hispanics, who accounted for one out of five public school students in 2005, according to the feds. And many of these students are the children of immigrant parents, for whom English is a second language. The other report, from the Pew Hispanic Center, revealed that the growing number of students designated as English-language learners–those who speak little or no English–are far behind their English-speaking classmates.

Nearly half (46 percent) of fourth-grade students in the ELL category scored “below basic” proficiency (the lowest level) in mathematics in 2005. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) scored below basic in reading. Middle school achievement was even lower, with 71 percent of eighth-grade ELL students scoring below basic proficiency in math and 71 percent below basic in reading.

The study, called “How Far Behind in Math and Reading Are English Language Learners,” also showed that about 51 percent of eighth-grade ELL students are behind their white peers in reading and math, while in fourth grade, 35 percent of ELL students are behind in math and 47 percent are behind in reading when compared with their white counterparts.

While Congress continues to debate immigration reform, with no real end in sight, educators are left to grapple with how best to incorporate the children of immigrant parents into the U.S. school system.

Immigration reform is an on-again, off-again issue, and it’s “extremely polarizing,” according to David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association. “But in the classroom,” Sanchez says, “immigration is not an issue.”

That’s because U.S. schools are charged with the task of teaching all students, regardless of their status. For educators, the only question is: How can we help all students– including those with limited English proficiency– succeed?

And the challenge exists all across the country, in small Midwestern towns as well as in larger cities and in states such as Florida, California, and New Mexico.

“A few years ago, in a fairly small town in western Kansas, I was with a group of teachers and I asked what their biggest challenge was,” says Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). “It was [ELL instruction], because of migrant workers coming in to pick the crops.”

One issue of major concern to schools with a significant number of ELL students is testing. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), in its current form, requires that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, according to standards and testing programs developed individually by each state. Specific groups of students, such as ELL students, must meet proficiency standards as a group.

But getting ELL students up to speed and passing the exams is not simply a matter of good instruction. Alarge part of the problem is how ELL students are categorized under the law. Once an ELL student passes a test that measures language proficiency, that student is no longer considered in the ELL category; instead, he or she is grouped within the mainstream student population.

“What’s happening is, if a school does really well with English-language learners, it’s going to have to reclassify those students, so they’re not considered ELL,” explains Steve Holmes, director of school improvement projects for Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District. “If I’m a highly motivated student, and I end up passing the proficiency test in a year, schools are not getting credit for that. You’re never measuring the same student over time; you’re always working with a new group of students. The measurements [we're] using are faulty in the way they categorize students.”

When a school constantly has a brand-new group of ELL students, and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is based only on those new students’ results each year, and not on the results of students who have moved from ELL status into mainstream status, a school’s test scores might show that it’s not making AYP–even if that school is making terrific progress by any other measure.

When schools are identified as needing improvement for two straight years, they must allow students to attend their school of choice, which means they often end up losing students–and the funding that accompanies them– to other schools in the district. Schools that fail to show AYPfor three consecutive years have to offer supplemental educational services, and after four years, they become marked as needing corrective action, which could result in new staff and/or a new principal. After five years, “you have to restructure the whole school,” says Holmes. It’s clear to many educators that NCLB must be rewritten, and indeed the law is up for reauthorization this fall.

The National Education Association (NEA) is working to have the law changed and has issued recommendations for improving the legislation in three areas of priority: (1) Use more than test scores to measure student learning and school performance; (2) reduce class size to help students learn; and (3) provide financial incentives to teachers who teach in hard-to-staff schools.

The NEA also is calling for a change in how immigrant ELL students are assessed. For newly arrived immigrant ELL students, for whom native-language assessments in the required core content subjects are not available, the group wants lawmakers to extend the period of time before their test scores are included in a school’s AYP results from one to three years.

But while Congress struggles to reform immigration and NCLB, educators continue to go about their business, quietly educating children of all backgrounds. And for those who are most successful, technology is playing a key role.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools is the fourthlargest public school district in the United States, with between 350,000 and 360,000 students. From 1999 to 2002, the district went from receiving 14,500 new foreign-born students into its schools each year to receiving 18,500, according to Joanne Urrutia, administrative director of bilingual education for the county’s schools.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, that number began to drop as security was tightened. Currently, the district receives around 13,000 new immigrant students each year–though about 80 percent of its students at any given time were, at some point, English-language learners. Educating foreign-born students is not a new issue,

Urrutia points out. She says Miami-Dade has been dealing with this challenge for at least 40 years, beginning with the Cuban emigration in the ’60s. “It’s just the way it is,” she explains. “The city of Miami would not be what it is today without immigrants.”

So the district is well versed in educating non-English speakers. The most important thing schools can do, Urrutia says, is to have a process for identifying and assessing immigrant students as they enter the system, and then have a plan for addressing their unique learning needs. “You can’t assume that, just by osmosis, they’re going to learn,” she says.

Toward this end, Miami-Dade uses a mix of traditional support structures and cutting-edge technology to personalize instruction for each child.

When an immigrant student enters the Miami-Dade system, there is a process for registering, identification, assessment, and placement. The student is asked a series of questions. If the student indicates that either he or his parents speak another language at home, regardless of whether that student was born in the United States, an English-language proficiency evaluation is done. If the child is identified as an ELL student, he gets special funding and is given two hours of specialized instruction in English per day.

Each teacher who provides this instruction must have special credentials for teaching English as a second language. Eighty percent of the district’s elementary teachers go through this training, says Urrutia, because they know that, at some point, they will be assigned ELL students. Then, schools must make sure they have the support and instructional materials necessary for teachers, “because it is not an easy task. You don’t need to have bilingual education to be able to do it; you just need to have instruction that is geared toward second-language learners,” Urrutia says.

At Miami-Dade, technology is used in many ways to help teach ELL students. Qualifying schools with a high percentage of English-language learners submit a yearly request for materials to the Division of Bilingual Education and World Languages. After a review of their requests, the qualifying schools receive research-based software programs to supplement and enhance students’ acquisition of English-language skills.

For example, Miami-Dade is rolling out a program called TeenBiz for all its secondary schools. TeenBiz is a web-based application through which students receive daily passages on current events.

“The beauty of [the service] is that three kids can be receiving the same article on a current event, but one will be receiving it on a fifth-grade reading level, and one could be receiving it on an eighth-grade level,” says Urrutia, explaining how technology allows for the kind of personalized instruction that ELL students need. Other software-based programs used in Miami schools include the Waterford Early Reading Program, CompassLearning’s Odyssey ELL, Rosetta Stone, and Pearson Digital Learning’s ELLIS products.

If a Miami-Dade teacher does not speak a second language–”and we do have some in Miami, believe it or not,” Urrutia jokes–he or she might be assigned a resource teacher who is bilingual. The resource teacher joins the class to assist the teacher and can work with students on an individual basis.

“This is more common at the high school level,” Urrutia says. “If you have a kid who just got here last year, and he has to take biology and U.S. government, that’s a lot of work. Teachers have to make every effort to make teaching comprehensible, and they have to make every effort to make the grades based on mastery of the content, and not on the ability of the student to manifest it in English.” Another way Miami-Dade helps immigrant students is by using federal funds to contract with community services, such as mental health agencies, to assist children who might have experienced trauma before arriving in this country.

The district also has a parent outreach program. “We often find that the child gets acculturated fast, and the parents get left behind,” says Urrutia. To combat this trend, the district holds a series of events, offering the same seminar at a variety of different locations so anyone who wants to can attend. Teachers are hired on an hourly basis to teach the seminars at night, after school, and on Saturdays.

The Mesa Public Schools, in Arizona, is another district that helps its ELL students by reaching out extensively to parents. “We provide education to parents, giving them opportunities to understand the whole system,” says Irene Frklich, English-language acquisition director for the Mesa school system. “We discuss any number of topics, including health issues, how do you become familiar with the school system, how do you attend a parent- teacher conference. …”

District-wide, Mesa is working hard to train its teachers in the instruction of English-language learners, providing stipends to teachers for their continuing education. The most important aspect of this training, in Frklich’s eyes, is that teachers have a variety of strategies they can use for teaching ELL students. These might include smallgroup instruction, the use of visuals, and vocabulary development. “These are things that help all kids, but specifically they can help ELLs,” she says.

Mesa also encourages its teachers to visit Mexico for two weeks every summer. While the teachers must pay their own way, the visits are sanctioned by the school district and are led by Frklich.

The first year this policy was in place, Frklich brought the superintendent and school administrators on the trip. Now, she brings teachers and administrators. They stay with families in Cuernavaca and attend class from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. daily. From 2 p.m. until 4 p.m., they have individual tutoring. Attendees get three credit hours per trip. “We have about 52 different language groups” in the Mesa schools, Frklich says, including Chinese, Russian, and Somalian students. “I don’t go asking if they’re legal or illegal,” she says. “They come into the class, we teach them.”

Down the road from Mesa on Route 10 in Arizona, officials at the Tucson Unified School District believed it was essential for educators and administrators to pinpoint how students were progressing, both individually and as a whole. With that in mind, they created a sophisticated, in-house data management tool that allows them to measure students’ progress year to year, regardless of what school they are in. Users “can look at data and discrete measures that allow teachers to make educated decisions about what happens in their classrooms,” says Holmes. “If we see a trend district-wide, we can look at what we have to do to modify the curriculum.”

Teachers also can use the tool to make decisions about individual students, such as which students need to take ESL classes for a second year. “It allows them to [target their instruction] in a way that’s good for ELL students,” Holmes says.

The tool was created by the district’s accountability and research department, which has at least 10 programmers whose sole job is to create useful ways to slice and dice the data. “They take all information provided by state assessments and can look at it in different ways, such as just [the data for] Native Americans, or they can take a group of kids in fourth grade and see how they’re doing in fifth grade,” Holmes says.

At least two people are dedicated to looking at the data on ELL students alone. Users can look for the average scores of students functioning at a specific level of English-language ability, and they can see whether, based on a given student’s level of ability, that student’s test scores are where they should be.

If the information doesn’t exist in a form that a teacher wants, the accountability and research department will create a new profile. And, because this department is separate from the district’s IT department and is devoted simply to analyzing information, Holmes explained, the data can be pulled in a timely manner. “The reason we have that level of staffing is because we want [the department] to be responsive to individual site needs,” he said.

When schools receive students from all areas of the world–one school in Princeton, N.J., had students speaking 80 languages when AASA’s Houston was there– there are, obviously, numerous challenges to teaching them all. But Houston says he sees enormous creativity happening in schools across the country.

Native-born students in the Princeton school that Houston cited, for example, are sometimes teamed with students who arrive from another country. One student might be partnered with the new student to help him learn playground words, while another student teaches the newcomer classroom words, and a third, cafeteria words. That way, students teach–and learn–about not just the English language, but also the social aspects of school. In yet another Arizona district, Houston says, students are enrolled in a “welcome center,” where they receive a sort of “basic training” on how to survive in the classroom before they are sent to community schools. They get a crash course in English, along with instruction on basic social skills.

“We got children in at, say, 16 years old from Mexico or Central America who not only didn’t speak English but had never been to school,” says Houston, noting that some of these students had never even been around indoor bathrooms. The welcome center allows the district to teach large groups of students at once, rather than parceling them out to teachers one by one.

Miami-Dade’s Urrutia suggests that, if school leaders don’t have expertise in teaching English as a second language, they should contact a large city school district– such as Miami, New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago– that has experience with English-language learners. “You’ll get plenty of help,” she says, explaining that Miami-Dade gets constant visitors and is always sharing its expertise with other districts.

Urrutia proudly mentions that one of the district’s schools, which has a student population that is 95 percent Hispanic, has made AYP for the last couple of years. “It can be done, with a lot of hard work, targeted programs, and a lot of training,” she concludes.

LINKS:

“The Condition of Education 2007″

Pew Hispanic Center

“How Far Behind in Math and Reading are English Language Learners?”

American Association of School Administrators

National Education Association (NEA)

NEA’s “ELL Web Technology Resource List”

Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Mesa Public Schools

Tucson Unified School District

TeenBiz3000

Waterford Early Reading Program

CompassLearning Inc.

Rosetta Stone

Pearson Digital Learning