[Grovenet] Federal Court Ruling Prods Texas on ELLs

Wed Jul 30 10:32:09 PDT 2008

Ebonics.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vickie Madeoneup" <whatsupy2k at yahoo.com>
To: "Forest Grove local interests list" <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Grovenet] Federal Court Ruling Prods Texas on ELLs

which language would be the second language? would there be a variety of 
choices?

Vickie

--- On Wed, 7/30/08, Bob Browning <rab at jurislex.com> wrote:
From: Bob Browning <rab at jurislex.com>
Subject: [Grovenet] Federal Court Ruling Prods Texas on ELLs
To: "Grovenet" <grovenet at rdrop.com>
Date: Wednesday, July 30, 2008, 10:07 AM

Here's some
information which should be taken into account when we vote in November
on an initiative relating to English as a second language in schools.
Maybe we should attempt to make all of our students bi-lingual like
they do in Europe. (Oops!! I guess that brands me as an intellectual
elite, one of the most invidious classes under the current talk-radio
standards!!)

bob "oh, boy, here we go again!!" browning

****************************************************

Published Online: July 29, 2008
Federal Court Ruling Prods Texas on ELLs
 By Mary Ann
Zehr
Texas officials say that they are likely
to appeal a federal court order telling the state it must, by the
2009-10 school year, revamp programs for English-language learners in
grades 7-12 and improve monitoring of programs for ELLs in all grades.
But the July 25 order in the long-running case of U.S. v. Texas
has drawn praise from ELL advocates, who hope it will spur improvement
of the quality of education for English-language learners in middle and
high schools across the nation.
The ruling “will end up
forcing the state to address an often-ignored problem in education, and
that is the quality of education for English-language learners at the
secondary level,” said David Hinojosa, a staff attorney for the Mexican
American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and a lawyer for the
plaintiff organizations.
In his
decision last week, U.S. Senior District Judge
William Wayne Justice reversed a
ruling he issued in July 2007 that Texas was
complying with federal law in how it educated ELLs.
This
time, Judge Justice concluded that secondary education programs for
ELLs violate the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.
He gave the state until Jan. 31 to devise a plan to revamp secondary
education programs and the monitoring system for all grades.
The
judge reversed his earlier decision after taking a closer look at
achievement levels of secondary school ELLs at the request of the
plaintiffs, their lawyers say.

In response to the ruling, the Texas Education Agency on July 28
sent a two-sentence statement to Education Week
stating: “We’re disappointed that Judge Justice reversed the original
order he issued in this case a year ago. We’re continuing to study this
latest ruling, but it is likely that we will ask the attorney general
to appeal it.”
Long-Running Dispute
Judge
Justice, who is in his late 80s, is the same judge who decided in a
landmark case that undocumented students have the right to a free K-12
education, a ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in its 1982
decision in Plyler v. Doe.
The judge’s
95-page opinion from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of Texas of Tyler, Texas, last week came in response to a motion filed
by two Hispanic civil rights organizations in 2006 that sought relief
for ELLs under the federal court’s continuing jurisdiction of the U.S.
v. Texas case, which began in 1970.
The
judge had harsh criticism for the quality of the state’s ELL services,
saying: “After a quarter century of sputtering implementation,
defendants have failed to achieve results that demonstrate they are
overcoming language barriers for secondary [limited-English-proficient]
students.”
Judge Justice wrote that because secondary ELLs
are doing so poorly in school according to a number of
measures—including their scores on state tests and retention
rates—Texas must revamp how schools instruct such students.

See Also
For more discussion on this topic, read Learning
the Language, edweek.org's blog on English-language learners.

The judge doesn’t prescribe a solution, but he
points to how bilingual education seems to have been promising at the
elementary school level.
Since 1981, Texas has required
bilingual education in kindergarten through 6th grade in school
districts with 20 or more ELLs in a grade. In the 2005-06 school year,
the ruling says, 376,170 ELLs in all grades were in bilingual
education, compared with 280,324 in English-as-a-second language
programs.
The ruling says that almost all of the 140,000
English-learners in grades 7-12 receive ESL instruction instead of
bilingual instruction. The judge concludes that the degree of
limited-English-proficient students in secondary schools “further
indicates that the change from bilingual education to ESL education
[between the elementary and secondary levels] is the primary culprit.”
But
he also says that one option for Texas may be to continue with “a
variation of the current ESL program with substantially enhanced
remedial education.”
Advocates Pleased
The
lawyers representing the two organizations which filed the 2006
motion—the GI Forum and the League of United Latin American
Citizens—hope the ruling will have an impact well beyond Texas.
The
ruling sends the message to education officials in Texas and elsewhere
that the requirement of federal law “is that these kids ... have to do
as well as native-English speakers ultimately,” said Roger L. Rice, a
lawyer and the executive director of the Somerville, Mass.-based
Multicultural Education, Training, and Advocacy. “It’s not enough that
you are making a little progress but most are dropping out. It’s not
enough to have a minimal closing of gaps but there are still huge gaps.”
Mr.
Hinojosa said the state argued “that these students have just arrived
here, they’ve only been here a couple of years so, of course, they
aren’t going to be doing well.”
Such an argument is “an
excuse, not a reason” why ELLs in middle and high schools are failing,
he said. He noted that 87 percent of ELLs in Texas have attended U.S.
schools for three or more years, a statistic also cited by Judge
Justice in his opinion.
Russell W. Rumberger, the director
of the Linguistic Minority Research Institute at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, said that his examination of performance of
ELLs on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, backs the
judge’s conclusion that such students are doing much better at the
elementary school level than at the secondary level in Texas.
In
4th-grade reading and mathematics, Texas ELLs scored higher than the
national average on NAEP, and the state had a smaller achievement gap
than average between ELLs and non-ELLs, he said.
But he
added, “In grade 8, English-language-learner achievement [in Texas] is
below the national average and the achievement gap is larger than the
national average.”
Researchers Weigh In
Diane
August, the co-editor of a report of the National Literacy Panel on
Language-Minority Children and Youth, said that while only a handful of
studies focus on developing literacy among English-language learners at
the secondary level, two of those studies, in fact, favor bilingual
education over English-only methods at that level.
She
surmises that middle and high school ELLs aren’t doing well in Texas
because they don’t have the background knowledge or understanding of
academic English, the language used in school as opposed to the
playground, to do well at the higher grades.
“You look at
states like Texas where their focus has been entirely on reading and
math to the exclusion of giving students access to content, and you
have problems,” she said.
Deborah Short, a researcher with
the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, said her advice to
Texas officials would be to analyze state data to find middle or high
schools that are doing a good job with ELLs and disseminate those
approaches.
“There are pockets [of success] here and
there, but I don’t think we have any state models that have the
evidence that they have been successful for students in the long term,”
she said.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs said they are not
calling for Texas to switch to bilingual education at the secondary
level. Texas is already having difficulty finding enough certified
bilingual teachers to staff programs at the elementary school level,
Mr. Hinojosa noted.
He said one option for the state might
be to give substantive training to all teachers who serve ELLs on the
secondary level in how to work with such students.
“There
are methods other than putting students in a 45-minute English lab and
then putting them in the [mainstream] classroom for the rest of the
day,” he said.
Vol. 27,
Issue 45

Related Stories

   “States
Struggle to Meet Achievement Standards for ELLs,” July 16, 2008.
   “States
Lag in ELL Curriculum Guidance,” July
5, 2007.
   “Proposed
ELL Guidelines Criticized as Too Rigid,” June 11, 2008.
   “NAEP
Scores in States That Cut Bilingual Ed. Fuel Concern on ELLs,” May 14, 2008.
  See other stories on education issues in Texas.
    See data on Texas'
public school system.

© 2008 Editorial
Projects in Education

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