Lawsuit demands that students be tested in their native language

[question everything]

Thursday, June 2, 2005

Lawsuit demands that students be tested in their native language

By: LOUISE ESOLA - Staff Writer

SAN FRANCISCO ---- Ten school districts statewide and three nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit against the state Wednesday for allegedly testing non-English-speaking students in English and then labeling them and their schools as "failing" under the state's implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The lawsuit, filed in federal Superior Court in San Francisco, demands that the state test its 1.6 million non-English-speaking students in a "language and form" they understand, as mandated in the federal education reform law.

The lawsuit is asking the state to change the way it tests students who do not yet understand English, said Mary Hernandez, an attorney with the Southern California-based law firm Burke, Williams & Sorensen, lawyers for the plaintiffs.

"We are asking that the state comply with federal law by testing students in the language and the form that will most likely yield accurate results on what they know and what they've learned," Hernandez said during a telephone press conference out of Los Angeles on Wednesday.

More..

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/06/02/news/state/10_11_426_1_05.txt

Contact staff writer Louise Esola at [phone] or [e-mail].

[pnb]

1. Maybe I'm missing something

But isn't the English language one of the things being taught?

Or are the districts just lowering standards to make it easier to comply with federal regulations?

[MountainLaurel]

3. The deal is

Research has shown that students have to be learning English for at least five years before they understand the language well enough to be equivalent to native-born students in any content area. So a kid who's only been learning English for a year won't understand a standardized exam in math or social studies that is written in English well enough to properly evaluate their content-area knowledge. Whereas creating a test in the language they do know is a better evaluator.

[cap]

6. you are missing something

you need to test English for non-native speaking students as ESL and not the standard English as everyone else. These ESL scores need to be normed in accordance with the amount of time that someone has been in this country. Also, for students who do not have near-native proficiency in English, their profiency in other subjects needs to be tested in their native language. Otherwise you cant tell whether they dont understand the subject or they dont have the English vocabulary to deal with the material.

Try going overseas and studying in a foreign country, you will be a lot more understanding of people who are working in a second langauge.

I dont support bilingual education except for special cases. I believe in English immersion but with after school tutoring in the native language.

[Maestro]

21. You seem to sympathize with the ELL's but your statement that

English immersion is better is completely off-base. Please point me to research that supports English immersion. Meanwhile here is a ton of info that supports bilingual education in teaching English. And if you support after school native language tutoring then you must believe in bilingual education unless you have some hang-up with the fact that some children need to learn cognitive academic skills in the native language to be able appropriately apply them in the second language.

http://www.irvingisd.net/~spollard/research.htm

And here is an op-ed I wrote.

The Results: Bilingual Education Means Better English



If only that were what polls tell us about bilingual education. To believe most polls would be to believe that bilingual education is more reviled than most aspects of American life and it certainly doesn’t mean better English. There are some exceptions such as a poll done in Texas by the Office of Survey Research at the University of Texas in June, 1998, that shows that 72% of the respondents find bilingual education an important part of the academic process for some students. With the exception of these precious few, do polls really show such aversion for bilingual education or do the polls strike another chord with the respondent? I must side with the latter. Allow me to explain.

What most polls on bilingual education actually show is the overriding support that English has in the United States. The polls show that English is considered to be the language of the land. The respondents believe that English is exceedingly important in order for anyone to be successful in an academic as well as in a commercial setting. I agree with this. In fact, there is no bilingual educator or bilingual supporter that would not agree with this also. The anti-bilingual movement knows this and it uses these strong feelings for the English language to gain a political and cultural advantage.

Many groups, including the English Only movement, manipulate their questions to solicit the response they desire. David Moore, vice president of the Gallup Poll states in Media Beat magazine, “Slight differences in question wording, or in the placement of the questions in the interview, can have profound consequences…” He goes on to say that the poll findings “…are very much influenced by the polling process itself.” In fact, author Herbert Schiller in the same article says that opinion polling is “a choice-restriciting mechanism.” I concur. The English Only movement knows that a question that seems to pit English against Spanish will always cause a response in favor of English and mistakenly against bilingual education.

The organization, Public Agenda, polls respondents on a variety of issues and it recognizes that sometimes the results may be less than reliable. The guidelines for recognizing a possibly flawed poll are:

* Results change when survey questions are reworded slightly

* Results change when implications or trade-offs of a policy are pointed out.

* Results may be misleading if reported in isolation or out of context

* Other research suggests that people have incomplete or inaccurate knowledge in this area.

These guidelines could apply to just about every poll that I have seen on bilingual education especially the last guideline. Public Agenda didn’t follow its own guidelines when it solicited the opinion of the public as to in which language immigrants should be taught. The question read in part, “…public schools should teach immigrants in their native language only until they know enough English to join regular classes…” First the majority of respondents know nothing of bilingual education, see the fourth guideline. Secondly, this statement is misleading. The word, only, leads some to believe that children are taught exclusively in the native language until they learn English. No, this is not true. English is taught on a daily basis. We teach in the native language to make input in English comprehensible. This statement might be flawed but I don’t think that Public Agenda set out to mislead the public. However, some organizations will take these polls to mean that there is ground-swelling support for the abolition of bilingual education when, in reality, people are giving their opinion on a subject of which they know next to nothing. In the case of bilingual education, the respondents will most consistently vote on the side of English with that language being the most familiar to them.

In truth, there are no sides. Bilingual education is on the side of English. We bilingual teachers sometimes refer to bilingual education as B.E. It is most fitting that it could also stand for, Better English because bilingual education does give a child the opportunity to communicate with more comprehension and function with higher degrees of success academically in English and as a great secondary benefit, the child can do the same in Spanish! Much of the United States has to become more cognizant of what bilingual education is or perhaps more importantly what it is not.

The truth is out there, but it is not in the polls. Talk to bilingual teachers, visit classrooms, go to libraries and do the research if you are so inclined, but don’t let polls form your opinion. Formulate one on your own and I think that you will see that bilingual education is not what many think it is. It is the best way to teach a child English while still giving that child an opportunity to be successful in the classroom. As a country, we need to ask ourselves if we want to teach some children to speak English or to teach children to speak English and then know what to do with it. Bilingual education, since it maintains and develops literacy, affords the child the luxury of knowing what to do with his second language. Too many respondents in polls do not realize this and with the simple answer of yes or no in a poll, one more child loses the opportunity to learn how to learn.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

7. Yes you are missing something. Inability to master English does not

equate to STUPID.

[K-W]

11. Only the obvious.

If you test someone who doesnt know english in english, every section of the test becomes an english exam on top of whatever the test is actually covering. Would you ask an english speaking student who is taking french to take all of thier tests for all of thier classes in french?

[MrSlayer]

24. That's a great point.

Foriegn born students should be given some leeway.

[dsc]

13. I just got done giving retakes of our Geometry end of course tests

to five students. Of the five, the one who knew the most geometry was a Hispanic student who spoke very mediocre English. He got the third best score. He simply lacked the English skill to read the questions. I speak a limited amount of Spanish and have majored in math. If you gave me say the SAT math section in Spanish I would have major problems getting a good score despite the fact I would almost certainly get a 800 on it in English. You not only have to know commonly used words but also technical ones such as tetrahedron, rectangular prism, converse, inverse, contrapositive, and serveral other terms.

[MountainLaurel]

2. This is gonna be interesting

In our county, despite the fact that ESL students are supposed to be exempt from testing for two years to give them time to learn English, some schools have been giving them the tests anyway because they're penalized for having too many students who don't take the test for whatever reason. At the school where my friend taught, they were giving the test to students who literally arrived in the U.S. the week before, with basic instructions about filling in those precious bubbles.

If 95 percent of students have to be tested, even though 40 percent of students are technically exempt for ESL or special ed, something has to give.

:popcorn:

[slackmaster]

4. Daqmey pat naghmey beQ ghommey mem!!!

I demand to be tested in Klingon!

[TygrBright]

5. Media Bias in Headlines

Crummy, crummy headline.

The issue here is not "what language are students tested in" it is "what is the purpose of the testing and what is done with the results?"

It is entirely reasonable to test ESL students in English for a good many purposes, but the way this headline is written seems designed to enflame the whole "liberals demand everybody pander to furriners who don't wanna learn English" debate all over again.

The issue is not "furriners should have to learn English to get along in 'murica" (there is a certain pragmatic merit in that position that is undeniable, and liberals who ignore it simply add to the neanderthals' sense of vindication.) The issue is "Under No Child Left Behind, schools have no viable options for testing and reporting on the academic progress of non-English speaking students."

But you wouldn't know that from the headline.

disgustedly,
Bright

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

8. Thankyou!

[pie]

9. Thank you for clearing that up.

[Igel]

10. Now isn't this a recipe for disaster.

I have no problems with testing kids for ESL. I have problems with a blanket stipulation that kids be tested in whatever language they feel proficient in.

If the choice is Spanish or English, I can live with it. Spanish, English, Mandarin, ok. After a few languages, it becomes unbearable.

Test development for districts where 20 or 30 languages are spoken, normed so that they yield comparable results? Or do we do it nationwide, with a couple of hundred languages being spoken?

And what do you do with Central American immigrants speaking languages that have nearly no written tradition?

Or with the speakers of some language with fairly wide range of acceptable dialectal variation? Or where the standard "literary" language is different enough from the local spoken variety that kids not raised to read, write, and speak the standard language have difficulty? (Arabic, and to some extent Czech, for example.)

Consideration of the lunacy of what they're asking for makes the court case sound as unreasonable as it actually is. Either those bringing the case are idiots, or just using the system for another purpose. I think it's the latter.

[K-W]

12. So you think we should just screw the minority to save us trouble?

How democratic of you.

If the government thinks it needs to test every child in America, it can do it in a fair way. The ends of efficient testing do not justify the means of marginalizing minority languages only partially because it renders the tests completely invalid.

[Sabriel]

15. That's their point, I'd say

The lawsuit points out the absurdity of holding schools accountable for students who are making every effort to learn English...placing them on the same level as native-born, middle-class English speakers. Either NCLB reworks itself, or bring on the lawsuits.

This is an educational movement that punishes the very schools that work with the neediest students. Something's gotta give, so why shouldn't it be NCLB, instead of human beings?

[K-W]

17. NCLB is designed to fail schools to justify major funding cuts.

Just like these people want SS gone, they want the Department of Education gone.

[msongs]

27. and kill the teachers' unions as well...like arnold

[Nevernose]

22. 180 languages are spoken in my school district (n/t)

[KaliTracy]

25. I think the underlying point is that it WOULD be impossible to do --

English only tests costs districts a lot of money (especially districts that do "off-grade" testing, too). I think this lawsuit is a way to talk about the legality of "No Child Left Behind," and the types of assessment this program is calling for to prove proficiency.





http://stophighstakestests.org

[lynne]

14. Just curious -

- but what language is the class in question being taught in? If a student is taking a class that is being taught by an English speaking teacher, shouldn't they take the test in English?

The next logical step is that we will be required to provide teachers that are either bilingual or have an interpreter for each language spoken within the classroom available.

Seems to me that it would be more beneficial all way around for the student to become proficient in English prior to testing.

[dsc]

16. They do take the class in English but often have the help of

students who speak English better than they do. I always let my Hispanic students sit in a group and the ones who are strongest in English help translate what I am teaching to those who are weak. I also give Spanish language worksheets when possible. But that can't be done on the standardized test. I think it should be. The question is do the know the subject area (in my case geometry) not do they know English.

[K-W]

18. With a teacher students can ask for clarification.

If they dont understand the test question they cant answer it, even if they actually know the answer.

"Seems to me that it would be more beneficial all way around for the student to become proficient in English prior to testing."

Well, Duh. If there were no students with english defficiencies we wouldnt have this problem, but we do have this problem, and if the US wants to test students they have to do it fairly. There is no next logical step, this isnt some slippery slope. If the government wants to test, it has to test accurately and fairly, if it doesnt want to do that, it doesnt have to test.

[KaliTracy]

26. the problem is that there is no waiting period before they take a test, if

they arrive in the district, and the child happens to be in a grade level in which a High Stakes Test is given, there is NOT an exemption given -- they just have to take the test, whether or not they have been in the school district a day or a year.

Our district (when I taught) happened to have a high transiency rate -- and many times students would be in 2 or 3 schools the same year they came to our school, and they had to take the test in our school if they were enrolled. Not just ESL kids. Imagine not knowing where you are going to end up in the next month, (or even the next night) Aunt Jane's or the Shelter, or the car, and then imagine being told that the test you are going to take for the next Week is Really, Really important. Only thing is, you didn't eat dinner the night before, and don't really remember which triangle is the Isosceles.

Assessment is not a bad thing in itself, but when it is used to judge children, on one test score, it is an inappropriate use of testing. I don't know of many child-centered educational or psychological groups which endorse High-Stakes-Tests (though do know of over 50 who do not endorse their use.


http://stophighstakestests.org

[kineneb]

19. This would make a great difference in final scores

Yes, students should learn the dominant language. But, putting the shoe on the other foot...you are 10 and your parents move to Foreign Country X. You are placed in a local school, without prior knowledge of the language. Just how well do you think you would score on a standardized test if you were barely proficent in the language? Never mind you are bright and understand math and science, the language barrier is tremendous. And remember, your parents are also learning the language, so they can't help you much. And they speak the old language at home.

Sit down and try to read an article in a language with which you are not familar.

[Dora]

20. Yet another reason why testing is going to kill our schools

Many lucid responses here, it gives me hope.

I wish all our schools would just boycott NCLB and get the guts to drop all "standardized" tests because they're nothing but moneymakers for a corrupt corporation and a means to a wicked end: the demise of our public schools.

I'm a teacher's kid. Worked in a teacher-focused non-profit org for many years. Mom's now teaching elem. ed at the university level, my stepdad taught in the same program for 35 years before retirement, and my stepmom teaches 5th grade.

Not a single one of them would question my decision to homeschool. That's how bad things are. Vouchers, testing, budget cuts, and corporate influence are all progressively weakening our schools. Add to the mix some overworked and uninterested parents, hungry and attention-needing children, and burntout teachers - it's a surefire recipe for failure.

[Maestro]

23. I totally support this suit.

Children who are learning English should be assessed with modified English tests that do not add to the aggregate scores of the school until such time that the student can be shown to be working at the same academic level as native speakers. This unfortunately takes many years. The "sponge" argument for children holds true for conversational language; not academic. There are a variety of ways to teach the academic aspects of the second language. Bilingual education uses the native language to strengthen these skills and then make the necessary connections to the English language. Quality ESL programs provide sheltered instruction for a number of years until such time that the child is academically fluent; not just conversationally fluent. The lunacy of NCLB gives ELL's precious little time to achieve this academic fluency and being set up to fail, period.