02/24/04 -- School boards across the nation are concerned about meeting the accountability requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act for students whose native language is not English, and a group of Virginia districts has formed a coalition to push for changes.
The difficulty of ensuring that limited English proficiency (LEP) children -- also known as English language learners (ELL) -- reach proficient levels on state assessments has been a key factor in contributing to hundreds of Virginia schools failing to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under NCLB.
NCLB requires all subgroups of students to reach proficiency in language arts and mathematics by 2014. That goal is particularly challenging for the ELL subgroup, because once these students reach proficiency, they leave the group.
As School Board News went to press Feb. 19, the U.S. Education Department was preparing to issue regulations on the NCLB accountability provisions for ELL students.
Growing population
Virginia's ELL student population has nearly doubled from just over 30,000 in 1999 to 60,000 in 2003, says school board member Allen C. Griffith of the city of Fairfax. Griffith and other members of the Virginia School Boards Association's Limited English Proficiency Coalition spoke about their concerns at NSBA's Federal Relations Network Conference Feb. 2.
The other founding members of the coalition are the school boards of Arlington, Alexandria, Manassas, Fairfax County, Prince William County, and Harrisonburg.
While much of the growth in ELL students is occurring in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, other areas of Virginia are affected as well.
The Harrisonburg school district, in the Shenandoah Valley, has an ELL population of 31 percent, which is comparable to that of the suburban districts of Alexandria with 24.4 percent, Arlington (36 percent), and Manassas (20.3 percent).
Subgroup keeps changing
A recent policy brief by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains why the NCLB accountability requirements are so challenging for ELL students:
• Historically, ELL students have lower performance and slow rates of improvement, compared to other students.
• Students with poor English skills tend to do less well on tests, which raises doubts about the accuracy of the test as a "measure of ELL content knowledge," CRESST reports. For ELL students, tests measure language ability, as well as achievement.
• The ELL subgroup is constantly changing. Once high-performing ELL students are redesignated as English language proficient, they are removed from the ELL subgroup. At the same time, new low-performing ELL students enter the subgroup.
According to CRESST, "A continuous increase of low-achieving ELL students, even if all other factors remain constant, will make it more difficult to achieve AYP for both the ELL subgroup and the overall student population."
• There are substantial factors affecting achievement of ELL students that are outside a school's control. Non-school factors, such as parents' education levels and socioeconomic status, "outweigh school factors in their effects on student achievement," the brief states.
The NCLB goal that all subgroups reach 100 percent proficiency in English language arts is basically contradictory for ELLs. "If ELL students were proficient in English language arts, they would not be ELL students in the first place," CRESST says. "Indeed, if NCLB goals were attained, the ELL subgroup would cease to exist."
Services are costly
Mary Hughes Hynes, a member of the Arlington school board, says all five of the district's middle schools and 10 of its 21 elementary schools failed to make AYP this year. Test scores for ELL students were a major factor, along with test scores for students with disabilities and failure to meet the required 95 percent threshold for test participation.
Forty percent of Arlington's 19,000 students are learning English as a second language, says Superintendent Robert G. Smith. Although 80 languages are spoken by Arlington students, 70 percent of ELL students are native Spanish speakers. Most of them are from El Salvador or Bolivia.
Arlington offers a range of services to ELL students, including pull-out instruction, social studies and science classes taught in Spanish, and dual immersion programs with native English speakers who want to learn Spanish.
A significant number of ELL students are also counted in the subgroup for poor students and some are also counted in the students with disabilities subgroup, Hynes says.
Meanwhile, "the bar is constantly rising under NCLB," Hynes says. This year, 61 percent of students in each subgroup must be proficient for a school to make AYP, while in 2005 it will rise to 71 percent.
It's a "very challenging task," Hynes says, and it's adding to districts' costs. She says it costs $29 per LEP student for the annual English proficiency exam. The state of Virginia promised to pay this year, but after that, local districts will have to pay.
Overall, the additional cost per-ELL pupil among caucus members ranges from $938 in Manassas to $3,820 in Arlington. The additional costs are for teachers, aides, translators, professional development, curriculum specialists, and instructional materials, as well as testing materials.
Hard for small districts
Educating ELLs is even more challenging for small districts, says Cathy Slusher, a school board member in Harrisonburg, which has a total enrollment of 4,000.
More than a third of ELL students in her district are Level 1, which means they are the least proficient in English and need the most services.
ELL students in Levels 2, 3, and 4 still need services, but most of the resources are exhausted with the Level 1 children, Slusher says.
According to Slusher, small districts don't have the large central office staff to write curriculum and provide translators. There are 38 languages spoken in Harrisonburg schools, and schools are expected to provide translated copies of all memos and handouts to parents, as well as educational material for students.
According to Griffith, the caucus recommends that ELL students be counted in only one subgroup. And, he says, if states require school districts to use a specific language proficiency assessment, states should provide 100 percent of the funding to pay for the required assessments.
The caucus also recommends that states should be allowed to develop alternate assessments that are more appropriate for ELL students to meet the NCLB reading and math assessment requirements. In addition, the caucus urges that NCLB be fully funded.