11/9/04 — The Coachella Valley Unified School District is considering a lawsuit challenging the No Child Left Behind Act because the law requires schools to reach impossible goals with regard to English language learners.
District officials are negotiating with state lawmakers for legislative relief. If that doesn’t work out, they plan to seek partners to join in a lawsuit against the state and federal governments, says Superintendent Foch “Tut” Pensis. The district plans to approach the California Teachers Association, National Education Association, and the California Association for Bilingual Education.
According to Pensis, California’s rules on testing are more stringent than those in NCLB. California requires non-English-speaking students to be tested even if they have been in the country for less than a year, while NCLB allows states to exempt children from testing for up to three years while they are learning English.
Eighty percent of the students in Coachella Valley schools are English language learners (ELLs), and 20 percent are levels 1 or 2 ELLs, which means they do not speak English at all or have only very basic skills, Pensis says.
The district has the highest percentage of level 1 and 2 ELLs in the state.
That has hampered Coachella Valley’s ability to meet its NCLB targets. Nine of its 16 schools didn’t make adequate yearly progress (AYP) this year, and the district as a whole is expected to be identified as failing to make AYP.
Pensis notes that Saul Martinez Elementary School doubled its score on California’s Academic Performance Index but still failed to make AYP.
“We want to be held accountable,” Pensis says. “But no one can learn a language at an academic level in one year. It’s wrong.”
Coachella Valley is in an agricultural area south of Palm Springs, and one-third of the students are from migrant families, he says.
School board President Gloria Maldonado says it takes three or four years for a child to learn a language well enough to have the comprehension to pass a test in it.
To test a child in a language they don’t know “is not fair to the child,” Maldonado says. “It’s setting them up to fail.”
California has plans to develop tests in Spanish for second graders, but isn’t expected to begin that process until 2005. The California legislature approved a $3 million bill to create more tests in Spanish for all the elementary grades, but it was vetoed last month by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
While there has been much talk about lawsuits since NCLB was enacted in 2002, only one school district has so far filed a suit.
The Reading, Pa., school system filed suit last December, and one of its complaints involved the state’s failure to offer reading and math tests in Spanish. Sixty-four percent of Reading’s students are Hispanic, and 11 percent are ELLs.
A state appeals court ruled against Reading in August, and the district is appealing.
When concerns about NCLB first arose shortly after its passage, the NEA announced it was searching for a school district to join in a lawsuit against the law. NEA spokesperson Dan Kaufman says the union has since dropped the idea of a lawsuit because it couldn’t find a plaintiff. Districts were unwilling to sue because of “concerns over the reaction of the Education Department.”
Kaufman says the union would provide legal advice and information to the Coachella Valley school system if asked, but has not received a formal request to join a lawsuit.