Report claims NCLB fails struggling Asian-American pupils
Schools are failing to identify struggling Asian-American students under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and to get them the academic interventions they need, a report says. “Contrary to stereotypes that cast Asian-Americans as model students of academic achievement, many Asian-American students are struggling, failing, and dropping out of schools that ignore their needs,” says the report by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF). Because the 6-year-old federal law fails to adequately track the academic achievement of all Asian ethnic groups, the organization contends, schools don’t need to publish test-score data that would highlight of the struggles of some groups of Asian-American students, particularly those who are English-language learners. To combat those problems, it says, the law should require districts and schools to break down test scores by the ethnicity of Asian students and to expand the native-language testing of such students in districts with significant populations of certain ethnicities. Every state should be required to collect comprehensive data that are broken down by “ethnicity, native language, socioeconomic status, ELL status, and ELL program type,” it says. “That will show the different performance and experiences of different Asian-American populations,” Khin Mai Aung, a staff lawyer for AALDEF, said. The group does not recommend holding schools accountable for the performance of every Asian ethnicity, however. Instead, it proposes increasing ELL services to students in those ethnic subgroups based on their performance.“We’re very much against a testing-and-punish law,” said Brian Redondo, the program associate for educational equity at AADELF.
Source: Education Week, 5/14/08, By David J. Hoff
[Editor’s Note: The report, below, calls NCLB “an ambitious law with serious flaws” that “has held states, school districts, and individual schools to impossibly high standards,” and states that “Congress must either pass other effective education legislation or truly commit to resolving the fate of NCLB this year. Otherwise they will fail our country’s young people.” AALDEF also calls for states to be required to provide native language assessments for ELL students not only, as now, when 10% or more of the state’s student population speaks that language, but based on both an absolute numerical threshold and on high population ratios within individual school districts. California’s failure to provide native language assessments is the subject of a legal challenge brought by Coachella Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) and others. A trial court ruling in favor of the state is summarized at the second link, and the opening brief filed this month in CVUSD’s appeal is at the third. As reported in the detailed account at the last link, CVUSD faces the prospect of state intervention.]
AALDEF report
NSBA School Law pages on Coachella Valley Unified Sch. Dist. v. Calif.
CVUSD brief
Riverside Press-Enterprise, 4/15/08, By Shirin Parsavand