English-learners show advances on state exam
Kate Folmar
Two years after voters all but banished bilingual education, students who speak little or no English scored better on the state's high-stakes standardized test, but the improvement was most dramatic in lower elementary grades and mathematics. The increases garnered by the one in four California pupils who are still learning English paralleled those of their fluent peers, but the marks mostly hovered in the bottom third nationwide. Their release reignited the debate over whether immigrant children learn best when immersed in English. In Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, so-called ``English-learners'' outscored their peers statewide in reading across all grades by a few percentile points on the Stanford 9 exam -- a basic skills test administered to about 4.3 million California students this spring. In San Benito, Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, they dropped well below state averages in most grades. San Francisco Unified does not test students unless they have been studying English at least three years. The detailed Stanford 9 scores, made public today at http://star.cde.ca.gov, flesh out the overall results released last month by the California Department of Education. The newer data reveals the performance of students by language ability, socioeconomic status, gender and special education status. Gov. Gray Davis' interim education secretary, John B. Mockler, attributed the gains to a number of multimillion-dollar education reforms, from paring class sizes in primary grades to holding schools accountable for improving student performance and giving teachers incentives to work in disadvantaged areas. By law, California students in grades two through 11 must take the English-language exam. The scores are the lynchpin of California's new school accountability system. Schools that reach certain targets for academic growth can earn cash awards, while those that miss the mark may be subject to state sanctions. Although Santa Clara County English-learners ranked in the bottom third nationally on the test in reading, they scored better in mathematics, a subject that's less dependent on language skills. By definition, the national average is the 50th percentile, with half the students in a pool of test-takers scoring above that line, and half falling below. ``The good news, of course, is that Santa Clara County students who are proficient in English continue to score at or above the state average in all subjects and grades,'' said Colleen B. Wilcox, county superintendent of schools. She added that ``English-learners, as a collective group, continue to score at or above the state average.'' The average score in Evergreen School District, which educates immigrant children from Mexico, Vietnam, India, China and the Philippines, ranged from the 30th to the 70th percentiles in the lower grades and the 30th and 40th percentiles in seventh- and eighth-grades. In the Alum Rock Union School District, which serves some of the county's poorest, mainly Latino immigrant children, scores edged upward but stayed mainly in the 16th through 40th percentiles. In San Jose Unified, the only district in the state that's court-ordered to offer bilingual education, standardized test scores nudged upward or held steady in reading and generally improved in math, language and spelling. Still, most marks were in the bottom third. The Mercury News looked at schools where at least half of the students were classified as limited-English speakers. Among those, San Jose had some pockets of phenomenal growth, including Horace Mann Elementary School, where second-grade reading scores jumped from the 18th to the 35th percentile thanks to an intensive reading program, after-school and extended-day learning opportunities for struggling students, a daily hour of English-language development for students and evening English classes for parents. ``We can't change the circumstances the children come to school with,'' said Principal Adam Escoto, ``but we can and should change the circumstances by which we teach and support them.'' Two years ago, East Palo Alto's Green Oaks Academy was the lowest-scoring school -- with marks in the single digits -- in one of the area's lowest-scoring districts. This year's limited-English-speaking second-graders bested the national average in reading and math. Principal Lorna Manning attributed the gains to a back-to-basics teaching approach and the dedication of a young staff. The new teachers have been hired with one requirement, Manning said: ``They all had to believe that children in impoverished areas could succeed as much as middle-class students.'' Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz, father of 1998's anti-bilingual education Proposition 227, trumpeted the results as proof that teaching students in English from Day One is best. Rather than dropping as critics predicted during the Proposition 227 campaign, he said, test scores have made ``a gigantic rise.'' Bilingual education experts, though, said it will take years to detect whether initial gains are lasting or whether bilingual students come out ahead in the long run. ``As far as I'm concerned, you can't attribute any of the changes to 227, because such a small number of kids changed programs because of it,'' said Russell Rumberger, an education professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara and director of the UC system's Language Minority Research Institute. ``The majority of kids were in English-only before, and a majority were afterward.'' ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Mercury News Staff Writer Sara Neufeld contributed to this report. |