What Happened at Ninth Street Elementary? Wayne Bishop
Part of the support for Proposition 227, the English for the Children Initiative, was the fact more than 80 children associated with Las Familias del Pueblo in Los Angeles were at the center of a historic boycott against primary instruction in Spanish at Ninth Street Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The school became synonymous with Latino frustration that schools were not developing the competence in English needed for educational advancement. One of the best known spokesmen for the form of bilingual education that had evolved prior to the overwhelming passage of Proposition 227 is Stephen Krashen, an education professor at the University of Southern California. He recently posted a message titled "What Happened at Ninth Street Elementary?" to a national education e-mail listserve, the gossip mechanism of our era, in which he argued that little had changed. Krashen pointed out the school's redesignation (to proficient English) rate is still abysmal, below 3 percent. The fact is, the test LAUSD uses -- the Criterion for Assessment of Reading in English, known by its acronym CARE -- is simply too difficult for its intended purpose. It is a test, in English, that requires a level of competence at least a third of native-English speakers in LAUSD at these grade levels would fail. Because of this exam, Latino children have been locked into substandard academic classes for years. The SAT-9 results for 1998-2000 for Ninth Street Elementary give a very different perspective. Some numbers did go down from 1998 to 1999, but only because of the dramatic increase in the number of students being tested. One year later, they are back up again but with more than three times as many second-graders involved. Only 22 second-graders were tested in English in 1998 vs. 74 in 2000 (essentially all), which makes the apparently flat performance from 23 to 24 NPR (National Percentile Ranking) look very different. The Open Court reading program is only now getting a good start, so expect next year's average score to rise as well. To get an assumption of a bit more stable population, last year's 50 second-graders tested at the 12th percentile and they are most of this year's 60 third-graders at the 25th. My particular interest is mathematics education, and the progress in mathematics is easier to document -- since nearly all second-graders took the SAT-9 mathematics test in '98, with 63 tested scoring at the 17th percentile. Last year in third grade, the 71 students tested were at the 27th and this year's 66 fourth-grade students tested were at the 46th -- stable solid progress. The last grade of the school is fifth, and the rise in 5th-grade mathematics performance over these two years is impressive. With most students tested each year: Year Average Percent above the NPR bottom quartile 1998 21 34 1999 35 60 2000 43 72 Since normal expectation would be 50 NPR and 75 percent above the bottom quartile, these fifth-grade students are now competitive as they go off to middle school. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it progress? Amazingly so. These numbers are now 8 points above the LAUSD average fifth-grade NPR and 17 percent more students above the bottom quartile! Some of the mathematics increase may have come from other factors, but it would be hard to deny real progress at Ninth Street Elementary. If CARE is working against students with limited English skills, and actually being used to deny such progress, perhaps it's time to discard it as an uncaring exam. --- Wayne Bishop is a professor of mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles. Write to him by e-mail at wbishop@calstatela.edu. |