Changes seen for bilingual education
SPRINGFIELD -- A team hired to evaluate the city's $12.4 million bilingual education program is poised to begin its final phase by compiling a report recommending changes to boost student achievement. The three-member team -- Joanne H. Urrutia of the Miami-Dade County School District, Lillian M. Gomez of the Colorado Department of Education and Elena Izquierdo of the University of Texas at El Paso -- spent the early part of this week here, visiting every school to gain insight into what works and what doesn't. Yesterday, Urrutia said the team is ready to wrap things up. "We've found some very good things going on, and some not so good things, too," said Urrutia, who monitors bilingual education in the 368,000-student district in southern Florida. The audit was requested by the School Committee after complaints about the program, which serves nearly 3,000 children whose first language is not English. Most are Spanish speakers. Superintendent Joseph P. Burke put together the team as one of his first moves on the job he started in June. Yesterday, he said he hoped that the audit will yield good results for children in bilingual programs. "My hope is that this will become a springboard for developing a very carefully crafted plan for bilingual education," Burke said. The report will be given to Burke in late November. It will begin by listing definitions for specific terms and the three bilingual programs used in the city. Team members found that principals and classroom teachers had their own interpretations of terms and programs, bringing about a lack of uniformity that will be a key part of the final report. "It's very difficult to say what works and what doesn't here, when there is no clear program and no clear definition about what the different terms mean," she said. "A lot of the programs in schools are not being delivered in the way the district says they should be," she added. Use of staff, resources and implementation of programs will be high on the list for recommended changes, she said. Urrutia said the team was frustrated by a lack of appropriate data. The report will ask that information be kept so that at the touch of a computer keyboard, officials might learn how bilingual students in fourth grade fared on standardized tests, for example. Team members also noticed that bilingual education may be taking too much heat for overall poor performance by Hispanic students. While the 3,000 bilingual students are mostly Spanish speakers, the total number of Hispanic students in the district is close to 12,000 this year. And bilingual education also includes Spanish, Russian and Vietnamese programs. The report asks for achievement data for students who are in, or who recently completed, bilingual programs, as well as for Hispanic students who never participated in bilingual education. Hispanic students historically have scored far lower than white students on standardized tests, and they have far higher suspension, absentee and dropout rates as a whole. |