Bilingual Funding Falls Short

Judge: state violates rights

Arizona doesn’t commit enough dollars to programs for children learning English, and it shoves them into classrooms with teachers unprepared to help them, a federal judge in Tucson decided this week.

However, U.S. District Judge Alfredo Marquez stopped short of ruling that the AIMS graduation test discriminates against students who don’t speak English well.

Monday’s court order says the state has violated civil rights and equal education opportunity laws, but it doesn’t specify a timetable for correcting them or exactly how that would be carried out.

“Clearly, for years the state hasn’t supported LEP (limited-English proficient) programs like it should,” said Tim Hogan of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, which sued on behalf of a Nogales mother in 1992. “The state’s going to have to get to work here. There needs to be more resources to give kids a chance.”

Department of Education officials agree that more funds are needed, and they welcome the debate that the ruling surely will bring, spokeswoman Patricia Likens said. They also are “gratified to see students will still have the opportunity to meet the standards on AIMS,” she said.

Hogan said he may file another suit against the AIMS test now that the first batch of results is out. Marquez heard testimony on the test back in August, when no results were available. Recent scores show that some groups of minority students did indeed turn in lower scores than Whites.

Sen. Joe Eddie Lopez hopes Marquez’s decision will provide a boost to his bill, which would increase funding for limited-English students from $162 per student to $621.

“Now that we have the decision, I don’t see any other obstacle in going forth,” said Lopez, a Phoenix Democrat.

Senate Bill 1242 would increase English as a Second Language funding from $18 million a year statewide to $40 million. The bill also would address a shortage of qualified ESL teachers by establishing a $1 million block grant to reimburse tuition for teachers who go back to school for bilingual-education training.

Judge’s decision or not, the Lopez bill could face problems because the Legislature is in the middle of a two-year budget cycle and reportedly only has about $36 million to appropriate.

Lopez doesn’t buy Republican revenue projections and believes the Legislature should avoid setting spending limits until updated revenue figures come in.

“If we wait until the end of the session, we will find there is sufficient money to take care of this need, as well as others,” Lopez said.

It has been 11 years since the state analyzed the cost of educating children who speak limited English. State education officials acknowledge that the money set aside for such students should be at least three times as much as it is. The difference falls to local school districts.

Of the $361 million spent to teach students English in the 1997-98 school year, $106 million came from federal funds and $15 million from state coffers. The rest, $240 million, came from grants, donations, desegregation money or contributions by public and private entities. But state officials caution that it’s unclear whether the school districts spent the $240 million just on language acquisition programs.

School districts say teaching in two languages requires double the materials, and because there aren’t enough teachers trained to educate such students, districts sometimes go without.

“It would have been devastating if he (Marquez) had ruled against this,” said Hilda Carr-Gaona, bilingual-education director at Phoenix’s Wilson Elementary School, where 62 percent of students speak limited English.

“All districts will be happy about this,” Joan Mason of the Phoenix Union High School District said about the ruling. “All teachers need to take responsibility for these students.”

As for Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, Marquez said there wasn’t relevant evidence to convince him that it should be shelved.

In August, a research professor at Arizona State University’s College of Education testified that more Hispanic and Black students do worse on the Stanford 9 standardized test than their White counterparts, based on scores from the Phoenix Union district.

The judge, however, said Phoenix’s demographics are different from those of Nogales, where the lawsuit originated in 1992.



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