Denver Strives To Make Bilingual Education More Than Lip Service

Stakes high for achieving DPS goal

In attempting to overhaul its troubled bilingual education program, Denver Public Schools stands at a linguistic crossroads: Succeed at educating language-minority children and become a national model. Fail, and lose $ 30 million in federal aid that goes to the district’s bilingual efforts.

These are high stakes for Denver Public Schools, which has never quite gotten it right. But now, under pressure from federal officials, the school system has introduced a host of changes designed to improve its bilingual program and bring it into compliance with federal law. The process hasn’t been easy; parents continue a bitter debate with school officials over details of the changes. The district is improving its assessment of students and teachers, two areas that have been weak in past years according to federal officials. Curriculum, also historically lame, is being shored up with additional resources like more foreign language texts. DPS, for example, received a large shipment of Spanish-language texts earlier this year from the Mexican government. The bottom line: to more effectivelyeducate language-minority children.

But revising bilingual education, on paper at least, might well be the smallest of the district’s worries.

Chronic teacher shortages have undermined bilingual efforts here and elsewhere to such an extent that desperate school systems in the past and even now have hired unqualified teachers for bilingual classrooms. In their zeal to teach students English, scant attention has been paid to the curriculum; as a result, bilingual curriculums often are so watered down that even when students learn English well enough to enter an English-speaking classroom, they are so woefully behind their peers academically there’s little chance of ultimate success.

Bilingual education also has increasingly been undermined by English-only proponents who view the program as an entitlement, a form of preferential treatment that, because it costs more in the short term, is bought at the expense of other school services. And, of course, the program is tainted by often subtle racism, which might well be the most significant and least talked about reason for bilingual education’s woes.

All of which helps explain why Denver Public Schools has never been able to fully satisfy federal mandates in a 1984 consent degree requiring DPS to do better by its language-minority students. For their part, DPS officials acknowledge there have been shortcomings in the program over the years, but they add that this academic year the district has made considerable progress in addressing the deficiencies; better assessment of teachers and students, for example, have been introduced, two areas that were described as deficient in a review by federal officials. Not exactly inventive, Denver’s efforts aren’t lagging compared with attempts elsewhere to overhaul weak bilingual programs.

“All the elements of good bilingual education are in our program,” says Tony Vigil, DPS’s director of bilingual education programs.

Denver parents and minority groups disagree, saying the revisions don’t go far enough. There is a deep distrust among parents with the school system here, as there is elsewhere, because of DPS’s inability – some parents and educators assert it is deliberate slowness – to satisfy the consent decree. No other federal program in Denver schools has ever had such problems. Why bilingual education?

A host of issues besets bilingual efforts in public schools, not the least of which is a dearth of qualified teachers. College and university departments of education have been slow to respond to the need. Many institutions, in fact, have folded bilingual education programs over the past two decades, saying students aren’t interested in majoring in bilingual ed. Who can blame potential bilingual education teachers? School systems themselves have sent indifferent, sometimes hostile, messages to bilingual teachers by housing their classes next to special education classes. Bilingual-ed teachers, in several surveys, also say other teachers condescend to them, make racially insensitive remarks and even thwart their efforts.

Two years ago, for example, one young Denver elementary school bilingual teacher received $ 800 from the school to buy books and other equipment for her class. Her principal’s response? A refusal to buy anything in Spanish; she told the teacher that DPS wasn’t going to offer anymore bilingual classes so the principal wasn’t going to waste her money on such acquisitions as Spanish-language books. It took the young teacher eight months to finally equip her classroom, and only after a white teacher prodded the young Hispanic teacher to push the principal and fight for her students.

“I could tell you a million stories like that,” said Kathy Escamilla, an associate professor in the graduate education program at the University of Colorado at Denver, where Escamilla taught the young teacher. “They are very poorly treated when they go out into the schools.”

DPS’s Vigil said the district is introducing more rigorous testing of its bilingual teachers, an initiative embraced by a host of other school systems. Previously, DPS retained bilingual teachers who took two to three years to pass a competency test. Under the district’s efforts to improve bilingual efforts, teachers are not hired if they fail a competency test that is graded in one day.

These steps should improve classroom performance, but other hindrances remain. Efforts to lure the brightest young minds in bilingual ed have also been batted down by teacher unions, who have blocked early efforts in many states to pay higher salaries to bilingual teachers who, after all, must bring a higher level of skills to classrooms and perform in two languages.

Although some school systems have succeeded in offering extra financial incentives to bilingual teachers – Los Angeles Unified School District offers a $ 5,000 incentive and was one of the first big-city school systems to do this with success – school districts are still losing potential bilingual educators because American companies, eager to compete in the ever-expanding global marketplace, are paying top dollar to young bilingual college graduates. This puts even more pressure on college recruitment efforts, which higher education representatives concede have fallen short.

“When we started bilingual education in the 1960s and 1970s, we grossly underestimated the ultimate need for the program,” said Escamilla. “We haven’t been able to keep up with the issue of demand. On the other hand, we have not worried enough about the retention of bilingual teachers.”

Nor has there been enough worry about the state of curriculum. There are, in fact, many bilingual education models that work, and DPS is piecing together an approach that is widely used: Instruction in the native language eventually is combined with English instruction followed by all-English classes. DPS also is paying more attention to student progress that includes scrutinizing writing samples. If a child isn’t progressing, he or she receives additional assistance.

But for decades, bilingual education has been viewed in many schools as yet another federal requirement forcing schools to grudgingly put in place bilingual programs with uninspired curriculum. In school districts that have embraced bilingual instruction as an education component, the results have been strong.

Consider the case of the Calexico Unified School District, a small California school system near the Arizona state line and the U.S.-Mexico border. Fully half of the district’s 7,100 students are enrolled in bilingual classes. Most students are poor. But the district graduates 90 percent of its students and sends nearly as many to four-year colleges, even sending some students to the University of California at Berkeley and other competitive colleges and universities.

Calexico’s curriculum for Spanish-speaking students and English-speaking students is the same; Spanish curriculum isn’t watered down as it is so often in other school districts. In a model increasingly adopted by other school systems, Calexico’s Spanish-speaking students learn core subjects in Spanish, while learning English, then move first into “sheltered English” in which classes are conducted both in Spanish and English and then, within three to four years, are transferred into all-English classes where they manage to perform at the same grade level as their English-speaking classmates.

“It can be done,” said Emily J. Palacios, Calexico’s assistant superintendent of instructional services. “But many school school districts have viewed bilingual education as a compliance program and not an education program.”

Calexico’s success – recognized by numerous awards, including one from the U.S. Department of Education – has been aided in large part by a relatively static student enrollment, unlike those found in Denver and other urban centers, where, given the array of languages, bilingual education is harder, but not impossible, to practice.

Palacios says the school system also has ignored the rhetoric that says bilingual education can’t work and that immigrants and non-English-speaking students should learn in English-only schools.

That increasingly prevailing attitude – a sad replay of American attitudes at the turn of the century – also has underminded already fragile bilingual education efforts everywhere, prompting two California school districts this school year to drop bilingual education entirely. California voters also will vote this November on a state referendum that, if approved, will scrap bilingual education entirely from public schools.

As the debate continues over whether bilingual education works and whether it has a place in public schools – a contentiousness that frankly often obscures the more significant issues – school systems across the country have initiated innovative and promising efforts to better educate English-limited students.

School systems also are doing better jobs of confronting increasingly diverse languages in the classroom. Denver Public Schools must educate students who speak 80 different languages, although Spanish here and elsewhere remains the prevalent language in bilingual classrooms. For students who speak languages other than Spanish – and in Denver that includes Russian and a host of Asian and eastern European languages – school districts like DPS find adults in the language-minority communities to serve as translators and tutors.

DPS’s other efforts – and this one perhaps ranks as one of the more controversial differences between parents the school system – call for students to enter English classrooms more quickly than in previous years. As it happens, many school systems, under pressure to turn in better performances by all of its students, have redoubled their efforts to make bilingual education a waystation rather than a terminus.

New York City, the nation’s largest school system with 1.1 million students, three years ago pledged a more efficient bilingual program, integrating language-minority children into English classes in three years; those who lag are given extra assistance, an approach DPS’ Vigil says the district plans to use.

All these approaches, say language-acquisition experts, will help bilingual education fulfill at least some of the promise it offered when created in 1964 as part of President Johnson’s Great Society legislation. English-limited children, it was argued then, deserved a smooth entry into American life, as they do today, enabling them to become full participants.

But the intent of Johnson’s legislation has been lost in the past three decades amid an ever-growing debate that fails to see past differences of language, race and ethnicity.

It is a debate that ultimately serves no one, least of all the children for whom bilingual education was created. American ingenuity, the envy of the world, put a man on the moon in less than a decade. American public schools can be and should be just as efficient in teaching our youngest citizens who, through no fault of their own, cannot speak English.

Bill Celis is an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Journalism. He is a former education correspondent for The New York Times and a former reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal.



Comments are closed.