Bilingual ed lacking, says state

State officials say reforming bilingual education is “essential,” based on a report today that shows only 4 percent of limited English- proficient students in 1997-98 had learned enough to enter regular classrooms.

The rate was even lower in the Tucson Unified and Sunnyside school districts, but some local educators say the state report is incomplete and gives an inaccurate picture of what is happening in bilingual classrooms.

In TUSD, 184 of 8,935 students – or 2 percent – in English acquisition programs were deemed proficient to transfer. In Sunnyside, 56 of 4,022 – or 1.4 percent – were reclassified.

“If we are a state that believes in providing an extraordinary education to all students, and that raising student achievement levels is important, we cannot sit idly by and accept results like these,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Graham Keegan said in a letter yesterday to legislators.

“The Arizona Department of Education, while not making specific policy recommendations in this report, believes very strongly that program reform is essential.”

Tucson Unified School District officials have heard the argument before.

“My concern is that the department states that (bilingual) program reform is essential and continues to imply that school reform is necessary, but there is no funding and support for that to occur,” said Becky Montao, assistant superintendent for curriculum/instruction.

The report shows 4 percent, or 4,527 of 111,207 limited English- proficient (LEP) students, were reclassified as English-proficient by their school districts last year – compared with 2.8 percent in 1996- 97.

Students are reclassified when they meet five criteria: oral proficiency, reading, writing, parent opinion and teacher verification.

Only 38,478 students were actually subjected to those criteria. Of students reassessed last year, nearly 12 percent were reclassified.

Fifty-three percent of those students passed the oral language proficiency portion, 36 percent passed the writing portion, and 22 percent passed the reading portion of the assessment process.

Individual district statistics were to be released later today, and Montao said many factors are missing in the report.

“There are no mobility figures about the number of students that are entering or exiting or who are recent arrivals to all the districts, so that is kind of lost in the data,” she explained.

Another omission, Montao said, is that districts did not have results from Stanford 9 tests last spring, which are used to reclassify students’ reading levels.

Students need to score above the 36 percentile in order to pass the reading portion of the reclassification criteria.

Montao said the state department did not release those scores to TUSD until August – too late for the district to use for determining which students would be eligible for exiting bilingual and English as a Second Language classrooms.

Department spokeswoman Laura Penny said districts still had access to hard-copy data from individual schools.

Still, the report doesn’t “differentiate one (bilingual) program from another,” said Leonard Basurto, TUSD director of bilingual education and Mexican-American studies.

“All the students were lumped together,” he said.

Also, by focusing in large on reclassification rates, the report does not address how bilingual programs are actually set up, Basurto said in an interview last week.

“To a lot of people, bilingual means Spanish only, when as a matter of fact, there is more English than Spanish,” he said.

Basurto said Spanish-predominant instruction in TUSD is primarily reserved for beginning bilingual students in kindergarten and first grade.

“(Just) because a student is still in a bilingual education program doesn’t mean he is not having mainstream classes,” he added.

The state report indicates that about 75 percent of the reclassified students last year were deemed English-proficient after only four years of bilingual or ESL instruction.

Penny said the finding contradicts a popular notion among proponents of bilingual education that it takes seven to 10 years to become English-proficient.

Keegan could not be reached for comment.

Students in English Acquisition Programs

1997-98 school year

Total Number of Pima County Students in English Acquisition Programs: 15,276

* – Students reassessed and reclassified as English-proficient.

** – Students in English Acquisition Programs were classified as limited English-proficient. Programs include bilingual education, English as a Second Language and individualized curriculums.

Source: “Bilingual Programs and English As A Second Language Programs,” School Year 1997-98 Report, Arizona Department of Education.