Voters who will decide in June whether to significantly alter the way immigrant children are taught face a dilemma:

A “yes” vote insures that thousands of immigrant children are subjected to an untested and unproven method of learning English.

A “no” vote insures that thousands of immigrant children continue to be subjected to a tested and unproven method of learning English.

State education officials say the only quantifiable measure of whether the programs are effective — checking how many limited-English speakers become fluent in English every year — gives only a hint of the story.

The English for the Children initiative on the June 2 ballot would place limited-English speakers in English-only classes with extra help for no more than one year. They would then be moved into regular classrooms.

At the heart of the issue is whether children learning English will perform better academically if bilingual programs are scrapped.

Even champions of bilingual education — teaching immigrant children in their native tongues to help them learn English — point to flaws in the programs that make it difficult to know if they work. Educators say that while in theory using primary language instruction should work, too few qualified teachers and faulty methods of tracking children translate into problems.

The state is about 21,000 qualified teachers shy of being able to accommodate California’s 1.4 million, limited-English students, according to 1997 figures from the state Department of Education. Nationwide, estimates put the teacher shortage as high as 250,000. Most bilingual teachers are proficient in Spanish, but some are qualified to teach in Cantonese, Armenian and Hmong, among other languages.

Daniel Cooper, principal at Hemlock Elementary School in the Fontana Unified School District, said that like many administrators he has had to go without qualified teachers for the children learning English.

“You find yourself as a principal in a situation where you’re competing to get bilingual teachers. You staff your school as well as you can. It’s a continual struggle to keep qualified staff,” Cooper said.

School districts have had a hard time showing the state that children in bilingual programs are making progress. Spotty tracking of students means they have sometimes been misplaced or pingponged between mainstream and bilingual classes.

Of about 250 school district bilingual programs reviewed by the Department of Education in 1996, 121 were unable to show an acceptable annual evaluation plan to check their effectiveness.

Lauri Burnham-Massey, a consultant in the department’s bilingual compliance unit, said it is not enough to show how many students are being relabeled fluent from limited-English speaking. The department wants to see other measurements, including scores on achievement tests, teacher assessments, parent input and an analysis of student performance based on how long they have been in the U. S.

The growing influx of new immigrants and the frequent movement of some students from school to school further cloud the question of whether the programs work, said state bilingual consultant David Dolson.

Dolson said the more new arrivals in a school district, the lower the relabeling rate will likely be because children who are just getting started in English are included in the formula.

“It’s too rough a statistic to explain such a complicated program,” Dolson said.

It would be more accurate to determine how many children become fluent in English after they are in a program several years instead of year to year, Dolson said. But long-range outlooks are costly, he said.

“School districts aren’t in the business of long-term program research and evaluation. It’s somewhat expensive to keep track of kids over time,” Dolson said.

Even so, more accountability is already under way.

Eleanor Clark-Thomas, manager of the state department’s coordinated compliance review unit, said that beginning this year, districts are required to show limited-English pupils are making academic progress.

“We’re really trying to move from a rules-based system to a performance-based system looking at standards, looking at assessment and seeing if students are really learning,” Clark-Thomas said. The department, which reviews school districts by county every four years, will look at Riverside County next year. San Bernardino County, which was reviewed last year, will have to show progress in its next review, Clark-Thomas said.

Districts out of compliance have 45 days to improve, and sometimes longer, depending on the issue, Clark-Thomas said. The most severe penalty for noncompliance is the loss of federal and state money to run the programs.

Despite a lack of data supporting or undermining bilingual education, schools of education from San Bernardino to San Francisco teach that the best method of making non-English speakers fluent in English is to build on the language they speak at home.

A little less than one-third of the state’s limited-English speakers are taught in their mother tongues. Others are helped by classroom aides who speak predominately Spanish but also Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog and a smattering of other languages.

Some Inland Empire school districts have been able to show that children who keep their primary languages and become bilingual outperform children on achievement tests who only speak English. In the Riverside Unified School District, a higher percentage of high school students who had been redesignated fluent in English earned C’s and above in 1997 than did native English speakers, according to school district data.

District statistics show redesignated students in grades two through eight scored at the 48th percentile in reading and 61st percentile in math on 1997 achievement tests, surpassing native English speakers who scored at the 45th percentile in reading and 49th percentile in math. (Scoring at the 48th percentile means a student outperformed 48 percent of students who took the test.)

Bob Ferrett, the district’s director of educational accountability, conceded that the numbers do not conclusively show that using a child’s native language in the classroom results in better grades. But Ferrett said they show children are able to achieve academically when they begin school with little or no English and are placed in special programs.

A report to the state Legislature last year by the UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Education Policy Center found that teaching children in their native language may help children do better in school. According to the report, it takes at least five years for children with limited fluency in English to get on equal footing with their English-speaking peers in reading and writing. An analysis of programs offered for non-native English speakers in the Santa Ana Unified School District by a team of UC Riverside researchers found children who received some special help learned English faster than those who were in the mainstream program.

In the Fontana school district, non-native English speakers who become fluent in English score just as well or better on achievement tests than native English speakers, said Joe Deem, the district’s director of educational accountability.

As a general rule, limited-English speakers are supposed to score better than the 36th percentile on a standardized achievement test to be redesignated fluent in English. About 5 percent of Fontana’s limited-English speakers moved into mainstream classes last year.

The district’s non-native English speakers, who scored at the 36th percentile for reading and language last year, outperformed all other Fontana students in every grade except 10th and 11th.

Beyond academic measures of bilingual education’s effectiveness, pro- ative-language instruction is at least partly to blame for the higher dropout rates because minority students who speak other languages are staying in school.

The Washington, D.C.-based National Association for Bilingual Education points to different statistics.

It is difficult to know how many of the Hispanic dropouts should be attributed to bilingual programs, said James Lyons, the association’s executive director. Less than half of Hispanic students speak limited English, and an even smaller percentage of them are taught in Spanish, he said.

Lyons said high dropout rates among Hispanics, as well as segregation issues, are not an outgrowth of bilingual education but rather a factor of economics.

The state does not keep dropout rates for limited-English students, but some districts do. A Riverside Unified School District report for 1995-96, for example, showed students learning English were almost three times more likely to drop out between grades nine and 12 than English-only students. Updated numbers for 1996-97 show the same trend, although the district’s Ferrett said the district is not releasing that information until the spring.

Ferrett said the reasons that some students gave for dropping out included feeling they did not fit in and having to work to support their families.



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