Bilingual students excuses from test

Percentage is up over previous year

Fewer than half the state’s bilingual third-graders took the Iowa reading test this year, even though more than 70 percent of them have attended Massachusetts schools since kindergarten or first grade and are presumed to speak English, according to a bilingual education specialist.

The Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, which third-graders take in May, is considered vital because it flags youngsters who are poor readers as they enter the fourth grade, when reading starts to become a tool for learning. Educators say it is critical to catch poor reading skills early to avoid future academic weakness.

Despite the need to determine third-grade reading skills, 58 percent of the state’s 4,582 bilingual third-graders were excused by their teachers from taking the test, up from 42 percent the year before. But because 71 percent of bilingual third-graders, or 3,253 of them, have attended Massachusetts schools for at least three years, some argue that at least that many should be proficient enough in English to be tested.

With results of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test results coming out Nov. 30 and expectations that very few fourth-, eighth-, and tenth-graders will be exempted from taking it this spring, critics are concerned that the skills of so many bilingual third-graders are not being assessed.

”Certainly any child who has been in our schools since kindergarten or first grade should be taking this test,” said Rosalie Porter, chief executive and research director of the Amherst-based READ Institute, for Research in English Acquisition and Development, a consulting group used by schools to improve bilingual programs.

Porter, formerly the longtime bilingual education director for the Newton public schools, analyzed the state’s test data and produced a report on bilingual third graders.

By comparison, only 2 percent of all special education students, including those with learning disabilities, were exempt from taking the test, she said.

”I would never subject a child to such a test in the first year or even the second year, but by the third year we ought to test them,” Porter said. ”They will have to take the MCAS … so it would help to know their reading level in English in the third grade.”

Not so, says Tom Louie, director of Mass English Plus, a bilingual education advocacy group in Boston. Louie said Porter’s group supports the view that children should leave bilingual education programs after a given time, even if they do not yet speak English well.

Like other more liberal advocates, Louie said children should not be tested in English until they are fluent, which varies by child.

”This is an issue of fairness,” he said. ”There is no reason to believe they would be able to work at grade level” by third grade compared to native English-speaking children.

David Driscoll, the state’s interim education commissioner, said Porter’s analysis indicates that children are not being moved into regular classes swiftly enough.

”I intend to make this one of my priorities in 1999, but not in the ideological-political way it has been looked at,” Driscoll said Thursday. ”We can no longer stand by and watch children essentially fail because we have not been effective in making them proficient.”

Massachusetts bilingual education law requires school districts to provide instruction in any native language spoken by at least 10 children in a school.

”If children are still learning in their native language, then they should be tested in their native language or with an alternative English proficiency test,” Louie said. He stressed that much research suggests that it requires a full five to seven years for students to begin to command academic English.

State data show that 96 percent of Framingham’s so-called limited English proficiency (LEP) third-graders did not take the reading test. In Boston, 66 percent of such students were not tested, nor were 69 percent of Holyoke’s 115 mostly Spanish-speaking youngsters.

Boston attributed the low number of students taking the test in part to confusing test instructions. Other communities, like Revere, cited large numbers of immigrants.

”In our case, the teacher makes the recommendation,” said Rosa Frau, who heads bilingual services in Holyoke, where virtually all the non-English-speaking students are transient Spanish-speakers from Puerto Rico. ”The population here is not strong in either Spanish or English, and many are not even reading at grade level in Spanish.”



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