Garland bilingual programs earn high marks

But school district survey finds room for improvement

GARLAND – The school district’s programs for bilingual education and English as a Second Language are effective in helping students learn English, according to a recent survey conducted by district officials.

“The survey gave us information that, by and large, parents are satisfied with the programs,” said Debra Cron, assistant superintendent for instructional services. “They also gave us information about some areas of improvement. But we’ll be the first to say there are some shortcomings we need to work on in our programs.”

A school district task force made up of administrators, teachers, parents and students wrote and conducted four surveys this spring.

The questionnaires were passed out by hand to a random selection of 331 students in the language programs, all of whom returned the form. Parents of all 5,000 students in the two programs received a separate questionnaire, which was returned by 1,486 parents. A third questionnaire was returned by 96 teachers, about half of those who received the form. The fourth questionnaire was returned by 47 of 48 principals, school officials said.

In one survey, 77 percent of the parents who responded said they understand how the language programs work and 85 percent said they felt welcome at their child’s school. However, when questioned whether they felt ignored at their child’s school, 24 percent of the parents said yes and 54 percent said no.

“There could be a parent who felt ignored once but still feels welcomed,” Dr. Cron said.

Almost three-quarters of the educators in the survey said the selection of books in the home language of their students was limited.

“Frankly, we thought the materials were in place,” Dr. Cron said. “There are some gaps that need to be filled. We’re making efforts to do that.”

She said the school board earmarked $ 90,000 in next year’s budget to stock more learning materials in bilingual education and ESL classrooms.

Tony Torres, chairman of the Garland Hispanic Coalition and a longtime critic of the school district’s bilingual education and ESL programs, said the surveys’ conclusions probably are not valid.

He said he believes the surveys were not conducted in a professional and scientific manner.

“One of the worst things you can do is a do-it-yourself questionnaire,” Mr. Torres said. “In real good surveys, you will be able to validate responses. But in this one, you have people contradicting themselves. It makes me wonder if the people taking the survey really knew what they were doing.”

Mr. Torres said the district should have hired a professional pollster to ensure objective results. He said he found some questions to be “skewed,” adding that the surveys generally appeared to be self-serving for the school district.

“If you really want an objective questionnaire, you don’t get a committee of teachers and volunteers to do this,” Mr. Torres said.

“Conducting surveys is definitely a science. You need to hire a professional.”

Dr. Cron said the survey was not perfect. However, after the volunteer task force designed the survey, questions were refined by the district’s in-house statistician, Michael Strozeski.

“We did have a fellow who has a Ph.D. in statistics evaluate the survey,” Dr. Cron said. “While there may be some questions that are not as strong as others, our efforts were to get an honest reading from all these groups. We did not try to manipulate the surveys in any way.”

Dr. Cron said the survey has taught school officials how they need to improve. In polling parents, they learned that 66 percent would like to receive more information about school programs.

“That’s great knowledge,” Dr. Cron said. “It tells us that we have to continue to find better ways to communicate to them.”

Dr. Cron said the surveyed students wrote that they made progress while enrolled in the program.

“I was pleased to see that we are benefiting the students,” she said.



Comments are closed.