Last month, a Texas court ordered the Texas Education Agency to overhaul the state’s bilingual education system, citing low test scores and high dropout rates. In Seattle, an outside review of that public school district’s program for immigrant students was deemed weak and in need of restructuring. The program, the evaluators said, “is ad hoc, incoherent and directionless,” the Seattle Times reported.
As two different systems struggle to overcome the burden of low achievement among their English-language learner populations, one scholar recommends providing children with more language support before pushing them into English-only classrooms, among a few strategies that may help both systems.
In Texas, Judge William Justice of the U.S. District Court ruled that the state failed to properly educate ELL students, reversing a 2007 ruling affirming the state bilingual education programs. “The failure of secondary (limited English proficient) students under every metric clearly and convincingly demonstrates student failure, and accordingly, the failure of the (English as a Second Language) secondary program in Texas,” Justice wrote in his decision.
TEA has until Jan. 31 to develop a new plan for the estimated 140,000 junior high and high school English-language learners, although the state is expected to appeal the court’s ruling.
Texas is home to one of the nation’s largest English-language learner populations. An estimated 680,000 students are enrolled in bilingual education programs, according to the TEA. Data for the class of 2006 show that the graduation rate for students in bilingual or English as a Second Language programs was 41 percent, notably below the state rate of 80.4 percent.
While the elementary students enrolled in Texas’ ELL programs are performing well, the appalling graduation rates among secondary students prompted officials from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a civil rights organization, to pursue the case.
According to LULAC officials, the TEA’s system of monitoring the performance of students created “gaps and masks” that distort the problem of low performance among this cohort of students.
