Key Policy Milestones and Directions in the Education of English Language Learners

Kenji Hakuta

Stanford University

Prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation Symposium

Leveraging Change: An Emerging Framework for Educational Equity

April 5, 2001

Washington, DC

Introduction

The initial reports from Census 2000 are starting to come in. They already show the expected increases in the numbers of foreign-born immigrants and people from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds. Foreign-born residents now make up over 10.1 percent of the entire population, compared to 7.9 percent in 1990. This trend is amplified in states such as California, where the foreign-born population in 2000 increased to 26 percent, up from 22 percent in 1990.

In 2000, it has been estimated that there were 8.6 million school-age children of immigrants (Camarota, 2001). Even taking a conservative rough estimate that 40 percent of these students are in need of special language assistance in schools (this is necessarily rough, since there is no agreed-upon operational definitions of Limited-English-Proficiency, or English Language Learner, ELL), one may estimate that there are 3.4 million ELL students in the nation. California, through its school language census, reported 1.48 million ELL students in 2000. However one looks at it, the numbers are huge.

In this paper, I would like to offer a quick review of some key policy issues that have emerged from the now 30+ year old experience of the educational policy, practice and advocacy communities in addressing the improvement of the educational status of ELL students. I will then draw upon these points to raise broader policy directions for national leaders, including the philanthropic community.

Key Policy Issues

In order to help us crystallize the key policy issues, I have organized this presentation around some key graphics.

Obligations of Lau

Figure 1 (click to see figure) shows a picture of Kinney Lau, a student in the San Francisco Unified School District in 1970. A lawsuit filed on his behalf against the school district on March 25, 1970 charged failure to provide, firstly, an opportunity to learn English and secondly, meaningful access to the educational program offered by the district. This case worked its way up through the courts, and in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the plaintiffs on the basis of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It stated:

Without specifying a remedy, the Court ruled that equal treatment was not equal opportunity, and that a program appropriate to the language needs of the students was required.

How Long?

How quickly do students learn English. Figure 2 shows data on the development of English language abilities among ELL students in a relatively privileged suburban school district. The slide is taken from a paper that my research group published (Hakuta, Goto-Butler, and Witt, 2000) pulling together available data on the question of how long it takes youngsters to learn English. The data are quite clear in showing that it can take 3 to 5 years to attain oral proficiency, and academic English proficiency can take 4 to 7 years. This estimate uses data from a school district that is considered highly successful in moving students out of the ELL designation. These data would not surprise researchers who have investigated the second language acquisition process deeply, but it may come as a surprise to policymakers who would like to see students acquire English faster, say in one year (more on this later). In any event, the point of this slide is to illustrate the long period of time it takes for ELLs to attain various criteria of English proficiency, and furthermore to understand that under Lau, it is imperative that their content area development be allowed to grow even as they learn English.

Importance of Student Background

What factors affect the rate of English language development? Figure 3 shows the predictive power of native language proficiency in English language development. These data come from a small sample of Latino 3^rd graders who were born in Mexico, comparing their performance on standardized measures of English and Spanish vocabulary development (where a score of 100 is equivalent to the 50^th percentile). The positive correlation between the two languages is clearly observable.

Proficiency in the native language, especially the ability to do well on formal tests in it, is also related to factors in the family and home. Figure 4 illustrates the predictive role of the socioeconomic background of the students. The data on these slides are taken from the California Department of Education website, which reports, separately for major ethnolinguistic groups, the numbers of ELL and FEP (fluent English-proficient) children. These data are further separated by grade level. Thus, for each ethnolinguistic group, one can calculate a ratio of FEP to ELL students across the grade levels. These are the numbers reported in the cells, and for each group, it can be readily observed that the numbers are lower in the elementary grades and increase as you proceed up the grade levels. Presumably, each ethnolinguistic group has its own immigration history (and of course variations due to subgroups within it), accounting for why some groups have large proportions of FEP from the lower grades; also, the groups with very recent immigration history, such as the Ukranians and Punjabis, have new arrivals spread throughout the grade levels. In any event, I have marked in light blue the cells with a ratio of FEP to ELL that exceed 1.0. One rough interpretation of the blue cells is that that is the point at which half of the ethnolinguistic group becomes competitive in school (for example, in California, a commonly adopted criterion for redesignation to FEP includes scoring at or above the 37^th percentile on the SAT-9 reading test).

As can be readily seen, the Hmong, Lao, Cambodian, Spanish and Tongan groups stand out. The groups in the graph, incidentally, are sorted in ascending order by data we have culled from the 1990 Census for the mean income levels of the group, which appear in the rightmost column of the table.

The bottom line of this figure is to underscore the importance of socioeconomic factors in English language development. A bottom-line policy implication of this fact is that "time limits" imposed on access to special language programs penalize students who probably most need special assistance, because they are slower in developing English for reasons that are circumstantial to their socioeconomic status.

Language of Instruction: What’s Known and What’s Missing

Figure 5 is a picture of Secretary of Education William Bennett sitting in President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. Bennett was perhaps the most outspoken and influential critic of bilingual education as the preferred method to address the needs of ELL students. In the early days of responding to the Lau decision, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asserted a kind of imperative for bilingual education. As the memorandum regarding Lau from OCR stated, "Because an ESL program does not consider the affective or cognitive development of students [in the elementary and intermediate grades], an ESL program is not appropriate." This understanding that bilingual education should be favored over English-only alternatives was also written into law through Title VII of ESEA (otherwise known as the Bilingual Education Act), by setting a cap on the percentage of funds that could go to non-bilingual programs. As Secretary of Education, Bennett launched a vigorous "cap attack" on Title VII, successfully eroding the extent to which Title VII preferred bilingual programs, such that by the last re-authorization in 1994, virtually no constraints remained with respect to language use in the programs funded.

Figure 6 shows data on the relative effectiveness of transitional bilingual education programs compared with English-only programs. These are based on real data that we collected comparing students from a high-poverty urban school district who were in bilingual and English-only program schools, with English reading comprehension scores as the outcome measure. The data show the students in the bilingual program ahead of those in the English-only program. This is highly consistent with meta-analyses of other comparison studies of transitional and English-only programs (Willig, 1985; Greene, 1998). Greene, for example, reports effect size of about .2 for measures of English reading in favor of bilingual programs.

The point of the slide, though, is to show that in spite of these positive effects of bilingual education programs, the gap between the outcomes for ELLs and for native speakers is huge, and continues to grow across the grade levels. The "white space" represented in the bar charts shows what it would take for the students to be "age-equivalent" in their reading performance. The gap continues to grow as students progress through school. What this graph tells us is that we have been fighting the bilingual wars between the red and the blue programs, but it has been at the expense of paying attention to the white space.

Standards-Based Reform and the Castaneda Model

Figure 7 is a picture from 1983 of members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. I put this marker to note the beginnings of the era of standards-based reform, followed by the 1989 Charlottesville summit convened by the senior Bush presidency. This raises a number of important policy issues regarding the inclusion of ELL students in the mantras of this reform movement: "high standards," "all students," "assessment," "accountability," "regulatory flexibility," and "system capacity," among others. Advocates for ELL students have been working through these issues (see, for example, James Crawford’s 1999 book that devotes a chapter to this issue). Agreement is easy at a general level: ELL students should be held to the same high standards as all students, i.e., "all means all", that it is unacceptable to place ELL students outside of the accountability system, and so forth. But many questions remain.

One way to conceptualize these issues is with respect to Figure 8, which represents a surprisingly wise ruling in a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 1981, Castaneda v. Pickard (648 F. 2d 989, 1006-07, 5th Cir. 1981), that helped define "appropriate action" by a school district for ELL students. It identified three prongs in meeting the definition: (1) programs must be based on "sound educational theory"; (2) they must be "implemented effectively" with adequate resources and personnel; and (3) after a trial period, the program must be evaluated as effective in overcoming language handicaps.

In analyzing the impact of standards-based reform on ELL students, we can think of theories of teaching and learning of both English language and content areas as comprising Prong 1. Effective implementation, Prong 2, means paying attention to high standards, teacher preparation to teach to these standards, school organization to support the teaching and learning environment, and appropriate assessment tools. Finally, Prong 3 would require rigorous evaluation of the outcomes of the program with respect to English language development and the meeting of performance standards.

There are many difficult questions that can be asked at each prong, including an overarching meta-question: is standards-based reform appropriate and effective in meeting the needs of ELL students? For the moment assuming that it is, and that it would be unfortunate for ELLs to miss the train since the train leads to greater resources, we could ask questions such as:

Prong 1:

• Is there sufficient basis to conclude that bilingual education is a more sound theory than English-only?

• Is there a theory of English-only education?

• In addition to content and performance standards that apply to ELL students, should there be additional standards for academic English language development?

• What theories of staff adequacy, professionalism, and school organization pertain to the school environment for ELL students?

Prong 2:

• Are the programs based on sound educational theory being implemented following state and national guidelines for teaching content standards?

• Are there appropriate assessments of ELL students?

Prong 3:

• Are the evaluation and accountability mechanisms fairly implemented with respect to ELL students?

• Are the data systems adequate for tracking longitudinal progress of students (i.e., do the systems have memory)?

• Are there incentives for program improvement for ELL students?

I would encourage this audience to think through the problems that each prong raises.

Incoherent Programs and Program Improvement

Figure 9 tells the story of New York City that suggests the importance of adequate programs (New York City Board of Education, 2000). In this recent report, longitudinal data were reported on the long-term educational outcomes for LEP students, using exit rates as the criterion. The graph shows the outcomes for a group of students who received bilingual-only, ESL-only, and a third category which they called mixed. An important caveat: these data are uncontrolled for SES, and we know that bilingual tends to be offered in lower SES schools with larger concentrations of ELL students. In any event, the data show the students in ESL-only somewhat ahead of the bilingual-only (again, this fails to control for SES); but my point is not the comparison of these two programs, but rather the fate of the students in the mixed programs. This is a bit like the white space issue in my earlier slide that showed the controlled comparison of bilingual and English-only. We really need to be paying attention to program quality, especially the students who are in mixed (read: inconsistent, and possibly under-resourced) programs.

Although I am a strong believer in the positive value of bilingual programs, the New York picture also tells us that it is a terrible thing to have an incoherent program, independent of language program type. This is important for several reasons. First, not all program labels are representative of the instructional methods they employ. Second, even those programs that are representative of their labels vary widely in their quality, and third, successful components are likely to be found in a variety of programs that are being run effectively. In effect, there is likely no ONE best model for educating ELL students. What is critical is finding a set of program components that works for the children in the community of interest, given the goals, demographics, and resources of that community. This set of components will (and should) vary depending on factors that differ not only across but within immigrant groups, such as students’ first language, SES, previous academic experience, community and parental socio-linguistic climate, learner styles, and goals for proficiency (additive v. subtractive). Teacher availability/ qualifications also play an important role. The best approach to take is to look to basic research, which will inform us as to how children learn best and under what conditions.

What has emerged from this thinking is a set of generally agreed upon "best practices" that can and should be found across program types to encourage the success of language minority students. A typical list of key components can be found in a recent National Research Council report that synthesized the research on effective schools for language minority students (August & Hakuta, 1998). The list includes the following: some use of native language and culture in the instruction of language minority students, a balanced curriculum that incorporates both basic and higher-order skills, explicit skills instruction, opportunities for student-directed activities, use of instructional strategies that enhance understanding, opportunities for practice, systematic student assessment, staff development, and home and parent involvement. Since the success of language minority students does not hinge solely on the classroom environment but also on that of the school, criteria for "good" schools for language minority students have been developed as well. The following are recommended school attributes: a supportive school-wide climate, school leadership, a customized learning environment, articulation and coordination between and among schools in the district, school-wide coherence, rigorous standards for teaching and learning, assessment and accountability, continuous evaluation, and research of program effectiveness. Many of these strategies for overall improvement of schools were derived and adapted from successful improvements for high-poverty schools, where most ELL students are found.

The Force of Law?

Figure 10 in many ways tells the beginnings of a story about how far we have come, but how far we still have to go. I have chosen a picture of the old ESEA law (the 1988 version), Section 1014(d) that defines which children are eligible for Title I (then Chapter 1) services. The law reads:

This law was indeed quite confusing. Interpreted literally, one had to distinguish between educational needs deriving from LEP status and educational needs deriving from low academic achievement; furthermore, the basis for selection, in addition, are standardized tests in English, which for ELL students measure primarily their academic English proficiency. After much debate, including an important study by Westat (Strang & Carlson, 1991) that documented problems of eligibility of ELL students deriving from the assessment systems in some school districts, the law was changed in 1994. The new law called for assessments that provided for:

This is a very clear message and a vast improvement over the previous law in promoting access to Title I resources (considerably larger and more widely dispersed than Title VII funds).

So what is the depressing part of this? Figure 11 will give a sense of it. It is a letter from the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education addressed to Delaine Eastin, Superintendent of Public Instruction for the California Department of Education. The letter is a strict and severe admonition from the U. S. Department of Education to the California Department of Education that it is "substantially out of compliance" with the sections of Title I having to do with assessment and reporting. The letter goes on to amplify the many ways in which the use of the SAT-9 falls short of Title I legislation, including the fact that the test is not aligned to state standards, and the serious ways in which use of the test with ELL students is out of compliance with the law. Strong stuff, it seems. Well, the letter is dated January 19, 2001. Clearly, it is important to get policies for appropriate inclusion of ELL students written into law. But equally clearly, where there is inadequate political will and technical capacity for implementation, even a law passed in 1994 ends up being a weak admonition issued six years later, one day before the end of the administration that structured and signed the law into place.

Proposition 227

The final figure, Figure 12, is of Mr. Ron Unz, author of Proposition 227 in California that banned bilingual education. It is important to address this initiative not just because California has about a third of the nation’s ELL students, but also because Mr. Unz has been active in many other states, including Arizona (where it passed in November), New York, Colorado, and Massachusetts.

Much of the excitement about California comes from a New York Times article that reported on the supposed miracle of a school district in Oceanside, California. I reproduce here some basic points about the California story from my website, which contains additional detail:

1. Any given school district's pattern of performance by LEP students should be considered in light of statewide patterns of performance by LEP and by native English speakers; our analysis shows that there have been statewide increases in SAT-9 scores for both LEP and native English speakers, following patterns that are virtually identical – large increases in the early grades, and then tapering off in the fourth grade and beyond. This is not a Proposition 227 effect, but something much more specific to SAT-9.

2. The increases are due to a number of possible causes. Advocates of reforms such as Proposition 227, class size reduction, and increased school accountability would certainly like to give credit to their own individual causes, but there are other explanations that must also be considered. For example, schools and districts have taken the SAT-9 much more seriously this past year, and have taught to the test. Younger children's scores are probably more likely to benefit from increased attention by teachers and school officials to the importance of the test. Also, districts seem to vary considerably in who they included as LEP or as non-LEP, and in percentages of the LEP students that they tested. Of course, the results of a school or district's LEP students would depend a great deal on who they count as LEP and which LEP students were tested. Each claim about "success" for LEP students would need to be scrutinized. It is certainly premature to claim any sort of victory for Proposition 227.

3. SAT-9 is a poor excuse of a measure of English development and academic achievement for LEP students. The test was developed to give normative data in reading and math for native English speakers. The test measures things that are qualititatively different from what would be expected of students learning English. Consider an analogy. Imagine if you had just finished a first set of golf lessons in a driving range, and then you were taken out to a golf course, asked to play a full 18 holes, and kept score. Unless you were a prodigy, your score would be virtually meaningless, measuring luck much more than it would your ability. The golf score is very meaningful for those who have played for a while (Tiger Woods), but not for beginners (being one, I can testify that I never keep score – I keep score in a different way, which is the percentage of solid contacts I make per swing). Given that SAT-9 is a weak measure of English for LEP students, we can only expect it to tell us very gross information. It is certainly not refined enough to tell us about differences between program labels, such as bilingual vs. English immersion. (Would I really be able to tell the difference between the effectiveness of different golf instructional approaches based on golf scores for beginners?).

4. The data from 1998 to 2000 show that all districts show rises, pretty much following statewide patterns. There are increases in school districts that have retained bilingual education, in school districts that had English immersion even before Proposition 227 (and therefore were not impacted by the policy), and in Oceanside, which has been acknowledged by the press for having switched faithfully from bilingual to English-only. Because SAT-9 is a bad measure for LEP students (golf scores), the scores for schools and districts are characterized by a lot of random noise, but they did rise in a rough way. That is, all the scores are rising, but the margins of errors are so large that it is not possible to distinguish between different types of language programs.

5. Why did Oceanside LEP students show such big gains from 1998 to 2000? Partly, one has to wonder how it managed to be so low in 1998 – the average LEP 2nd grader at the 12th percentile (compared to LEP at the 19th percentile statewide), and the average 3rd grader at the 9th percentile (compared to 14th percentile statewide). So, they started out among the lowest in a group of students who score low to begin with. One of the laws of statistics is that the lower the beginning score, the more it will be expected to rise upon retesting. Also, an important perspective is that one can pretty easily find schools report having well-run bilingual education programs, that have equally dramatic gains as did Oceanside.

6. A final comment about Proposition 227 from a historical perspective. It is a regressive initiative in that educators of ELL students have been trying to get away from using program labels as the basis for policy. The hope has been to transcend the "cap attacks" of the Bennett years and to build on improving system components for effectively educating ELL students. Thus, the thrust has been in the direction of full inclusion in standards-based reform, adherence to the Castaneda model with coherent and well-resourced programs, and recognizing that the evaluation studies of bilingual education has found modest benefits. That is hardly the direction that Proposition 227 has taken.

Summary Observations and Recommendations for Policy.

1. ELL students have needs in the areas of both English language development and content knowledge development; the obligation to meet these dual needs on the part of schools is explicit in Lau, based on the Civil Rights Act.

2. It takes a considerable amount of time for ELL students to develop English proficiency – certainly much longer than one year, and it depends on the aspect of language proficiency as well as the socioeconomic background characteristics of students.

3. Bilingual education is more effective than English-only alternatives, all things being equal.

4. There are challenges to the effective education of ELL students that accumulate as students progress through grade levels, such that the gap with native English speakers increases rather than decreases;

5. Standards-based reform and Castaneda provide important frameworks around which reform for ELL students can proceed, although they raise difficult questions;

6. A major challenge appears to be students in inconsistent programs as well as students who move across different programs;

7. Legislation, although needed, will not solve problems of political will and technical capacity; and

8. Proposition 227 and similar legislation to ban bilingual education capitalize on symbolic politics but are disconnected with the knowledge base and from realistic, sustained reform.

As for policy recommendations, I would reiterate some recommendations that I made a few years ago to congressional leaders at a program of the Aspen Institute (Hakuta, 1998):

In general, the educational discourse about the education of language minority students needs to move from an understanding of language to the development of academic content and the improvement of schools. If we are to talk about language at all, it should be about innovations to tap immigrant languages as a national resource. Policy leaders can help facilitate this in several ways.

Make Use of What We Know about Language.

It is time to acknowledge that we are at the point of diminishing returns in understanding the language variables for the purposes of program development and evaluation. We know that English language development takes three or more years; individual student progress in English language development is not a function of the motivation or resistance by the student, and is strongly related to their educational capital; bilingual education is slightly better than English immersion or ESL approaches, but won’t fix everything. Policy leaders can take these findings and make a clear declaration: We know enough about language. Immigrant children are learning English promptly. So let’s move on with dissemination of these facts, and begin addressing the bigger problem of academic standards and school improvement.

Focus on the Capacity for Program Improvement.

The key decisions about education are made at the state and local levels, and it is the responsibility of national level policy leaders to provide the tools to develop local capacity. The common tools used for standards-based reform are the public articulation of standards, student assessment and accountability, professional development, and parental involvement. In each of these, the question of the inclusion of ELL students arises, and legislators can take the leadership in demanding answers to how this is occurring.

The system for assessment and accountability around the standards demands immediate attention if ELL students are to benefit from current reforms. ELL students are often assessed for their English proficiency, but not for content knowledge. Currently, most ELL students are excluded from local, state and national assessment and accountability systems. Worse, they may be included inappropriately in high stakes tests, such as in California.

The area of the professional preparation and development of teachers is another critical problem. The shortage is not just limited to bilingual education teachers, but also extends to teachers of all programs that serve ELL students. The recently completed efforts of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to develop standards for Bilingual and ESL Teachers should be applauded as the "deluxe" model, but the magnitude of the problem is staggering when we look at the other elements of professional preparation such as schools of education, state certificate requirements, professional development models, and Title VII incentives. In addition, current knowledge about the effectiveness of strategies for teacher education and the assessment of teacher knowledge and skills is very limited. Policy leaders should demand and support a systematic inquiry into ways to understand, support and coordinate all of these efforts.

Encouraging the Value of Bilingualism

One of my favorite quotes about bilingualism (not bilingual education) comes from the great scholar Joshua Fishman (1966), who wrote: "many Americans have long been of the opinion that bilingualism is ‘a good thing’ if it was acquired via travel (preferably to Paris) or via formal education (preferably at Harvard) but that it is a ‘bad thing’ if it was acquired from one’s immigrant parents or grandparents" (pp. 122-123). Research shows that bilingualism, in the sense of a strong command of two or more languages, is a good thing regardless of whether you are a first-generation or seventh-generation immigrant. But we hold split standards that lead us to value bilingualism for people of privileged backgrounds, but not for people who are recent immigrants.

Policy leaders can play an important role by acknowledging and promoting the value of bilingualism for personal growth as well as for the nation’s security and economic interests. They could encourage local community leaders to develop mechanisms that would support bilingualism to its fullest potential, and use the linguistic prowess of immigrant bilingualism to set high standards for all Americans. These are not the current goals of programs (with the exception of maintenance and two-way programs). My own personal bias is that attention to the full development of the native language does not have to occur in the elementary grades, and that the middle and high school years could be used effectively for this purpose. Currently, innovation is limited because of what I consider an unwarranted fear that English is threatened, not strengthened, by bilingualism.

References

August, D. & Hakuta, K. (1998). (Eds) Educating language-minority children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Camarota, S. (2001). Immigrants in the United States – 2000: A Snapshot of America’s Foreign-Born Population. Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies. http://www.cis.org/articles/2001/back101.html

Crawford 1999 Bilingual Education: History, politics, theory and practice (Fourth Edition). Los Angeles: Bilingual Educational Services, Inc.

Fishman, J., Nahirny, V., Hofman, J. & Hayden, R. (1966). Language loyalty in the United States. The Hague: Mouton.

Greene, J. P. (1998). A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Bilingual Education. University of Texas: The Tomas Rivera Policy Institute.

Hakuta, K. (1998). Improving education for all children: Meeting the needs of language minority children. In D. Clark (ed.), Education and the development of American youth. Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute.

Hakuta, K., Goto Butler, Y., and Witt, D. (2000). How long does it take English Learners to attain proficiency? University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute: Policy Report 2000-1, available on-line at http://www.lmri.ucsb.edu/RESDISS/hakuta.pdf

New York City Board of Education (2000). ELL Subcommittee Research Studies: Progress Report. Brooklyn: New York City Board of Education.

Strang, E. W. & Carlson, E. (1991). Providing Chapter 1 Services to Limited English-Proficient Students. Final Report submitted to the Office of Policy and Planning, U. S. Department of Education