By Pat Muller
Oregon Save
Our Schools
Students and teachers have recently faced many obstacles to success
for English Language Learners (ELLs).
Layoffs have increased workloads for remaining staff. Class sizes have increased. There is reduced support from the
central office as a result of increased administrator workloads. Assistant time has been reduced for
classroom support and interventions.
These conditions are made worse by tighter timelines for exiting
students, higher goals for progressing students through proficiency levels at a
rate not supported by research, rising cut scores for the English Language
Proficiency Assessment (ELPA) and the Oregon Assessment of Knowledge and Skills
(OAKS), and increased expectations for percentage of students passing the ELPA
and the OAKS.
We have been doing more with less for some time now and we have
reached the tipping point. Yet, the Governor’s office and the Oregon Education
Investment Board (OEIB) say, “Show us the results and then we’ll give you the
money.”
The current system of funding for ELL students gives an extra .5 of
the state funding as long as the student is classified as “active”. Active means that the student is
eligible for and receiving ELL services.
There is pressure to exit students out before they are ready using the
AMAO formula which contains goals for the following: percentage of all ELL students exiting the program,
percentage of ELL students who have been in the program five years or more
exiting, percentage of students who gain one proficiency level on the ELPA
test, and percentage of students who pass the state OAKS exams.
If you examine testing results trends, you will see that ELL
students perform below the “all student” population at all grade levels, with
the gap widening in middle school and high school. While the funding provides for the services of the ELL
teacher, there are not a sufficient number of programs in place for
intervention, regular classroom support, and adequate monitoring for recently
exited students who are to be followed for two years.Pushing students out of the program before they are ready to survive
with no support will result in even further widening of the gap.
The proposal presented to the Governor and the OEIB Board was to
restrict the funding to a certain yet unknown number of years, which will
result in even more inappropriate exiting. The report also alludes to some schools being able to move students
faster to proficiency. When I
asked the Governor’s office to provide the names of those places, they have so
far been unable to provide them.
The current funding formula provides little enforcement as to how
the ELL dollars are spent. While
most districts are better now than in the past, there is no mandatory reporting
for showing what percent of ELL dollars are spent on ELL services.
The Governor’s office claims that they will eliminate the
achievement gap. The majority of
corporate education reform policies embraced by that office do little to help
ELL students and in some cases, make things even worse for ELLs. Examples of these are: charter schools that don’t enroll ELLs
proportionate to local demographics, teacher incentive programs that fail to
adequately weight ELL performance, online programs, inter-district transfer
policies mostly accessed by non ELL parents, and new teacher evaluation
programs that will make ELL students less welcome in the classroom as they traditionally
perform worse on the state exams.
· Support to better serve ELL students.
· Eliminate poverty and hunger.
· Educator effectiveness programs that honor wisdom,
experience, and qualifications.
· Address class size issues.
· Reduce or eliminate high stakes testing to offer a
more comprehensive education.
· Mandatory teacher input in professional
decisions. Board members need to
be present when the public is testifying and meeting times should be when
teachers can actually attend.
· Protect student privacy.
· Continue to fund after-school programs when the 21st
Century Grants expire.
· Restore TOSA and mentor positions.
· Restore the annual Closing the Achievement Gap
Conference and Awards where teachers can share best practices.
· Create an online resource for sharing common formative
assessment and resources aligned to standards.
· Teacher-designed professional development.
· Improve technology to share resources and assessment.
· Restore Title I reading positions.
· Restore interventions lost to recent budget cuts.
· Restore school specialists and teacher librarians.
· Fund public libraries.
Wouldn’t it be nice if these were the kinds of things being
brought up at the legislature this session?
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