Teachers Address Education Law

I wish I had the answer! At Wilson, we have dedicated staff members who work with ESOL students. Because the numbers of students are "manageable" for the numbers of teachers and those same students and teachers are so dedicated, they meet with some success. The ideal situation would be to scaffold the tests for students until they have reached a level of proficiency in English that would allow them to "deal" with the test. My guess would be that most of the newcomers, at any school, would find great success if the tests were given in their native languages.

Obviously you understand with genuine empathy what so many teachers in California are facing: the unequivocal foolishness of NCLB when it comes to assessing the skills of students for whom English is not yet a viable language.

Here's an idea. Send Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to Russia for 13 months and then give her a final exam in Russian littered with algebraic word problems and Language Arts inference questions and see how she does. Holy smokes, it's preposterous to think anyone is going to succeed. Yet this is the policy by which she so firmly stands.

There has got to be a better way to approach the issue. Especially since you, as a school and a staff, are the ones being "labeled." It's as if your incompetence is the cause of the circumstance when the truth is, it's your professionalism that is the main force working to better the circumstance. So many teachers are immensely demoralized by NCLB for exactly this reason.

The challenge of improving the abilities of English Language Learners is massive, most probably one of the greatest challenges facing public education in the United States looking out into the next decade. If we continue to "fail" the ESL students and ostracize them and exacerbate the dropout rate by over-testing them without the proper support then we are going to feed an ever-growing subculture of uneducated, illiterate citizenry and suffer the societal ills which run hand and hand with that. However, if we come up with a more sane approach (which I do not think is that hard to do because this one is so insane) we stand a much better chance of making some real inroads.

I wish there was a magic bullet to offer but the fact is that your students will not test well in English until they 1) learn English and 2) learn the academic skills being tested. There are no shortcuts. Language immersion, bridging, cultural relevance, and tapping into prior knowledge - every ESL methodology needs to be implemented. And then patience and time needs to be added to the mix. As I said, there is no magic pill for this stuff.

A tremendous challenge also being faced is that most people incorrectly assume that the second language of which we speak is Spanish and this is not the case. In some California school districts there are over 30 different languages being spoken, from Hmong to Korean to Philippino with so many ESL students at so many different levels of ability that it's almost impossible to meet the needs of all the kids unless you evaluate them one at a time as individual students. (As we should, by the way.)

If the measurements of NCLB do anything, they eliminate the individual identity of the student taking the test and instead view the kid as a mere piece of statistical data to be quantified on a spectrum.

NCLB is telling ESL students to sink or swim and when they sink, they tell them, "Tough cookies, you should have tried harder." Or, "Your teachers are at fault. Blame them." It's as if the legislation were written by people who have no idea what the real "rubber meets the road" challenges are for today's students in our country.

My best advice is to try not to lose perspective. We must be there for the kids almost in spite of how severely NCLB is not.

One of the best advancements we have made in public education the past decade is our ability to respond to children who don't speak the same language as the teacher in the classroom. Any one of us can imagine how difficult this might be for a child. We have only started this academic journey, but it is obvious that our best and brightest minds - like you, Sophia - are part of the ongoing process to help all students learn, even when there is a significant language barrier.

As you know, the ESL component of the NCLB legislation is one of the most hotly contested elements of the law, and all indications seem to point to offering some relief to children and schools that struggle with spoken and written language barriers. This is one area where our federal policymakers deserve a big pat on the back. They have responded publicly with the need to change this part of NCLB, and are working hard to implement more reasonable solutions.