This post is adopted from Ruth’s statement to the Board read during its meeting on May 3, 22.
I think she is powerfully addressing the key contradiction of the current review: the Dual Language program was introduced to improve educational outcomes for recent immigrants, – English Learners, – but is evaluated by how it can be made easier to manage for the administration without inconveniencing too much English Speakers, our middle class kids whose parents just want language immersion in a public school at a walking distance. (Obviously a great thing to have, but having little to do with the stated lofty goal of the program.)
And if you trash your original goal, you can safely present a report without a single datapoint telling us what did you achieve. Which is exactly what we have.
Anyway, – over to Ruth.
– YB
As the Board may remember, the previous updates on the Spanish Dual Language program did not contain a single datapoint showing that the program improved the academic outcome of the English Learners in it.
Indeed, it would be hard to believe that the 90-10 model of the DL program, which immerses the English speaking kids in Spanish for the first few years while depriving the Spanish speaking students from learning English through immersion, can be beneficial for the English Learners.
By law, “school districts must monitor the progress of all English Learners to ensure they achieve English language proficiency and acquire content knowledge within a reasonable period of time.” Surely, if the outcome was successful, the administration would have proudly presented it. Unfortunately, the data from the Illinois Report Card indicates otherwise. The English Learners are doing worse academically under the Spanish DL program, as I discussed in earlier letters to the Board. Moreover, Black students in the schools where the DL program is housed are doing worse on average.
Recently, however, the district updated its information on the DL program, stating that:
- Dual language students of all racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, on average, are on par or outperforming district averages of students in English only classrooms.
- While we do see varying levels of oral language fluency in both languages based on the students’ native language, we are not seeing substantial achievement differences/gaps across racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups of students.
As the district neglected to release the data which these statements are based upon, it is not clear what these statements mean and why they conflict with the State’s data.
For example, in 2019, the State data shockingly showed that 0% of the 5th grade English Learners at Leal and Dr Williams were proficient in Math. And of Dr Williams’ 5th graders, 0% of the Hispanic English Learners were proficient in ELA!
As for other racial minorities in the DL program, at Dr Williams, less than 5% of the Black students were proficient in ELA and Math. Although the data on how many Black students at Dr Williams are in the DL program was not available to us, these numbers are certainly not a reason for celebration!
The statement about the students in the DL program being “on par or outperforming district averages of students in English-only classrooms” is misleading. At the elementary school level, all the Hispanic EL students are channeled into the DL program, and hence there are hardly any students to compare them to within the district.
The Black students at Leal and Dr Williams are doing on average just as badly as black students in the English-only schools.
As for the statement about not seeing substantial achievement gaps across racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups of students – this statement is plainly false. At Leal, there is over 40 percentage point difference between the performance of White students and Hispanic students in both Math and ELA. Only at Dr Willliams there is no significant difference between white and Hispanic students – both groups hit bottom!
What one might conclude here is that the Dual Language program is a great enrichment program for a selected group of native English speakers, which exploits the English Learners, using resources that were intended to help the English Learners in becoming proficient in English.