The gothic saga of Dual Language is approaching a (provisional) climax, to be reached at the Board meeting on October 18, where the proposal of the “Spanish DL Committee” (of, by, and for the USD116 administration) will be discussed.
The outcome we were predicting for some time now, – the consolidation of all Spanish DL programs at Leal school, – is, however, by now far from certain: over the summer, Urbana’s middle class families started to question the wisdom of the proposal on mailing lists and social networks. The district bureaucracy, until recently confident that their equity-centered arguments will silence the opposition, is now hedging its bets. Their plan du jour is to ask the Board to choose (“to seek a straw pole on the follow options,” as they put it) one of the three ways to proceed: to consolidate Spanish DL program at Leal, leave the programs as they are or to postpone the decision till May 2023.
(The original plan, of presenting the DL Committee’s proposal to the Board on October 18, and to let the Board to decide on it in December is still on the district slides. The truth is, these are, well, very busy people, and things got out of hand.)
Politically, shifting the decision to May makes sense. All of the Board seats are up for election in April, and a campaign driven by the enraged parents is the last thing the district bosses want. Yet, the declared reason for the desired postponement should sound legitimate, and so the administration stressed the importance of the future findings by the Systemic Educational Equity LLC (SEE LLC) conducting the Equity Audit, and the recently contracted Center for Applied Linguistic (CAL) doing an evaluation of the DL programs in the district. Both expect to be done with their research by May next year.
We wrote about the SEE LLC a lot in the past, and will address the wisdom of paying to CAL $30K ($3,200 for “development and delivery of PPT presentation“!) for their evaluation later, but we do have deep respect for research, and so spent some time over the last couple of months exploring the landscape.
Here’s what we found.
The existing practices of dual language education was formed by a haphazard process, shaped by state and federal laws, SCOTUS rulings, ballot initiatives, legal challenges, various federal initiatives and local tweaks1. That made the situation quite ambiguous: the school districts have to provide help to kids for whom English is not the native language, but how, is up to them. So the districts, naturally, started to turn to the educational researchers.
In a market economy, where there is the demand, there is supply; the research emerged. Two professors in education, Drs. Collier and Thomas, stand here out: they became the prophets of the bilingual programs and flooded the zone with papers, reports and articles extolling the virtues of a specific mode of educating immigrant kids, the two-way immersion, where they are mixed with the native English speakers and are educated, at least initially, primarily in their mother tongue, delaying their exposure to education in English till later years.
Again, capitalism and all, a cottage industry (see, e.g., Rossell and Baker) of countering Collier and Thomas’ arguments inevitably appeared.
And, we have to admit, it was not an especially hard vocation to pursue. The prolific output of Collier and Thomas was at once shallow and bombastic. They accumulated performance data, paying little attention to who is tested and how. The statistical analyses were minimal, the metrics of success fuzzy, and the outcomes of the studies rigidly predetermined.
Still, their proselytizing worked2. The comically simplistic graphs (like the one on the left) are still replicated in hundreds of reports and presentations (the authors themselves seem to be astonished by their success) as the ultimate proof that two-way immersion, – the method used in our school district, – is the only solution to the problem of educating of immigrant kids (a.k.a. English Learners, ELs).
Most of the research of on which Collier and Thomas build up was done 20-25 years ago. Current literature is ample, and took some time to sieve through.
We focused on the work that addresses the key (to us) question, – how English Learners do in the DL programs. And the results, I’m afraid to say, are inconclusive. Here are just a few examples we looked at.
Padilla et al longitudinal study found benefits of DL programs, but has not matched control groups to the treatment one, and looked into a very idiosyncratic population. Umansky showed that Transitional and Maintenance Bilingual education model, when the immigrant kids are taught in both native language and English without their nonimmigrant peers, is superior to the Dual Immersion version (but had no controls for factors). Vela et al found that DL helps EL performance in math, but told nothing about the comparative group compositions. Watzinger-Tarp et al did a relatively careful matching of the student demographics, and found little impact of the DL modalities has on math performace. Slavin et al shows that Spanish students acquire English equally well under immersion and transitional mode. Serafini et al attempted to do a careful factor analysis of the DL impact on the performance of ELs, and found it small (sometimes positive, sometimes negative).
And so on and so forth.
We should sympathize the researchers: they have to fight an enormous number of confounders, factors that impact educational performance: not just the demographics of the students, but the quality of the teachers, support of the administration, composition of the classes (in USD116, the parents have to sign a pledge to help their kids at home, an implicit sieve), often dynamic of the classes (more successful students stay on; lagging drop off), et cetera, et cetera. Even in the best of circumstances, the researchers have access only to some of the data. And the people who do have it all, – the district administrators, – are unwilling to share them, judging by what we see in the USD116.
So, quantitative literature is inconclusive at best.
Let’s look at the problem from the other angle, through the metaphysical critical theory lens, – after all that’s Dr. Wiemelt’s, the district’s bilingual leader, research specialization.
Dr. Wiemelt’s thesis helpfully tells us what Critical Bilingual Leadership amounts to. “Transformative school principals,” he writes, “must challenge the status quo of schools <…>. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence that situates this theory in relation to the educational success of <English Learners>.”3 But, no worries: “schools that are culturally and linguistically responsive ensure <…> students’ ability to challenge the dominate ideology,” and that is the key metric, according to his thesis.
If you’re not convinced that acquiring working English is the wrong goal for the immigrant kids in elementary schools, listen to another expert on the DL Committee, Dr. Nuñez, a Professor at the College of Education here. She asserts that “Latinx communities are forced to decide whether to surrender to or resist the power of English.” Rather than a useful skill, mastery of English is interpreted as an “assimilative ideology,” so that “to sustain Latinx identities and ways of being, families have engaged in resistance practices…”
While the immigrant families ask for fast and reliable track to English (from Champaign-Urbana to, say, New York), the professional liberators in USD116 are exercising their dominant position over the subjugate population, from threatening to refuse (illegally, most probably) ESL support to immigrant families opting out of DL, to forcing on families speaking Q’anjob’al at home one European colonial language (Spanish) over another European colonial language (English, – incidentally, far more useful for them where they are).
Provision of ESL services is the US law, as established in title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.
It goes without saying that this patronizing attitude is not restricted to Urbana. Morita-Mullaney and Chesnut in their (highly sympathetic to DL programs) article quote Indiana principals who complains that their Hispanic population doesn’t want to enroll their children because… “in Mexico, public education is not highly looked-upon.” This idea, that immigrants are parochially unable to think for themselves and thus the administrator “need to “educate” families about the goals, benefits, and structure of DLI instruction” seems to be utterly pervasive.
If this is not a clearest manifestation of imperial hubris, I don’t know what is.
I have to repeat my mantra: in no way these liberators are driven by an ideology. Ideologies, like the subaltern populations they steer through the educational funnels, are merely props for them to do their performative dances, which somehow became a mean to maintain their careers, prestige, bourgeois lifestyle. Is this because just doing the obvious, – making the education better here and now, – is too boring, lacking the glamour of challenging the dominate ideology? I do not know, and I do not really care. But the bizarre triangulation between the middle-class families yearning (rightly!) for decent education for their kids, the (obvious!) social justice needs, and establishment trends should stop. The USD116 Board of Education let this circus go on for way too long.
1. The history of the dual language programs in this country is remarkably long, and predates even the Bilingual Education Act, a.k.a. Title VII, mandating special education efforts to help kids not proficient in English. It goes back at least to the effort of Cuban exiles in Florida to set up Spanish classes for the refugee students in mid 60-ies. Early 70-ies saw several states establishing programs to educate immigrant kids in their native languages, and then federal laws and Supreme Court rulings followed.
Backlashes followed too, – the infamous Proposition 227 in California passed in ’98 severely restricted the ability of school districts to provide classes in the native language (read, Spanish) to immigrant children, and similar ballot initiatives passed in other states (notably, in Massachusetts, in ’02). Some nasty characters made opposition to bilingual education their pet cause, and spent a lot of money to stop it.
2. In retrospect, the astonishing willingness to accept Two-Way immersion as the bestest way to bring immigrant kids up to speed can be attributed to the despair middle class parents felt about the language education in the US: essentially, their kids were disadvantaged by having no reliable second language when they were leaving high school. The DL programs felt like a miraculous hack: rather than unsuccessfully argue for early education in French or Spanish or Mandarin, one could just press for two-way immersion for ELs, et voila!
3. The table below, we notice, does give some empirical evidence of the collapse of district’s schools ability to teach immigrant grade level English under Dr. Wiemelt’s Critical Bilingual Leadership.
Ruth managed to get access to anonymized results of ACCESS tests, used to evaluate proficiency of the immigrant kids in English, used to reclassify them from English Learner to regular category. The tests are run at the beginning of the school year, so show what happened the year before. The scores range from 0 to 6, and the student is reclassified as (more or less proficient) if the score is 4.8 or above. I looked at how many students in each grade reached that level in Leal and DPW schools, in 19-20 (last pre-pandemic years) and in ’13 (just before DL Immersion took over the district).
| School | grade | ’13 | ’19 | ’20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DPW | 1 | 1/12 | 0/22 | 0/27 |
| 2 | na | 0/18 | 0/26 | |
| 3 | na | 0/19 | 0/16 | |
| 4 | na | 5/25 | 3/20 | |
| 5 | na | 2/17 | 1/18 | |
| Leal | 1 | 1/26 | 1/15 | 0/27 |
| 2 | 4/30 | 1/28 | 0/16 | |
| 3 | 8/22 | 0/40 | 1/17 | |
| 4 | 15/26 | 3/19 | 5/45 | |
| 5 | 3/11 | 5/19 | 0/20 |
In other words, in 2013, more than half of ELs were reaching English proficiency after 3rd grade at Leal, the level we can only dream about today…