The meetings of the Board of Education of the Urbana school district on October 11 and 18 were fascinating spectacles of the school bureaucracy handling (thus far, successfully) the populace around the contentious issue of converting the Leal school into the sole home of the district’s Dual Language (DL) program, ending its neighborhood school status.
The administration prodded quite a few of their employees to testify to the necessity of consolidation. (Two co-opted fellow travelers1Dr. Felipe Menanteau and Mr. Cord Schroeder joined, calling “to trust the leaders.”) The teachers and staff mobilized by the district presented versions of the same broad argument, appealing to the need of equity.
Equity, a notoriously difficult to codify concept (most frequently defined through a version of the kids watching a game over the fence cartoon) is one possible framing of the problem.
The old good idea of the civil rights is another, and perhaps one easier to operationalize. Regardless of one’s views on the neighborhood status of the Leal Elementary, we all should agree that civil rights of English Learners should be of primary importance in any decisions by all school districts and by all Boards of Education involved.
The federal government agrees with this stance: the responsibility to ensure that students with limited English proficiency can meaningfully participate in their educational programs and services is shared by the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.
To help the State Boards of Education, and the school districts follow the civil rights laws, these offices issued a Dear Colleague Letter,2The genre of DCLs is used by federal agencies to communicate with the bodies outside their direct control, but relying on federal funding: go too brazenly against the spirit of the guidance, and the funding will be withdrawn. English Learner Students and Limited English Proficient Parents. The DCL was issued back in 2015, but is still operational.
That DCL presents a quite detailed and clear guidance on what school districts should do. And that is not what we see in USD116.
According to the Civil Rights Offices, “EL programs must be designed and reasonably calculated to enable EL students to attain both English proficiency and parity of participation in the standard instructional program within a reasonable length of time.” (DCL, p6)
Tell that to some of the DL consolidation zealots, they’ll scoff and roll their eyes. To them, the goal of the program is to help the English Learners to keep their native language (so they’ll be able to talk to their folks back home, as they frequently insist.3Never mind that majority of the English Learners in Urbana’s Spanish DL program were born in Illinois.)
Some of these enthusiasts go even further, maintaining that English language should be fought. To quote MB, a Dual Language teacher “…the reality is that English will always have that power and we are working so hard to combat it, but we’re not winning every day…” 4from Citizen Statement to the Board, 10.18).
Whether the teachers’ or the administrators’ mindsets are the root cause, but English Learners are not really taught English in DL program in Urbana. In kingergarden, and in the first grade, essentially all of the instruction (90%) is in Spanish.5Worth noting that in Houston, TX school district, a huge organization with enormous experience in educating English Learners, and, incidentally, the site of one of the blockbuster studies of Collier and Thomas, an overwhelming majority of the DL programs are 50/50 (and not one school has less than 20% of English classes in K-5). The ACCESS scores – the measurement of proficiency of English Learners, – dropped dramatically since the rollout of Spanish DL program in Urbana.
It is surprising though, that the very same teachers highlight how bad their EL students’ English is. Here’s CP, a DL teacher: “year after year I have worked with my students to practice and build confidence with keywords and phrases so that they need to be able to interact with monolingual adults in our school and I still see so many students who are not comfortable doing so…”6from Citizen Statement to the Board, 10.18. (Mystery of the century: why, indeed, is this happening year after year?)
LS, another DL teacher, seconds: “people who are not <…> in the thick of the Dual Language program, who are not a part of this, they really will struggle to understand what that feels like, to be a person who can’t go out into the community and ask any person on the street where’s this bus stop…“7from Citizen Statement to the Board, 10.11.
(I am not in the thick of the Dual Language program, but as a parent who pulled my older kids through two language shocks, first in Germany, to where they came as 5 and 6 years olds, and then in the US, at 10 and 11, I do know what it feels like, when the kids are not speaking the language. I would go berserk if someone told me that public schools should refuse to teach my kids the language spoken around them. Luckily, no one did.)
So, the district (perhaps, intentionally) ignores the federal goal on ensuring speedy English proficiency for ELs, by all indications failing it. Well, mistakes happen. But the district also makes everything humanly possible to avoid learning from their mistakes: by failing to do their own analysis8Dr. Wiemelt’s presentation assured the Board in May that cohort data will be ready to analyze before the Leal decision is made; one of the many promises made, promises forgotten. and by withholding the data from those offering help.
This wilful ignorance in itself is another violation of the federal requirements. The Civil Rights Offices are crystal clear: “Meaningful EL program evaluations include longitudinal data that compare performance in the core content areas (e.g., valid and reliable standardized tests in those areas), graduation, dropout, and retention data for EL students as they progress through the program, former EL students, and never-EL students.” The inability of the district to provide hard data on the performance of the DL program is not a small missing detail in the whole project, – it is one of its key deficiencies.
The list of USD116 administration’s violations of the DCL guidelines continues. The Letter implores: “In adapting instruction for EL students, <…> school districts should ensure that their specialized instruction (e.g., bilingual or sheltered content classes) does not use a watered-down curriculum that could leave EL students with academic deficits when they transition from EL programs into general education classrooms.” Well, if you know any parents of elementary school age kids in Urbana, you hear a lot about that common retort by the teachers: it just takes longer in the DL! All will be fine in the end. No, it won’t, unless the corners are cut, and the kids advance to middle school having troubles reading, writing and counting, coming out of each grade behind their district peers, not just in K-5, but all the way till they leave the system.9I invite Dr. Wiemelt and Ms. Ricconi to refute that claim with the data
More from the Letter: “While EL programs may require that EL students receive separate instruction for a limited period of time, the Departments expect school districts and [State Educational Agencies] to carry out their chosen program in the least segregative manner consistent with achieving the program’s stated educational goals.” Does the planned herding of all English Learners from Spanish speaking countries (whatever their at home language is) into Leal school sound to you as the least segregative manner?10Again, looking at the Houston school district, an overwhelming majority of the DL schools there are strand, not whole. Under the threat of kicking them out of the English support programs altogether?
When I started to look into the district’s Dual Language program, I was perfectly agnostic about its virtues or demerits. I was expecting to see just the usual degree of mismanagement and ineptitude. But even the fragmented bits of information from FOIAs and the mandatory open data paint a picture of the district severely handicapping, for no legitimate reasons, the education of the immigrant families’ kids. Whichever pain the administrations’ plans to inflict on the middle class families in Urbana, it pales compared to the damage they have been doing, and going to continue to do to that marginalized population.
From the basic principles, a way out of this predicament seems to be not too difficult. Switching to 50/50 DL program mode would alleviate the bilingual teachers shortage and create some freedom of maneuver. One can use that to establish the DL classes in all elementary schools, easing the access to that enrichment program to the middle class families. Introducing rigorous performance tracking could help to identify pathways for accelerating English preparation for the ELs.
But in the current state, these steps are just not feasible. The administration is clearly unable to reform from inside, and the Board is too bound by the equity spell.
Is reporting the civil rights violation to the Department of Justice, indeed, the only way left to stop this show?