I wrote that we don’t really know how our district’s Dual Language program serves the immigrant families. Well, now we do, kind of.
Recall that the district’s Dual Language web page asks (themselves), How are students currently doing in the Dual Language program? and immediately replies:
“Current assessment data suggest the following:
- 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.
- Students are developing bilingual/biliterate skills
- Students are achieving well academically in both languages
- 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.
- Dual language students are interacting and developing cross-cultural, cross-racial, and cross-linguistic relationships like we have never seen before.”
With all the vacuous flourishes in present continuous and that vaguely familiar phrase like we have never seen before, there is a quite cleanly-cut quantitative promise here: on par or outperforming.
Do they mean it seriously? I diligently asked the district what data support these claims. The District duly responded.
(The clever folks of USD116 have, by the way, a peculiar habit of never giving you the data right away, but always transforming your query into a FOIA request. On one hand, this makes sure that their FOIA Officer, Ms. Johnson, coincidentally, the administrative assistant to the Superintendent Dr. Ivory-Tatum, has always a little something to do on the side. On the other hand, it transforms your legit request into a silly nuisance to the august public body. After all, the FOIA requests are recorded, put into the Board of Education minutes, and read at the Board meetings, painting you publicly as a bit of a MAGA troll, trying to disrupt the selfless work by the administration. After all, the training our good old friend, Dr. Dubiel, recommends, tells us to recognize the enemy by looking who files the FOIA requests.)
Whatever the cost, we got the district’s response. It amounted to garbled data on literacy in three elementary schools that run the Dual Language classes just for this academic year. The data are a mess (we asked for a spreadsheet, but the able hands of Ms. Johnson turned them into barely legible PDFs), but clear enough to show that no! dual language program do not outperform “district averages in English only classrooms.”
To be more precise, the performance of students in the DL program is clearly below the district averages as a whole. (Which are appalling on their own right, – say, in the 5th grade 44% of the district students do not meet the grade level expectation.) Meaning the Dual Language classes are even worse compared to their monolingual peers. And that goes not merely for English, but for Spanish as well, in the English Learning (i.e. immigrant) population: forget about the integration, the DL classes fail to teach Spanish-speaking kids to read and write in Spanish!
So, what to make out of this? Two possible interpretations:
- the district knows that the data do not support their public claim, and just go ahead with their truthful hyperbole (after all, DL leadership affinity to Trumpspeak is well established by now), or
- the district has, somewhere, some data that do support their claims, and just decided to violate our FOIA queries to hide them.
Make your own inferences, which is more plausible. But whichever is, never ever expect the district to be straight with you.
Update (5.31) Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson sent us some spreadsheets. I ran them through a code, to visualize the results. Keep in mind that a lot of entries in their tables are empty (they decided not to test some students? why? who knows), and they didn’t indicate any of the Yankee Ridge classes as Dual Language, so the plots pertain only to the Spanish Dual Language programs in Leal and Dr. Williams schools. But here they are:
Another update (6.16) Ruth took the trouble to decipher the pdfs I referred to above and plotted the results – thank you, Ruth!
Her results are on the left. Red shows the performance of ML classes in English; blue and green are the DL performances in Spanish (in K-5), and purple and yellow are their results in English (in grade 5 only).
Takeaways:
- The data are not the same as the spreadsheets. (That the district feels so free to feed us data having little to do with reality makes it prudent to assume that they routinely feed it to everybody else.) Alternative facts, literally.
- In DL classes, the district clearly fails to teach English learners English. The performance of the immigrant kids after 6 years when they allegedly were brought up to speed is abysmal.
Does this look like on par or outperforming? I think it’s fairer to say that DL classes provide equity of failure, at least in teaching Spanish to both immigrant and middle class kids. (I must confess, I just quote a DL teacher who told me this much in these very words.)
Again, we understand: it is a hard job to teach, and even harder to teach well. But not to look for solutions, – no, to claim that the district already is doing a great job for the immigrant kids, while covering an obvious failure: if this is not the textbook imperial arrogance and systemic racism, then I don’t know what is. Perhaps the Doctors in Educational Leadership, so abundantly represented in the administration, could tell us.