NORTHWEST
EDUCATION
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YAKIMA, Washington—At 2:40 on a drizzly spring afternoon, students burst through the weathered metal doors of A.C. Davis High School. A young couple walks toward the parking lot, their arms draped around each other, creating their own island as other students dart around them. Some students head for soccer or softball or track practice or to club meetings; others to after-school jobs or the comforts of home. But for another group, the academic day is not over. These students amble in to a small, portable classroom just outside the main building with their backpacks and book bags and head for one of the computers that circle the small, crowded room.
Heriberto Torres, the coordinator of the program—a short, compact Latino with a broad chest and a tidy mustache—greets each student in energetic, rapid-fire Spanish. After a long day in English language classrooms, many of the 30-plus students seem to visibly relax as they enter the room and fall into the easy rhythms of their native language. Mariachi instruments fill the back of the classroom and brightly-colored, Spanish language posters cover the walls. While most of these students might prefer to be at sports practice or wandering toward the parking lot with an arm around their sweetheart, there is a sense that the hardest part of the day is behind them. Here, there is a feeling of shared culture based on both a common language and each individual’s desire to improve his or her life. The classroom is filled to capacity. For the next two hours and 15 minutes, all lessons are in Spanish.
The portable classroom at Davis is one of several places around the city that house plazas comunitarias, or community plazas. Each offers a facility, computers, an on-site coordinator, and a wealth of educational and cultural resources and services. Here, both students and parents can access a cornucopia of Spanish language content courses via the CONEVyT (pronounced “Cone-aye-Veet”) Portal. CONEVyT—the Spanish acronym for Mexico’s Consejo Nacional de Educación para la Vida y el Trabajo (the National Council for Education for Life and Work)—is part of a national system that offers lifelong education and training opportunities for Hispanic teenagers and adults. The Mexican government created the program more than 25 years ago to meet the needs of the estimated 35 million adults in that country who had not completed school beyond the sixth grade. From the beginning, the program also focused on serving Hispanic immigrants in the United States.
Several Mexican government agencies, including the Secretaría de Educación Pública, the Instituto Nacional de Educación para los Adultos (INEA), and the Colegio de Bachilleres, collaborated to develop the programs and services offered under the CONEVyT umbrella. In purely academic terms, this collaboration resulted in high-quality, Spanish language curricula for more than 150 different courses, ranging from remedial Spanish literacy and math to calculus, physics, and other college-level courses. Initially offered as traditional pencil-and-paper coursework, during the past five years the program has developed into a Web-based “portal,” which has helped spread its popularity throughout the United States. Currently, public and/or private institutions, schools, or districts in 30 different states use the CONEVyT Portal to help English language learners improve their academic achievement. More than 130 plaza comunitaria sites exist in the U.S., while more than 2,000 are scattered throughout Mexico.
Only a few states, however, have truly tapped into the full potential of the CONEVyT program by hosting their own portals, rather than simply accessing the main Mexican educational site. These include California, Texas, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Georgia, North Carolina, and most recently, Wisconsin and Washington.
In May 2005, these last two states held a joint videoconference with Mexican government officials to announce the unveiling of CONEVyT Portal/Plaza Comunitaria projects in their respective states. Mexican President Vicente Fox, Washington state Governor Chris Gregoire, and other high-ranking officials hailed the multinational collaboration and its potential to improve the academic achievement of Spanish-speaking students in the United States.
The CONEVyT Portal in Washington is hosted by the Yakima School District, whose superintendent, Benjamin A. Soria, played a major role in bringing the program to the state. Hosting a portal allows for more customization of the program, explains Nicolas Zavala, the executive director of state and federal programs for the district. “Basically, we have what’s called a mirror site,” says Zavala. “We house the entire program on our own server. In theory, we could just connect to the Oregon portal or the California portal or directly to the Mexico portal, but having our own portal gives us greater control. We can personalize it. We can upload certain courses that another state might not be interested in. Moreover, we also have more control over the registration process, the passwords for the assessments, and other administrative functions. It makes us a lot more independent.”
Hosting a portal also means that a state can shape the CONEVyT coursework to match its own state standards. Soon after the May 2005 inauguration ceremony, the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s migrant/bilingual office formed a course alignment project team, consisting of bilingual, content-area experts from around the state—including 11 from the Yakima School District. For the next several months the team worked closely with Mexican education organizations and the Mexican Consul in Seattle to explicitly align courses to Washington state standards. In the end, 92 of the possible 150 courses were fully aligned and piloted in the fall of 2006.
In 2003 Washington had 490,448 official residents born in Mexico or other Hispanic nations—the eighth largest such population in the United States. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of Mexican-born residents in the state increased by 200 percent. Much of this growth can be attributed to changing trends in agriculture and in the immigration policy. The Yakima Valley, a broad, fertile agricultural plain, is fed by the Yakima River, which starts in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and stretches more than 100 miles to its confluence with the Columbia River in the Tri-Cities. Along the way it is used to irrigate some of the most productive farmland in the country. Hispanic migrant workers have been an important part of this agricultural work since at least the 1960s. Yakima and the smaller towns that dot the valley have traditionally been home to the largest concentration of Hispanics in the state.
In recent years, the shift from fruit orchards to vineyards and hop fields has contributed to a shift in migration trends. More Hispanic workers are staying in the valley year round, and more Hispanic students are filling the schools. According to the most current available statistics there are more than 55,000 Hispanic students in Washington public schools, representing 12 percent of the entire student population. In the Yakima School District that number is closer to 59 percent. Many of these students are English language learners struggling to meet grade-level expectations in the core subject areas. For many students that struggle ends in frustration. During the 2003–2004 school year, for instance, the dropout rate for Hispanic students was 10.2 percent, while the on-time graduation rate for that group was only 54 percent. As Jorge Herrera, the CONEVyT coordinator for both the Yakima School District and the state, says, “We see the CONEVyT program as a way to keep more kids in school, raise the graduation rate, and bring them up to grade level, while they also acquire English.”
The 30-plus students crowded into the Davis High School portable building are only a small sampling of Yakima’s CONEVyT participants. At the Davis site alone, for instance, more than 80 English language learner/migrant students are registered in the program. In addition, more than 100 mainstream students are using CONEVyT courses as supplemental resources for their own academic development—some use the program to study Spanish, or a part of a CONEVyT course to improve their skills in specific content areas, while others take courses (in Spanish) not otherwise offered by the school. Many of these mainstream students have access to home computers and normally come to the plaza comunitaria site only to take exams if needed.
For the many students and parents without access to the Internet, the plaza comunitaria is indeed a portal to opportunities otherwise out of reach. Each site is open to both students and parents four days a week. Students, like those at Davis, have access to their respective plaza comunitaria from 2:45 to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, while parents come in the evenings from six to eight. More than 40 parents are registered at the Davis site. On an average night, between 25 and 30 parents show up to do CONEVyT coursework or to take personal growth classes, such as employment skills, ESL, GED Spanish courses, parenting, or effective communication.
Perhaps the most important features of the program, for students and parents alike, are its flexibility and affordability. All K–9 level courses are free, while grade 10–12 level courses have a small recovery fee of $10 each, which includes all course materials and assessment tools. In addition, all of the courses are designed for those 15 years or older, but participants can find an appropriate course at any level of instruction, from remedial to college-level. “Adding to the flexibility,” says Herrera, “is that none of the courses has a time limit—students aren’t pressured to finish the course within a semester or trimester or whatever. They can go at their own pace and take the tests when they are ready.”
All of this flexibility is meant to remove the traditional barriers to adult learning in the Hispanic community, such as limited English skills, a mobile lifestyle, lack of childcare, the need to hold multiple jobs, and distrust in the standard educational institutions. Here, all coursework is in Spanish and most staff members are bilingual.
For many students, CONEVyT will mean the difference between graduating and dropping out. In Washington state, students must earn 22 total credits to graduate, with a maximum of seven credits taken in electives. Currently, Limited English Proficient students can earn up to 14 of their 22 credits in Spanish via CONEVyT, including core classes such as Algebra I and II, geometry, Biology I and II, Economics I and II, accounting and bookkeeping, one of the two health/fitness requirements, world languages, and occupational education. The only core subject credits students can’t meet through CONEVyT are language arts and social sciences. “The Washington CONEVyT Portal offers content course work in Spanish only; basic language arts and local history aren’t options,” says Herrera, acknowledging the essential need and the political nature of English language instruction. “We want students to learn English. The Spanish language courses are not a replacement for that—they are supplemental.”
For Herrera, the real treasure of CONEVyT is in its electives. Students can earn all seven of their elective credits, but they don’t have to stop there. The program offers advanced-level classes such as physics and calculus, and others—such as philosophy, anthropology, and scientific research methodology—that aren’t offered at the regular school, in any language.
“In the past,” says Herrera, “students might arrive at the school ready for calculus, but end up being placed in a lower-level math class because of their limited English skills. That was a total waste. Now, with CONEVyT, a student will never get stuck in a lower-level or remedial class due to a language barrier.”
Along with these educational opportunities, Herrera says, come hope and dignity. Parents who have never learned to read or write in any language can take ESL classes or Spanish literacy classes—or both—at an appropriate level and at their own pace. They can also earn a GED by taking Spanish language classes or can earn their accredited certification from the Mexican school system.
For Herrera, the only barriers still left are due to the after-school nature of the program. “We would really like to make this available during school hours, like English language online programs such as A+ or NovaNet,” he says. “It’s not fair that a lot of these students have to miss out on sports or can’t take after-school jobs or participate in other activities. If they don’t have a home computer and they really want to participate in the program, they have to make some difficult decisions.”
One other possible barrier is that—beginning in 2008—students will have to pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning, in English, in order to graduate. But Herrera does not see this as a problem. “If anything, CONEVyT will help them pass,” he says. “Transferring knowledge from one language to another is easier than being tested on material you’ve never even studied.”
As the students at Davis High School plunge into their studies a quiet settles over the room. Most of the students are wearing headphones and are deeply immersed in their lessons. Some students are taking tests—including a few taking finals. Others are just getting started with CONEVyT. As Torres surveys the room, he points to one rail-thin boy in a hooded sweatshirt. “This student just arrived from Mexico two days ago,” he says. “He really has no English at all.” Although Torres is whispering in English, the boy seems to sense that he’s being talked about. He shifts slightly in his seat and glances in our direction—swiftly, almost imperceptibly—but in that glance is a mass of emotions: fear, confusion, homesickness, anger, loss. Torres, who was also born in Mexico, seems unfazed. “We’ll get him going,” he says confidently, and turns in another direction.
In this student—surrounded by his Spanish-speaking peers, presented with coursework he is familiar with from Mexico, and guided by an instructor who himself has made this same long journey—it’s possible to see the real power of CONEVyT and to understand the meaning of the plazas comunitarias. 
Original URL: http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/11-03/portal/
This online version is based upon the print version of the magazine. The information contained in it was current at the time of printing.
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Copyright © 2006, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.
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