High Sights | The Hispanic Child

IMAGINE A SCHOOL SYSTEM AS AN INTRICATE FABRIC OF PEOPLE, POLICIES, AND PRACTICES. Then consider that in most school systems, language-minority students are woven into the margins of the cloth--if they are woven in at all.

"Programs to address their unique needs tend to be ghettoized--if not physically, then in administrators' attitudes and practices," note Diane August, Kenji Hakuta, and Delia Pompa in For All Students: Limited English Proficient Students and Goals 2000, published by the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education in 1994. "Large numbers of limited-English-proficient children continue to receive instruction that is substandard to what English speakers receive. This amounts to a two-tiered system of education, with challenging curriculum for some and mediocrity for the rest."

In another paper from the National Clearinghouse, Implementing Bilingual Programs is Everybody's Business, Toni Greigo-Jones charges many schools with "housing two schools"--one for language-minority kids, the other for mainstream kids--in one building. The paper, published in 1995, deplores the "isolation" and "lack of connection" this duality creates for language-minority students.

But she and other advocates for language-minority children see promise in what has become the rallying cry of educators, commentators, and policymakers engaged in school improvement: systemic reform. This she defines as a "holistic approach to reform and change, one that involves all stakeholders and affects all aspects of schooling." Returning to the school-system-as-fabric analogy, educational reform can be seen as the process of recreating the cloth. Systemic reform, rather than patching or mending, shuttles each and every thread through the loom anew, leaving no loose strands. Programs for language-minority students, in this all-encompassing approach to school change, aren't tacked on but woven in.

"Reorienting American schools away from old assumptions--that minority children can learn only basic skills and that bilingualism is a handicap to be overcome--will require a comprehensive approach," August and her colleagues insist. "Reform must be systemic in nature."

So far, they add, "the reform movement has generally side-stepped the particular conditions, needs, and strengths of limited-English-proficient children." Systemic reform hinges on the conviction that academic success belongs not only to kids who live on suburban cul-de-sacs, but also to kids who live in gangland tenements. And to kids who live in remote farmhouses. And to kids who can't scrape up the dollar for a school lunch. Systemic reform rests on the belief that educators must hold high expectations not only for children whose parents speak English, but also for children whose parents speak Spanish and Russian and Hmong.

THESE IDEAS--HIGH SIGHTS, SEISMIC CHANGE--underpin two key pieces of federal legislation that are shaping the way states and districts tackle reform and address the needs of language-minority students: the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and Goals 2000.

The reauthorized ESEA, the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, reduces fragmented services by letting districts blend some pots of money once earmarked for narrowly defined populations. The beefed-up coordination and combined resources that result when schools link programs for disadvantaged, migrant, and language-minority students, for example, benefit all targeted kids. When services are fragmented, as they too often have been in the past, "resources are dispersed, children's needs are only partially addressed, and no one is held fully accountable," August notes.

The legislation also makes more money and services available for limited-English-proficient children by loosening restrictions on Title I eligibility. Before, limited-English-proficient (LEP) kids couldn't get Title I services (special help for disadvantaged students) if their main educational roadblock was language. Now, they can. The rural Santiam Canyon School District in Oregon, for example, is taking advantage of the new flexibility in federal funding. The district's migrant, bilingual, and Title I staff are engaged in joint planning and resource sharing across programs. After all, Title I Coordinator Monica Lawson observes, "Our kids aren't in separate packages."

At the same time that language-minority students are being brought into the Title I fold, Title I programs are expanding to embrace whole schools and districts.

"When large portions of students in a school are in need, the best way to upgrade the educational experience for those students is to improve the program for the entire student body," August, Hakuta, Pompa, and Fernando Olguin note in LEP Students and Title I: A Guidebook for Educators published by Stanford University in November 1995. "Schoolwide programs provide a vehicle for much-needed reform in that regular classroom instruction, rather than supplemental and pull-out instruction, becomes the focus for improving outcomes for students."

Language-minority students stand to benefit from schoolwide Title I programs, August and her colleagues argue, because such students tend to be concentrated in high-poverty schools. But here's where educators encounter a dilemma: how to restructure the whole without short-changing the parts. Traditionally, most U.S. schools have taken one of two tacks: They have banished language-minority students to pull-out programs or thrown them into the mainstream classroom to sink or swim on their own. The U.S. Department of Education, with backing from the Supreme Court, has judged both approaches--segregation and submersion--illegal. So schools must walk a precarious line between the two extremes. They must blend language-minority students into the overall school program at the same time they attend to those students' special needs.

Some segregation is OK, but only when the benefits to students outweigh the detriments, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has said. Whatever program the school or district chooses--ESL, transitional bilingual education, developmental bilingual education, or some other strategy or combination of strategies--it must be carried out in the "least segregative manner" possible, Michael Williams, the assistant secretary for civil rights told OCR staff in a 1991 memo. Segregating students for both academic and nonacademic subjects such as recess, PE, art, and music is one practice that could violate antisegregation laws. Another is keeping students in alternative language programs longer than necessary to achieve program goals.

The Goals 2000: Educate America Act is the other key piece of legislation that bodes well for language-minority children. Goals 2000 codifies the eight national education goals into law and offers funding to states for systemic reform. The act is specific about which students should reach the high standards set forth in the goals: all of them. It defines "all students" as "students from a broad range of backgrounds and circumstances, including, among others, students or children with limited English proficiency." In explaining how statewide reform efforts will improve schools, states must detail how targeted groups such as disadvantaged students, LEP students, and migrant students will benefit.

"LINKING LEP SERVICES TO BROADER, SYSTEMIC REFORM SHOULD HELP ASSURE THAT THESE STUDENTS PARTICIPATE IN AND BENEFIT FROM SUCH REFORM," the U.S. General Accounting Office notes in a 1994 report, Limited English Proficiency: A Growing and Costly Educational Challenge Facing Many School Districts. Eight U.S. schools featured in a new report from the National Clearinghouse on Bilingual Education have made this link successfully. In so doing, they have found fertile middle ground between segregation and submersion, where language-minority students can thrive.

"At all of the exemplary schools, the program for LEP students is an integral part of the entire school's restructuring effort," writes Beverly McLeod in School Reform and Student Diversity: Exemplary Schooling for Language Minority Students published in 1995. "It is neither conceptually nor physically separate from the rest of the school...The exemplary schools have devised creative ways to both include LEP students centrally in the educational program and meet their needs for language instruction and modified curriculum."

In fact, McLeod notes, at these schools, programs for language-minority students "are so carefully crafted and intertwined with the school's other offerings that it is impossible in many cases to point to æthe LEP program' and describe it apart from the general program.

"At the exemplary schools," McLeod reports, "English language proficiency is not the great dividing line that it is at many schools."

The eight elementary and middle schools described in the report, identified by a nationwide search conducted by the National Center for Research on ultural Diversity and Second Language Learning, "operate on the premise that students are able to participate fully in challenging academic work despite their limited English skills," McLeod writes. The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, sought to identify, describe, and analyze exemplary school reform efforts for LEP students in grades four through eight in three curricular areas: language arts, science, and math.

Here's a sampling, in McLeod words, of effective practices these schools have devised:

Many of the exemplary schools organize students into larger-than-class groupings such as "families," "houses," "wings," or paired classes. Within these larger units, students can be grouped in various ways for different instructional purposes. For example, each seventh-grade "family" at a middle school might include about 25 LEP students and 60 English-proficient students. The LEP students might be instructed in social studies in a self-contained sheltered or bilingual instructional format, but be integrated with English-proficient students in science classes. These kinds of creative groupings give schools the ability to include all students by sometimes mixing different (language and ability) groups heterogeneously, and sometimes dividing them for instruction geared to their particular needs.
Teachers guide students into collaborative learning by making extensive use of cooperative work groups. The use of cooperative groups is particularly valuable for LEP students for several reasons. If their group includes a native language mate whose English is more proficient, they can get immediate clarification if they don't understand what is being said. Even if no peer translator is available, LEP students working with other students on a common task are more likely to be able to understand and participate than if they struggled alone to comprehend directions from a teacher or textbook. LEP students in cooperative groups are also given many opportunities for exactly the kind of informal, face-to-face conversation that can strengthen their English skills and their sociolinguistic competence.
While English acquisition and literacy development are viewed by the exemplary schools as primary goals for LEP students, an equally important objective is engaging in challenging work in other academic disciplines. These schools subscribe to the notion that all students are capable of a high level of serious scholarship, and they offer a rigorous curriculum to all students, regardless of their English language ability. A class of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders at one school uses laptop computers and Hypercard software to produce multimedia book reports. Middle school students at another school conduct scientific investigations of water quality and ant behavior.
The schools make meaningful connections across academic disciplines. Their curricula reflect the kind of integration, depth, and hands-on approaches recommended by educators to guide students into critical thinking and complex understanding.
Students are encouraged to use language meaningfully. This means allowing them to use their native language to ask or answer questions when they are unable to do so in English.

THE SHIFT IN THINKING THAT SYSTEMIC REFORM REQUIRES is a shift from seeing children's differences as negatives to seeing them as pluses. In current reform lingo, it means moving from a "risk" model to a "resiliency" model. In a 1995 position paper, Educational Reform and Its Effect on Migrant Education, Oregon's Migrant Education Service Center points out that the migrant lifestyle, usually viewed as an educational deficit, actually fosters multilingualism, adaptability, cultural understanding, appreciation for the value of work and family, and a sense of responsibility--strengths that schools can and should build on.

The new federally funded Northwest comprehensive technical assistance center operated by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory will help schools move from risk to resiliency, from fragmentation to unification, from tracking to inclusion. The center's focus, says Director Carlos Sundermann, will be on "changing the mind-set of school and community collaborators from viewing language- and ethnic-minority students and their families as problems to looking at national heritage, culture, and customs as resources for the further exploration and growth of all children and teachers."

Sources of Assistance in Designing Programs for Language-Minority Students

Northwest Regional Assistance Center

In keeping with education's new emphasis on systemic reform, integrated services, and integrative curriculum, schools receiving federal dollars to serve special student populations can turn for help to a network of new "megacenters" offering one-stop assistance. The U.S. Department of Education has created 15 regional comprehensive technical assistance centers to provide training and technical assistance encompassing Title I, Indian, migrant, bilingual, and drug education-categories formerly served by separate assistance centers in each region. The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, in partnership with the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians and Salish-Kooteni Community College, has been designated to operate the center serving the states of Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. The Lab will also assist the center serving Alaska, operated by the South East Regional Resource Center in Juneau. For information, call Director Carlos Sundermann at (503) 275-9479.

Center for National Origin, Race, and Sex Equity

As the federally funded desegregation assistance center for Region X, operated by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, the equity center assists Northwest schools with preparing and implementing desegregation plans; identifying and promoting awareness of biased and discriminatory actions; eliminating use of biased textbooks and materials; and developing procedures for nondiscriminatory student placement, among other services. Services aimed specifically at improving educational opportunities for language-minority children fall into such categories as language assessment, instructional program development, community support, staff recruitment, parent and student communication, and testing procedures. For information, call Director Joyce Harris at (503) 275-9664.

Office for Civil Rights, Region X, U.S. Department of Education

The Office for Civil Rights investigates allegations of civil rights violations and initiates investigations of compliance with federal civil rights laws in schools. Equity for limited-English-proficient students is a priority area. In response to requests from school districts for help in designing plans for better serving language-minority students, the office has developed an outline of a model plan. The model plan spells out the elements that an alternative language program must include to meet federal guidelines. It also includes a glossary of terms, a policy update, several flow charts, sample home-language surveys, a chart of exit criteria, and an assessment tool, among other materials. For information, call Patricia Yates at the Region X office in Seattle, (206) 220-7924.

State Education Agencies

Under the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, state education departments must help each school and district affected by the state school improvement plan to develop the capacity to comply with school improvement requirements, targeted assistance, and schoolwide requirements. Assistance should include: School Support Teams to provide help to schoolwide programs and, if funds are sufficient, to high-poverty schools or schools in need of improvement; Distinguished Schools that serve as models and provide support to other schools; Distinguished Educators to provide intensive and sustained help to the schools and districts furthest from meeting the state's student performance standards and to schoolwide programs. For information, call the compensatory education specialist at your state education department.

National Resources

The Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs of the U.S. Department of Education will help states identify appropriate assessment measures for Title I students in languages other than English. For information, call (202) 205-9157.
The Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language Learning, through funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, has developed a school improvement system specifically focused on limited-English-proficient students. To order Effective Schooling for Second Language Learners: A School Assessment System by D.L. August and C. Pease-Alvarez, call (202) 429-9292.
The National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education is creating a database of persons who speak a language other than English who are willing to serve as resources to schools. The clearinghouse will be working with comprehensive technical assistance centers to provide this information to schools. For information call (800) 321-NCBE.

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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01
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