From Learning the Language on 11/25/09.

I’ve been hearing the complaint that California administrators keep ELLs in special programs for financial reasons for nearly a decade, as long as I’ve been writing about English-language learners for Education Week. Ron Unz, the businessman who financed a campaign that persuaded voters to pass Prop. 227, which curtailed bilingual education in California, made the same complaint back in the late 1990s.

It’s true that districts get extra funds in California to educate ELLs. Only 10 states—Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and West Virginia—don’t provide any additional money for ELL students other than what they provide for regular students, according to EPE Research Center data published in Quality Counts 2009.

But that doesn’t mean California administrators are keeping ELLs in programs for years for the extra funding. It could be that they just feel the students need the extra help, and they are worried that such students won’t do well in mainstream classes if they are reclassified before they have really strong English skills.

Learning the Language also posted a followup to the above on 12/01/09.

ASSESSMENT OF LIMITED ENGLISH PROFICIENT STUDENTS UNDER TITLES I AND III OF THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT OF 2001: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STUDENT PERFORMANCE ON THE UTAH ACADEMIC LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY ASSESSMENT AND UTAH CRITERION REFERENCED TEST

Abstract

Federal required states to implement new annual assessments of English language proficiency and also to include nearly all limited English proficient (LEP) students in annual academic achievement testing. The purpose of this project was to investigate the relationship between LEP students’ scores on both assessments. Archived data from one northern Utah school district were analyzed using Pearson product moment correlations and crosstabulations. Correlations were calculated for the whole group and for subgroups, based on grade level, gender, race or ethnicity, length of United States enrollment for students born abroad, birth place (United States, Mexico, or other), and language (Spanish or other). Results indicated that for nearly all subgroups in nearly all subject areas there were statistically significant correlations between Utah’s assessments, the Utah Academic Language Proficiency Assessment (UALPA) and the Utah Criterion Reference Test (UCRT). For the whole group, correlation coefficients of 0.626, 0.434, and 0.570 were found for English, math, and science respectively. Of students with emergent and pre-emergent English proficiency as measured by the UALPA, 60-90% of students received unsatisfactory (level 1) scores on the UCRT subject tests. Results suggested that both the UALPA and UCRT assessed English language proficiency and throws doubt on the validity of using the UCRT to measure the achievement of students with limited English proficiency, especially with students having very limited English proficiency and with new immigrant students. Conclusions, limitations, recommendations for further study, and recommendations for policy makers were discussed.

Read the whole document here.

Download (NMOORE-Masters-Project-Completed.pdf, PDF, 1.42MB)