By Lisa Irish, Arizona Education News Service
As more English Language Learners are reclassified as proficient and more schools earn letter-grade points for that, Arizona education leaders are considering changes to increase students’ academic growth and boost high school graduation rates, essential parts of state’s school accountability system.
ELL students (Arizona Education News Service)
One pressing concern is how the four-hour block of intensive English instruction in reading, writing, grammar and conversation affects high school ELL students.
“They’re not able to take all their credits and graduate – at least on time,” said Jacob Moore, a member of the State Board of Education and the board’s Structured English Immersion Models Review Committee.
“When the task force put together the SEI model, the people that they had in mind were really elementary students,” said Evie Cortés-Pletenik, curriculum director for language acquisition for Phoenix Union High School. “To this day we struggle with the model, because the model doesn’t necessarily fit our program.”
Languages spoken
“We have students from all over the world here,” said Craig Pletenik, communications director for Phoenix Union High School District. “My last count has 65 languages, plus English.”
In Phoenix Union, 14,111 students, or 47 percent, designated Spanish as their primary home language, Pletenik said. One hundred eight students speak Nepalese, 103 students speak Vietnamese, 84 students speak Arabic and 78 students speak Karen, a language spoken in Burma and Thailand, Pletenik said.
“Many of the languages are represented by one, or a few students,” Pletenik said. “It is often dependent on where the hot spots in the world are, with regards to refugees.”
The majority of the 300 English Language Learners at Flowing Wells Unified School District in Tucson speak Spanish, “but we also have students coming with Arabic, Cambodian, Filipino, French, Mandarin and Vietnamese home languages,” said Audrey Reff, director of federal programs for the district.
Glendale Union High School District has about 400 English Language Learners and 26 identified languages, said Kim Means, ELL coordinator.
ELL students’ proficiency and state accountability system
In fiscal year 2013, 23.6 percent of English Language Learners were reclassified as proficient, Dammen said. Fiscal year 2014 numbers are not public yet and cannot be compared with prior years, because of the new AZELLA test that began use in school year 2012-13 and additional exit criteria, Dammen said.
“The Office of Civil Rights required the exit criteria based on AZELLA to require proficient in both reading and writing and proficient overall, whereas beforehand the student only needed to attain proficient overall,” Dammen said.
The number of schools and local educational agencies earning all three ELL points in Arizona’s A-F letter grade school accountability system rose this year, Dammen said. Sixty two percent of all eligible schools earned the points this year, up from 44 percent last year, and 53 percent of LEAS earned the points this year, up from 40 percent last year, Dammen said.
To earn the points, a school/LEA must have 10 or more ELL students evaluated, test 95 percent of students with an ELL need on the Spring AZELLA and have 23 percent or more of all Full Academic Year ELL students across all grades reclassified as proficient.
Structured English Immersion models review committee
The current system of Structured English Immersion – where students receive four hours a day of English language development taught by highly qualified teachers and enter and exit the program based on their scores on the AZELLA proficiency test – is based on legislation passed by the Arizona Legislature, and “the State Board was not involved in that process,” Moore said.
The SEI Models Review Committee of Vicki Balentine, chair, Moore, and Joanne Kramer assumed the duties of the former English Language Learner Task Force through legislation. The committee will gather information and provide recommendations to the State Board of Education for final approval.
“There is a lot of statistical data in terms of how successful SEI is, what works and what doesn’t work,” Moore said. “We need to make a recommendation on this within the strictures of the law. We need to make it more efficient and more effective.”
In April and May the board put together an ELL sub-committee made up of former and current State Board members to review the models, Dammen said. The sub-committee asked the Arizona Department of Education to propose refinements or enhancements to the models, so ADE convened a small group of experts from the field, mainly ELL teachers, to discuss possible recommendations.
Read the full article by Lisa Irish from Arizona Education News Service.
