Leaders’ Concerns Grow Over NCLB’s Impact on Bilingual Ed
Christine Senteno     [Photo]

As the California Association for Bilingual Education prepares for its annual conference March 1-4 in San Jose, Calif., Latino experts are expressing frustration that support for the pedagogy, particularly at a national level, may severely limit educational opportunities for non-English-speaking students.

Another concern they express is that while the number of English Language Learners (ELLs) continues to increase, federal funding has stagnated.

Martha Hernández, president of the CABE board of directors, says the need for improvement in the No Child Left Behind legislation will be a focus at the conference, where more than 5,000 are expected to attend.

James Crawford, president of the National Association for Bilingual Education, sees the law as an insidious threat. "NCLB dumbs down curriculum rather than giving kids a full, well-rounded education. It just teaches to the test. Teachers are under pressure to make yearly targets and they feel they are being blamed when kids fail."

California education consultant Norm Gold, a nationally recognized authority who was with the California Department of Education for 21 years, calls NCLB’s requirements for the nation’s five million English Language Learners "absurd," stating, "It's a train wreck just waiting to happen."

Another expert, Josué González, who was the founding director of the federal government's Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs in the U.S Department of Education (renamed by the Bush administration as the Office of English Language Acquisition), says bilingual education as we know it is a "done deal" because the federal spotlight is on passing NCLB tests.

In January 2002, President Bush signed the NCLB Act into law. The legislation holds schools accountable for the performance of all students, including English Language Learners. ELLs tend to be immigrants or the children of immigrants.

In the 1993-94 school year, there were three million students in ELL programs. Ten years later that number jumped to its present five million-plus, a 65 percent increase.

According to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, more than 80 percent of ELL students are Latinos, and as their numbers rise, there are fewer programs and more restrictions.

For the fifth year in a row, the Bush administration is freezing funding in its 2007 budget for ELL programs at $669 million.

Calculations by Democrats on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce show the shortfall will deprive more than 63,000 children assistance in learning English but they will still be required to take and pass standardized tests. In some cases, ELLs will be denied a high school diploma if they cannot pass exit exams required by states such as California.

Should school districts and teachers focus on the high stakes testing that is encouraged by the federal program rather than using valuable instruction time to improve students’ skills in their home language and English, Crawford asks?

Teachers and administrators are under pressure to increase their Annual Yearly Progress scores; otherwise they can lose funding, their jobs or even have their schools shut down.

Gold states he has seen good bilingual programs shut down because of the shift in focus. In many cases, schools are being labeled as failures even though students are proficient, he says. Schools can teach a room full of third graders how to speak English in two years but since they are not able to pass the standardized test until fifth grade, the school is labeled as a failure, he adds.

CABE's Hernández says, "We are hoping that NCLB becomes more ELL friendly. We are all for accountability but we want to ensure the law is doing what it is supposed to do. The effectiveness of the sanctions for low-performing schools needs to be changed. Otherwise it undermines the effect of programs for ELL students."

González emphasizes change needs to come from the district or local level. "We are going to become a bilingual society anyway. It is just not going to happen in the schools."

(Christine Senteno is a reporter with Hispanic Link News Service. She may be reached at Christine@hispaniclink.org)

© 2006. Hispanic Link News Service
02/26/06
END