CENTER
FOR RESEARCH ON EDUCATION, DIVERSITY & EXCELLENCE NATIONAL STUDY SHEDS LIGHT ON IMPACT OF SCHOOL PROGRAMS ON LANGUAGE MINORITY August 27, 2002 Contact: Barbara McKenna (831.459.3521); mckenna@cats.ucsc.edu FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SANTA CRUZ — By the 2030s, students whose first language is not English will make up an estimated 40 percent of K-12 student population in the United States. Although a range of programs exists to serve these students, there has been little conclusive data to date to indicate which programs are the most effective and why. As this demographic grows, determining which programs are effective is becoming increasingly more vital. A newly released national study, conducted through the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE), presents in-depth data on the effectiveness of various programs and recommendations on design, implementation, and evaluation for education reform for language minority students. Titled "A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students' Long-Term Academic Achievement," the study was conducted from 1996-2001, by Wayne P. Thomas and Virginia P. Collier, professors of education at George Mason University. It includes quantitative and qualitative research findings from urban and rural research sites in northeast, northwest, south-central, and southeast U.S. The study examines the types of school programs provided for linguistically and culturally diverse students and the resulting long-term academic achievement of these students. It concludes by proposing answers to urgent policy questions at federal and state levels. The report focuses on five school districts and examines more than 210,000 student records (a record includes all the school district records for one student collected during one school year). More than 80 primary languages were represented in the student samples, but the data analyses in three of the five research sites focused on Spanish speakers — 75 percent of the U.S. language minority school-age population. The study focuses on English language learners students whose first language is not English and who are not fluent in English in grades K-12 — the demographic group that most U.S. schools are currently under-educating. Although this project began in 1996, it incorporates knowledge from research underway since 1985. Thomas and Collier established agreements with participating school districts to follow every language minority student who entered the school district for every year of his/her attendance in that district. Their research tracked students based on each program type attended (bilingual, ESL content, mainstream, two-way immersion, etc.) and by cohorts (grouped by socioeconomic status, primary and second language proficiency upon entry, prior schooling, etc.). To track student achievement, they used results from measures administered by the school district, including standardized test scores. The complete study can be found on the CREDE website at: http://www.crede.ucsc.edu/research/llaa/llaa.html Attached are the following: ##### Program Types The study focused on student outcomes from eight major program
types for language minority (LM) students: Spanish Achievement: A goal of one-way and two-way bilingual programs is to graduate students who are fully academically proficient in both languages of instruction Thomas and Collier include in their study a summary of native-Spanish-speakers' long-term achievement on nationally standardized Aprenda 2 and SABE tests in Spanish Total Reading and Spanish Total Math. Reading: Thomas and Collier chose the reading subtest of the standardized tests as the "ultimate" measure of attainment, because LM students' reading scores were consistently the lowest among the subjects and because it is the measure that most closely correlates with the standardized tests required for admission to post-secondary Other Subjects: Student achievement in all other subjects is also
reported in this study. Influence Of Student Background On Student Achievement: This portion of the study examines how student achievement is affected by socioeconomic status, number of years of primary language schooling, and gender differences. ##### A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students' Long-Term Academic Achievement Major Policy Implications A brief overview of some policy implications is presented here.
The full document can be viewed at: http://www.crede.ucsc.edu/research/llaa/1.1_conclusions.html * The authors found that enrichment 90-10 and 50-50 one-way and two-way developmental bilingual education (DBE) programs (or dual language, bilingual immersion) are the only programs found to date that assist students to fully reach the 50th percentile in both their native language and English in all subjects and to maintain that level of high achievement, or reach even higher levels through the end of schooling. The fewest dropouts come from these programs. * Parents who refuse bilingual/ESL services for their children should be informed that their children's long-term academic achievement will probably be much lower as a result, and they should be strongly counseled against refusing bilingual/ESL services when their child is eligible. The research findings of this study indicate that ESL or bilingual services, as required by Lau v. Nichols, raise students' achievement levels by significant amounts. * When English language learners (ELLs) initially attend segregated, remedial programs, these students do not close the achievement gap after reclassification and placement in the English mainstream. Instead, they maintain or widen the gap in later years. Therefore, their average achievement NCE at reclassification should be as high as possible, since this is likely to be their highest achievement level that they reach during their school years. Ideally, instructional gains are best accomplished in an enrichment (not a remedial) program. * Students with no proficiency in English must not be placed in short-term programs of only 1-3 years. In this study and all other research studies following ELLs long term, the minimum length of time it takes to reach grade-level performance in second language is 4 years. Furthermore, only ELLs with at least 4 years of primary language schooling reach grade-level performance in a second language in 4 years. As a group, students with no primary language schooling (either in home country or host country) are not able to reach grade-level performance in a second language. * The strongest predictor of second language student achievement is the amount of formal primary language schooling. The more primary language grade-level schooling, the higher the achievement in the second language. * Bilingually schooled students outperform comparable monolingually schooled students in academic achievement in all subjects, after 4-7 years of dual-language schooling. * Students who receive at least 4-5 years of grade-level primary language schooling in their home country before they emigrate to the U.S. typically reach the 34th NCE (23rd percentile) by 11th grade when schooled all in English in the U.S. in an ESL Content program, and then the mainstream. These students are on grade level when they arrive, but it takes them several years to acquire enough English to do grade-level work, which is equivalent to interrupting their schooling for 1 or 2 years. Then they have to make more gains than the average native-English speaker makes every year for several years in a row to eventually catch up to grade level, a very difficult task to accomplish within the remaining years of K-12 schooling. * The highest quality ESL Content programs close about half of the total achievement gap. * When ELLs initially exit into the English mainstream, those schooled all in English outperform those schooled bilingually when tested in English. But the bilingually schooled students reach the same levels of achievement as those schooled all in English by the middle school years, and during the high school years the bilingually schooled students outperform the monolingually schooled students. * Students who receive at least 5-6 years of dual language schooling in the U.S. reach the 50th NCE/percentile in second language by 5th or 6th grade and maintain that level of performance, because they have not lost any years of schooling. Students who are raised in a dual language environment need at least 4 years of schooling in primary language and 4 years of schooling in second language to achieve on-grade level in either of the two languages. Providing bilingual schooling in the U.S. meets both needs simultaneously, typically in 4-7 years, leading to high academic achievement in the long term. * Bilingual/ESL Content programs must be effective (at least 3-4 NCE gains per year more than mainstream students are gaining per year), well implemented, not segregated, and sustained long enough (5-6 years) for the typical 25 NCE achievement gap between ELLs and native-English speakers to be closed. Even the most effective programs can only close half of the achievement gap in 2-3 years, the typical length of remedial ELL programs. Therefore, short-term, remedial, and ineffective programs cannot close the large achievement gap and should be avoided. * An enrichment bilingual/ESL program must meet students' developmental needs: linguistic (primary language/second language), academic, cognitive, emotional, social, physical. Schools need to create a natural learning environment in school, with lots of natural, rich oral and written language used by students and teachers (primary language and second language used in separate instructional contexts, not using translation); meaningful, ‘real world' problem-solving; all students working together; media-rich learning (video, computers, print); challenging thematic units that get and hold students' interest; and using students' bilingual-bicultural knowledge to bridge to new knowledge across the curriculum. ##### |