All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual. Albert Einstein
One size never fits all, but somehow our government’s educational leaders keep trying to find the magic size anyway. They can’t succeed. They won’t succeed. In the meantime, teachers and students pay the price for misguided attempts at Common Core Standards and other wishful thinking.
I’d like to take readers back in time. The school year ending in 2012 had been a long year. I had taught 7th grade language arts and social studies to a group of bilingual students, some of whom had started in the bilingual program in kindergarten and had never managed to pass the exit test. The length of time students were spending in “transitional” bilingual programs had become worrisome and even appalling in my view. If some students never exit, a program should not be labeled transitional. I caught flak from bilingual and other administrators for recommending that students’ parents pull them out of bilingual classes, whether they qualified to exit or not.
The native-language crutch has become one too-often-ignored problem in bilingual education. If all the students in a bilingual class speak Spanish, too often those students will be speaking Spanish to each other in school. They may wake up in a Spanish-speaking household, climb on the bus with Spanish speaking friends, go to Spanish-speaking classes, and then return home for an evening of Spanish-speaking TV with a possible trip to a Spanish-speaking restaurant. That’s the poorest recipe for English-language learning I can imagine. The best way to learn a foreign language is immersion. I regard the plan where we immerse these kids in Spanish to teach them English as one of the damnedest misuses of educational funds I‘ve ever seen.
In my classes, we used English, with some Spanish support for newcomers and a few others. But the shortage of bilingual teachers in Illinois has led to the creation of provisional certification. I took that provisional certification test to become a bilingual teacher. The test is essentially a language test. Illinois provides a 5-year temporary bilingual certification to teachers based on proof that those teachers can speak another language, usually Spanish. Having sat in multiple professional development meetings for bilingual educators, I’d like to share a scary observation: Some of those provisional teachers do not speak English well. At times, I have listened to bilingual teachers who appeared nearly incoherent as they tackled the English-language barrier. A former Assistant Principal and I once discussed this problem. He described how his fourth grade bilingual teacher used to bring a student with her to translate when she met with him.
I’ve raised a boatload of issues here, but I’d like to make just one point for the moment. The Common Core represents an absurd use of time for America’s bilingual students. The PARCC test based on the Common Core failed most of the English-speaking students in many American zip codes.
From Diane Ravitch, at http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/25/opinion/ravitch-common-core-standards/index.html, writing about New York (Updated 7:52 AM ET, November 25, 2013):
The parents weren’t angry because they found out their child wasn’t brilliant, but because most were told by the state that their children were failures. Only 31% of the state’s students in grades third through eighth passed or exceeded the new tests. Among students who are English-language learners, only 3% passed the English standards; among students with disabilities, only 5% passed them; among black and Hispanic students, fewer than 20% passed. The numbers for math were better, but not by much.
In what universe does a multi-day test that sucks up so much time to administer and process benefit those English-language learners? They are guessing their way through the whole damn test for the most part. That’s what that “3%” means.
Strike one against the Core and bilingual education as currently practiced.
Eduhonesty: To Be Continued…