English Language Learner Program Addresses Bedford’s Changing Demographics

December 7, 2012

By Kim Siebert MacPhail

Image (c) Del Mar School District, CA
Image (c) Del Mar School District, CA

Dr. Susan Rozen, head of the fledgling English Language Learner (ELL) program in the Bedford Schools, presented an overview to the School Committee last Tuesday of the one-year-old state- mandated initiative.

ELL is defined by Chapter 71A of Massachusetts General Laws as “support [for] students who have difficulty performing ordinary class work in English due to problems handling the English Language.” The statute says that “the government and the public school have a moral obligation and a constitutional duty to provide all of Massachusetts’ children, regardless of their ethnicity or national origins, with the skills necessary to become productive members of our society. . .”

Rozen, who has worked in the Bedford Schools for a number of years as the Reading Program Administrator, provided the School Committee with data that illustrated a rapid rise in ELL students. She reported that if the current trend continues,by 2020, 1 in 5 Massachusetts school children will need ELL support. Rozen added that close to 80% of ELL students now enrolled are low income and that the population has the highest drop-out rate—31.9%—of any educational cohort.

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Looking at a how many languages other than English are represented in Bedford’s ELL population, Rozen said that the number now stands at 25, up from 19 just a few years ago.

ELL students can be sorted into several subcategories, Rozen said:

“We have those who are high-functioning but still need ELL services, and many of those students have parents who are working in the high-tech industry. We have a few students from Hanscom—children of soldiers who get married overseas [for example].

“We have students who were educated in a foreign country but have limited-to-no English skills. The advantage of these students is that they have the literacy to use as a context for learning a second language. . .but it’s still traumatic for these students. . . .One student at the high school is struggling. She doesn’t know how to go into the cafeteria and select foods. She  cries because she’s lonely. She can’t speak English to any of the other students.

“There’s another population—students with interrupted formal education [the acronym is SIFE] that is really hitting us hard in Massachusetts. These students are those that come to us from extreme poverty, war-torn countries, and refugee camps. Their educations have been interrupted. We have to sort of backtrack. The other problem is that they’re traumatized. They can’t concentrate. They’ve seen atrocities that we cannot even relate to in the United States.

“The other population that you’ve probably heard [about]is students from the academically impoverished. These are homeless students. The state is responsible for finding them homes and placements, so we have those in our community, too. The difference is that this population is functionally illiterate and they cannot relate to learning a second language. They can’t relate writing or reading to another language that they’ve already learned.”

Adding together the various subcategories, Bedford has about 100 ELL students, Rozen said. The Schools are expecting another group of such students on December 10 so Rozen says the current count will be soon outdated.

“Anytime I give Jon [Sills, Bedford Superintendent of Schools] the number, I tell him, ‘Just blink, because the number’s going to change,’” she said.

As a complicating factor, the state mandates that all documents that go home to ELL students must be translated into their home language. This is hard to comply with, both because of the cost and the lack of translators.

Rozen believes that once testing is completed this January and February, many students now receiving ELL support will move out of the program because they’ve become proficient.

Looking at how the demographic changes have altered MCAS results over the years, Rozen noted that the most recent tallies show far more failures in English Language Arts among ELL than in the 2006 to 2008 time frame.

“What we see slaps us in the face. It’s a little astounding. My plans for the future are to change this.”

This same scenario is playing out across the state and around the country. In response, new instruction and assessment standards—called WIDA (World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment)—have been developed so that all teachers, no matter whether they are strictly ELL instructors or regular classroom faculty, can improve English language learners’ outcomes. Twenty-seven states, including Massachusetts, have joined the WIDA consortium.

“As part of certification renewal, all teachers will have to become SEI [Structured English Immersion] endorsed,” Rozen said.  Current teachers will have the opportunity to take professional development courses to become WIDA endorsed. New teachers coming out of graduate school must also be WIDA certified in order to attain their degrees. Rozen believes that these changes will equip teachers with more tools to work with the ELL population.

Superintendent Sills added, “The impetus [for this requirement] is that, at the national level, we are failing this population and the statistics bear that out. This is Massachusetts’ response to the federal mandate. In terms of our own practice [here in Bedford], I think we have been quite successful, but the intensity and complexity and number of kids is really changing. We don’t know yet—we’re untested—with that complexity, particularly with the SIFE students, who don’t have the language or the skills.”

One way in which Bedford has altered its practice is that, rather than pulling students out of class for English instruction, Rozen and the ELL teaching staff now provide support within the regular classroom. This strategy means that course content and language skills are tied together.

“A lot of the classroom teachers, they’re concerned,” said Rozen.“They have these students in their class who don’t speak English; they don’t know what to do. So as our population increases, we’re going to need to get these teachers more trained, and in that sense this new initiative will help because it will give them the education they need.”

School Committee members, while understanding the problem, expressed concern that this requirement— to which the  Commonwealth has allocated a mere$7M state-wide—is yet another minimally-funded mandate and that regular education students are not receiving adequate attention because teacher time is spent on struggling ELL students.

Committee member Brad Hafer summed up these concerns. “This country has a long tradition of welcoming immigrants and folding them into our country. . . .But when you look at the numbers that you’re showing us. . .you can see how unpredictable and challenging this is. How do you model or plan for that? I worry about the impact to other kids when 20% of their class doesn’t speak English. . . .This is definitely challenging for us.”

Sills added that teachers are very stressed by the situation. “The teachers are feeling very stretched by this. . . .We have some wonderful support systems, but the whole system is being taxed at this point,” he said.

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