Success rates vary greatly with English learners

Eighteen students sit in Rachel Mangum’s classroom at Desert Shadows Middle School, practicing new vocabulary words to describe how to protect the environment.

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“When we throw trash into a garbage can, we seldom think where it is going,” reads one girl, slowly, to a small group at the Apache Junction school.

One student doesn’t understand her. She repeats herself. Someone explains what “seldom” means.

In Gilbert, Juanita Martin sits at a small table with six first-graders at Oak Tree Elementary School.

She helps Daniel Hwang as he tries to think of a word ending in “ss” to write on the board.

“How about a bass? It’s a type of fish,” she says, then helps him sound out the word phonetically.

According to state data, the non-English speakers at these two schools are more likely than their peers at most other East Valley schools to learn English and to shed their status as “English-Language Learners.”

Responding to new legislation, the state is preparing to change the way it educates its English learners this fall. As part of those changes, there will be more pressure placed on schools to successfully move English learners to speaking proficient English — and to do it more quickly.

Schools measure what they call “reclassification rates,” which show the percentage of those students who become proficient in English each year.

Leading districts in the East Valley is the Gilbert Unified School District at 20 percent.

Martin said many factors play into Oak Tree Elementary’s success — the school moved 39 percent of its English learners to English proficiency last year — including student motivation and parent involvement. But she believes the school’s format for teaching students plays a key role, too.

“I think the mix of inclusion (in mainstream classrooms) and pulling them out for blocks helps,” she said.

Close behind Gilbert is the Apache Junction Unified School District with 19 percent of English learners becoming proficient last year.

John Stollar, the state’s associate superintendent for accountability, said looking at these reclassification rates is one of the best ways parents can judge how well a school is teaching English.

It is also a way for the Arizona Department of Education to give schools feedback on their success, he said.

“Since I’ve been in the office, I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the reclassification rate,” he said. “That’s because our current state average is about 12 percent annually. I don’t believe that is really a good indication that we are being really successful with our (English learners).”

The only way for English learners to exit the program is to pass the state’s English test, the AZELLA or Arizona English Language Learner Assessment, administered once a year.

Starting next year, until students can pass that test, they will have to spend four hours per day in a separate English-learner-only classroom.

The state has said it expects most students to pass the AZELLA after one year. And if those students aren’t able to exit the program after two years, schools will no longer receive extra funding for them, said Giovanna Grijalva, an education lecturer at Arizona State University.

Proficiency, according to the state’s standards, is defined in five different areas — writing mechanics, writing expression, speaking, reading and listening.

Proficiency in English for kindergartners is defined by skills like speaking with past and future tense — while allowing for occasional errors. [CORRECTION: In the previous version it was incorrectly stated that  proficiency for kindergartners is defined by speaking with past and future tense — while allowing for errors.] At the high school level, students must recognize and interpret “irony, sarcasm, and humor in a variety of interactions.”

Not everyone believes that comparing reclassification rates is a fair method to judge the way a school is helping students reach proficiency.

Katy Cavanaugh, assistant superintendent in the Scottsdale Unified School District, said it is also important to look at AIMS scores and teacher assessments indicating how well students are grasping English in social situations and math, science and social studies.

Also, rates will be lower in poorer school districts because those children are facing additional hurdles, said Patricia Gándara, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s huge linguistic isolation in those schools. Those kids are in neighborhoods where they may never be exposed to English other than in the school. They come to school and the school just dumps English in with them. Their progress is very slow,” said Gándara.

She also said children in wealthier schools often enter school with more English knowledge.

Stollar of the education department disagrees with using that as an excuse for the differences in rates.

For example, at Desert Shadows in Apache Junction 42 percent of students come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. Yet the school still managed to help 31 percent of its English-learners acquire the language last year.

“I spent 30 years of my life as an elementary and high school principal and I will tell you that schools will always shy away, and say it’s a multiple-factor situation, etc. But it’s one of the only measures we have of knowing how well a school is doing at getting kids proficient in English. And that’s our prime goal,” Stollar said. “We will be going out and monitoring schools and making sure they are achieving, and our department has been very clear with schools that one measure we’ll be using is reclassification.”

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Tribune writer Amanda Keim contributed to this report.