Lawsuit over ‘nonsense’ EL program
ACLU sues State, Dinuba Unified
In a special state Senate hearing last month, California’s system of classifying, reclassifying, and teaching English learners came under heavy criticism from educators and advocates, who cited inconsistent and ineffective policies and practices for teaching students who comprise one-quarter of the state’s schoolchildren. On Wednesday, parents and teachers in a small Central Valley town added an exclamation point to the criticism by filing suit against the state and their school district over a curriculum for English learners they say is damaging their children’s chances to learn to read and write.
The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento Superior Court by attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union in California, charges that 6,000-student Dinuba Unified and the state violated their children’s constitutional right to equal education opportunity and federal law mandating sound instruction for English learners. The district adopted, and the state rubber-stamped its approval of a curriculum that “contradicts everything we know about how children learn language,” ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum said in a statement. Teachers in the district who have taught Second Language Acquisition Development Instruction, or SLADI, concluded it was “nonsense,” the lawsuit said.
The ACLU is asking the court to order the district to stop using the program and the state to follow the law and thoroughly evaluate and monitor programs that districts adopt for English learners. Through the lawsuit, attorneys are prodding the state Department of Education and the State Board of Education, which is also a defendant, to begin to face up to flaws in the system for English learners. “As Dinuba goes, so goes the state of California in terms of English learners.”
More than half of elementary school English learners score below basic on the state’s English and math tests. Only 56 percent graduate from high school, and annually only one in ten English learners is redesignated as fluent in English and no longer needing extra help.
In naming Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson as a defendant, the ACLU also quoted from Torlakson’s Blueprint for Great Schools. English learners, it says on the CDE website, “fall further behind the longer they are in California schools, as do low-income students. The curriculum and teaching supports currently in place are not preparing these students for the higher-order skills expected in high school and beyond.”
In a short statement, the state Department of Education said it was reviewing the allegations, then added, “It is unfortunate that the parties chose to file suit rather than making a good-faith effort to meet with state officials to address their concerns.” Since Dinuba Unified has been a Program Improvement district for a half-dozen years for failing to make its standardized test targets under the No Child Left Behind law, the lawsuit notes that the district, through consultants, must approve the curriculums that the district uses for English learners and verify that teachers are trained in them. CDE spokesperson Paul Hefner said that he could not verify if the department sanctioned Dinuba’s use of SLADI.
Dinuba Unified declined comment as well on the allegations. In a statement, Superintendent Joe Hernandez said that he had a “productive conversation” on Wednesday with the plaintiffs, “and the parties have agreed to work together in good faith to avoid costly and excessive litigation.”
Dinuba is a city of 24,000 east of Route 99, midway between Fresno and Visalia. More than 90 percent of Dinuba Unified students are Hispanic and one third are English learners; 70 percent qualify for free or reduced lunches.
Syntax, not picture books, for SLADI kids
Adopted by the district in 2009, Second Language Acquisition Development Instruction is apparently an unorthodox and not a widely used curriculum for English learners. (ACLU’s Rosenbaum said he knew of no other district that uses it.)
SLADI takes a grammar- and spelling-intensive approach to learning English, starting with first and second graders, who learn parts of speech and sentence construction. What students don’t get is exposure to texts that are rich with vocabulary and picture books – fun stories that motivate children to want to learn to read, said Nona Rhea, a 23-year elementary teacher (15 of those years in Dinuba), who was trained in SLADI and has taught it for two years. She is also one of five teachers who signed on as plaintiffs, along with two children, their parents, and a resident of Dinuba worried about the district’s English language programs.
“It cost me sleep at night. I don’t want to see children separated from other kids where they don’t learn the state’s English language arts curriculum,” said Rhea. “I wouldn’t want it for my children or grandchildren.” It also has a scripted curriculum with diagrams of sentences and a K-6 vocabulary and an approach that is inappropriate for first and second graders, she said.
Rosenbaum called SLADI “a ‘Hunger Games’ approach to education whereby adults madly crush the futures of children. SLADI is the equivalent of attempting to teach children how to swim by having them memorize the chemical formula of water.” The district’s Q&A on its SLADI website says that two of the six principles of SLADI are: 5) “Language growth occurs in deliberately created states of productive discomfort. Students must be pushed to a level of discomfort; 6) Error correction is crucial for building language accuracy.”
Before the adoption of SLADI, English learners and English speakers were mixed in heterogeneous classes. Under SLADI, the least proficient English learners attend separate SLADI classes for 2-and-a-half hours daily for half a year, then return to regular classes in January. For more advanced students, as measured by CELDT, the California English Language Development Test, students are pulled out for 45 minutes daily.
The assumption was that students who went through SLADI could then be integrated back into the classroom. But these students have missed a half-year of the state curriculum, Rhea said, without extra help to catch up. “Students assume they are the problem, but they’re not.”
The lawsuit says that the two unnamed 8-year-old plaintiffs’ reading scores on CELDT regressed considerably after taking SLADI. One child was assigned the program in first and second grades. Both children’s parents say they’re worried their children have not learned how to read.
The lawsuit also says that test scores for English learners as a whole have declined as a result of SLADI. Last month the Dinuba Teachers Association took the position that the district should not have adopted a program that “defied accepted research and common sense,” the lawsuit said. The teachers added, “(F)or our K-2 students this is a backwards model that could prove detrimental to their futures. Teachers cannot reconcile this in their minds and hearts.”
This lawsuit is puzzling. Why can’t the district decide to change programs and get the state to approve the new one? The general theme of this lawsuit doesn’t bode well for weighted student funding. If districts shift blame to the state how can they be trusted with greater financial responsibility.
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The philosophy of this curriculum sounds like a variation on the management philosophy called “negative reinforcement.” There was a practitioner of that philosophy in a high-level job in my school district flying high for a while, terrorizing subordinates, until she was gradually, quietly marginalized and more quietly left the district. How cruel and destructive to inflict it on young kids. What are people thinking?
I’m curious to know more about the strategy behind actually suing over it, though.
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Probably suing because every other effort has been thwarted! SDUSD had the most dismal, fill in the blanks ESL program for years, and probably still does. California does not do a good job of looking at how multilingual societies teach languages! Too many linguists in the curriculum department?
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Would linguists be the wrong people to determine how to teach language? What job description would be better suited to determine how to teach language?
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I am not sure the data you present on the performance of EL students is accurate. EL students on average gain points on the CELDT every year they are EL until reclassified. If you are using the percentage of EL students proficient on the CSTs as a metric for growth, you are using a poor metric, as the bar for proficient goes up with every grade. Even English-only students suffer from this problem: between grade 8 and grade 11 the percent proficient or advanced falls from 65% to 52% (2011 data). Almost half of grade 11 English-only students are below proficient. Recall that the EL population in the upper grades are either new students to U.S. schools, or, if enrolled in California schools for many years, are among the lowest performers in their original cohort. The more able students are reclassified and removed from the reporting population by the upper grades.
Likewise, the graduation data are misrepresented. These data are for students that are still EL at the time of graduation. This is a population that one would expect to have a lower graduation rate. For example the reclassified fluent English proficient students in LAUSD had a 78% graduation rate as compared to 48% for ELs at the time of graduation (2006 data).
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Nothing lasting or positive will come of it, I’m sure, but godspeed to the people of Dinuba who are suing everyone in sight to get their children educated. Nothing like a lawsuit by the ACLU to focus the minds of educrats. SLADI sounds like totalitarian punishment, not school. The statistics in this story are just devastating– and then they are matched with the incomprehensible caviling of Mr. Ersk. Who’s on first? It just makes me want to cry my eyes out.
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I am confused why an attempt to clarify ambiguous statistical claims should be considered caviling. Not only are our EL-related accountability data and terminology confusing and misleading, but there are studies showing that reclassification is not happening as it otherwise might/should (and the rates are skewed by the fact that reclassification can happen only once).
Regardless, the text is wrong in the article. My guess is its a typo, but half of elementary ELs do not score below basic on the CST (I’m assuming that is what was meant by “the state’s english and math tests”).
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Navigio, I didn’t read those claims as “ambiguous.” They seem seriously terrible to me.
I admire those brave families in Dinuba and, like them, I am fed up. I am sure you are too. But I feel something in our measured conversation needs to change drastically if the long long history of certifiably sub-par public education of Latino kids in this state is to be improved. I am impatient with clinical dissections and mulling — it is caviling — EL accountability data that’s lost in the mists of terminology that few people understand and references to “reclassification”– from what to what? bad to worse? This is an emergency that presages the future and needs remedy now. I would argue it is more important for all Californians than any of the Governor’s other Golden State dream projects.
There are more and more Latino kids in our schools — approaching half the total. They are not learning school subjects well enough to keep pace with their peers. They are often poor and transient. Huge numbers of them drop out of school before graduation. There are experts galore in California on teaching and learning, on Latino assimilation and culture, on successful second language acquisition. Why can’t such people be assembled and charged with developing an effective academic program that avoids the political byways of race and nationality, one that will take us from less than zero to the moon?
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Part of the difficulty is the failure in CA education to understand the multi variable needs of students. Latino students are both the incredibly wealthy students coming from powerhouse Mexican backgrounds whose parents are highly educated and highly motivated to support their children in a binational environment and the opposite! In my experience, most of affluent children were not placed in bilingual or ESL classrooms, but were immersed and mainstreamed from the beginning. (That is an option with parental input – or was at SDUSD.) Many of them actually attend private schools in San Diego.
Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum, the one that we don’t address because we cannot. The children of illegal immigrants who are placed in a vulnerable position from the beginning. Those of us who taught those children, talked to their parents, etc., know that those children are caught between two cultures without any belonging in either. They know that they will leave school and not attend college because they are not legal. Sadly, in my experience, for far too many of them, the children are pulled out constantly to care for other children, work with their parents, etc., and can also be caught in the complex gender values system of their families. The emotional complexity of these children, and the silence that they are to maintain because of their parents’ decisions (for whatever reasons they made them, and they are not always benign) are often the underpinnings of the anger, dissent, and internal revolt against a system they regard as denying them opportunity. Manifestations of the latter against teachers are sometimes quite frightening - – especially when delivered by a known gang member – and teachers’ fears of those very real situations are not taken seriously enough. (I know, I’ve been there, and I’m not easily scared.)
I had a lot of success with Latino and Latino high schoolers, and I’ve written about this before. When I was approached about their success in both regular language acquisition and classroom demonstrated performance, CLAS testing (that was a surprise to the administrators) and through Genre Studies, etc., nothing was pursued BECAUSE I had not followed the California and SDUSD policies. In other words, the system and the experts and the layers of specialists and CLAD and LDS and ESL and Bilingual, and EL classification specialists were not applicable, but those are jobs! I also had a lot of failure, and I learned to understand that, too, hence a search into deeper underpinnings.
I grew up in a multilingual environment in England, and that also makes a huge difference as to how one approaches the academic teaching of students who are recent immigrants, and I traveled extensively and had mainly bi or tri lingual friends.
Without a tearing up of the rule book, and the determination to clear out the layers of high paid employees, nothing will change – but the costs will only increase.
I also made a point of talking to the parents and caregivers as often as I could – and I don’t speak Spanish – using family members, etc. It was the point of contact that made the difference - as always. But you cannot teach teachers to call parents, they have to want to, to be committed to them, and be genuinely caring, (even if really ticked off, you care because you picked up the phone at night to call when it was convenient for the parents) otherwise nothing works.
I consider much of the existing predicament to have been created entirely by politicians and business leaders who benefit from the reduced labor costs. It is the lower and working classes who are being destroyed by the unfair system that denies their labor a fair wage. Coming from a blue collar background just one generation away, I feel very strongly about the undercutting of wages, by the wealthy, while then passing along the costs to society in general, which usually means further hurting the blue collar/lower classes – for want of better labeling! I used to live in La Jolla – - – I saw enough and heard enough. My interest is primarily in the undervaluing of women’s work and child care using illegal labor that then benefits the wealthier, often female, employer. (But I know that’s not something one talks about in public gatherings in California.)
So … my long answer is that there won’t be change until we are totally honest about the existing reality, and one way or another, resolve it! It is much more than a question about schooling.
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Great post sue! I would just add that I think there is something we can do now, regardless of whatever else happens, and that is to better support the teachers that are put in these positions. As you point out, teachers can end up in some pretty intense situations, and generally speaking, they are not only not always ‘trained’ for those situations, they often are not always aware of the context from which their students (or other students in their schools) might come (some talk, some dont). This is even more important as we reduce the support/student ratio (eliminating deans, vice principals, counselors, etc) because teachers end up taking over much of those roles, and more. Even worse, when things do happen–and they do, the teachers are often the first ones labelled as the bad guy by the district (or at least treated that way), if the teacher is even acknowledged at all. This is just insult to injury. This is something we could do a lot better than we currently do, imho.
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Hi Navigio – thank you! Your point about supporting teachers should be a priority issue, and should have been 20 years ago when it became apparent that there were new stresses that needed deep discussion, solutions and ongoing evaluation. In my experience, there are so many taboos around opening up race and culture and poverty issues in California, the open and necessary conversations do not happen very often. I used to work very hard in a my TEP classes to prepare students for the reality of classrooms, but continuing education for teachers is often irrelevant, and/or led by County Office types who haven’t ever had the experience of the classrooms about which they lead workshops! Too many of us came up against denial and sometimes threats of racism when we tried to deal openly with the realities of children’s lives, and the intersection with the classroom. I’d be more than willing to get involved if there was a chance of actual change – and not more pontificating in the legislature. Corporations and politicians need to be pressed hard to bear responsibility, but we all need to assess our part in this downward spiral.
Have you read : ‘A Plague of Prisons’? It’s a very helpful text that should be required study by teachers and anyone related to the profession.
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I’m a literacy education professor in NYC. There’s nothing on the web about this program other than in relation to this case. My hunch is that it was developed by someone inhouse or local who was then perhaps paid for it. There may be a follow-the-money issue here. I looked at samples of the curriculum and it’s completely inappropriate and amateurish. Clearly not a real published program.
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I need help!! I need guidance on this whole ESL issue. My daughter who speaks, understands, writes and read English was assest last year and now she is being classified as an ESL student. Yes, I filled out the home questioner which shows that my mom and speak spanish. Since my daughter did not go public school for Kindergarten, the school is using the excuse that they has not background information. I fought all of last year for the school not to labler her as an ESL student, she is not in a special class and her grades are excellent. She is a US Citizen that I feel is being judge by her background. I called the Departement of English Second language and i was informed that according to the information given, the school should have not assume. I got a letter again where she was recalssified and her score is not matching her school grades. Do you know who i can contact for guidance?????
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Vanessa,
I am very familiar with California law concerning English learners, and since much of it is based on federal law and case law, I’m sure it is similar wherever you live. If you have not yet been assisted on this issue, please feel free to contact me at info@civilrightsroseville.org
Ted Herr
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Clearly, no-one told the author of this article that teaching kids how to swim by first making them memorise the chemical formula for water is the exact methodology that schools use for well.. Everything else!
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