In January 2002, President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act. The NCLB was an ambitious attempt to revamp the federal role in education by placing high accountability on states and school districts to improve student achievement as measured by standardized tests. As a condition for states to receive federal funds, the law mandates that they test students in reading and math annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once during high school. Beginning in 2007-08, states must also include science assessments at least once in three grade spans covering grades 3 through 5, 6 through 9, and 10 to 11. Enacted with broad bipartisan support but clouded with controversy from its beginning, the Act is up for reauthorization in the coming year.
As proposed revisions now circulate, the testing provisions that directly affect the more than 5 million students who are not proficient in English continue to provoke heated debate. The details underscore how the complexities of language and bilingualism have yet to be resolved since Congress enacted the 1968 Bilingual Education Act which Title III of the NCLB replaced. They also make clear how the linguistic potential of the increasingly large and diverse group of “English language learners” (ELLs) remains under the national political radar screen.
The 1968 Act was a modest program offering “seed money” on a competitive basis to states and localities. Although originally designed to address academic failure and high dropout rates among Spanish-speaking students, it was extended to other groups largely to avoid legal challenge. Its goal was to meet the “special educational needs” of children with “limited English-speaking ability” between the ages of three and eighteen whose families fell within the poverty guidelines and who came from “environments where the dominant language” was “other than English.” Yet despite its title, the Act failed to define “bilingual education” or the role that the child’s home language and culture would play.
Subsequent revisions focused on the English language abilities of the students and, depending on the mood in Congress, intermittently encouraged the participation of English-speaking students to avoid racial/ethnic segregation. And while the poverty factor (dropped in the 1974 amendments), along with the underlying deficit rationale, may have proven politically effective in the 1960s’ world of compensatory education, both cast a stigma from which the approach still struggles to recover. Through the years it became progressively apparent that the goal was solely to develop English language skills and not bilingual proficiency. Bilingual programs thus became “educational medicine” for the poor and the disadvantaged rather than a tool for developing the linguistic abilities of all students.
As time wore on, a confluence of forces created a backlash against using the child’s home language even as a bridge to learning English. Growing concerns over immigration from Latin America and the dominance of Spanish speakers in certain parts of the country, reports of Spanish-speaking students languishing for years in bilingual programs without adequately learning English, and attempts by the federal government to legally mandate bilingual instruction following the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Lau v. Nichols all fanned the flames of opposition. By the late 1990s, English Only proponents had gained significant traction, giving rise to state ballot measures, notably in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, mandating sheltered English immersion, typically for one year, while allowing parents limited opportunities to waive their children into bilingual programs. Meanwhile, the anti-bilingual mood coalesced with the state accountability movement sweeping the country. Both took firm hold in Washington, giving rise to the No Child Left Behind Act.
Title III of the NCLB effectively dismantled the Bilingual Education Act. In contrast to the old competitive structure, Title III distributes funds by formula to each state depending on enrollments of “limited English proficient” students. From its new title, the “English Language Acquisition Act,” to the newly named Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students (formerly the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Affairs), the law erased from the federal lexicon any reference to bilingualism or bilingual education. More fundamentally, it shifted the federal goal from enhancing “equal educational opportunity” to closing the “academic achievement gap.” Rather than focus on instructional “inputs,” the new law holds school systems accountable for producing “outputs” as measured by standardized tests. A school that fails to make “adequate yearly progress” risks being “restructured.”
Title III neither mandates nor precludes any particular teaching approach. It merely provides that programs “may make instructional use” of English and of the child’s native language to develop English proficiency and “may include” English proficient students to develop both language skills, a concession to dual language immersion programs that are increasingly popular among middle-class parents. Yet the law contains strong deterrents on both counts. Threaded throughout are repeated references to “attain[ing] English proficiency” and developing “high levels of academic attainment in English.” The fact that schools are judged by the percentage of students reclassified as fluent in English each year creates a powerful incentive to set aside native language instruction in the interest of quickly developing English language skills.
The testing requirements have generated widespread disagreement and proven particularly problematic for students who lack proficiency in English. While all students must be included in math testing, regulations published by the Department of Education in 2006 exempt ELLs from taking the state’s English reading/language arts assessment but only on the first administration after they enroll in U.S. schools. Beyond that point, their scores are counted in the school’s accountability rating. The arguments challenging those requirements bear directly on language and demand particular attention in the reauthorization process.
ELLs differ widely in language fluency, years and quality of prior schooling, family background, and other factors. And so to classify them into one group for accountability purposes, and to impose the same time-frame for all to achieve English language proficiency, clearly defy sound pedagogy and are simply unjust. Indeed research findings indicate that it can take from one to six years for ELLs to become proficient in oral English and from four to nine years in academic English. The ELL group, moreover, is constantly in a state of flux. New students speaking limited English enter while those who arguably have gained proficiency leave for the mainstream, both events pulling down average scores. This creates a “treadmill effect” where the group’s average performance is unable consequently to progress very far or to give an accurate reading of either overall student improvement or program success.
The NCLB permits states to administer the reading/language arts and math assessments in the student’s native language, or to use accommodations on the English assessments for the first three years the student has been in U.S. schools, with up to two additional years depending on individual circumstances. One apparent drawback is that native-language assessments are only meaningful for students who have received instruction in their native language and are literate in that language. Unfortunately, some immigrant students enter the country with little or no schooling. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, an estimated two-thirds of those classified as ELLs are not immigrants but native-born Americans. Many are “semilingual,” that is, proficient in neither English nor their home language. For any and all these reasons, native language assessments are especially inappropriate for the growing number of students enrolled in sheltered English immersion classes.
As an alternative, some educators believe that simplifying the English wording of test questions is a more effective way to assess ELLs. Yet it is difficult to simplify language without also simplifying constructs and some content. In either case, whether translation or simplified English is used, the tests’ validity and reliability are seriously compromised. In addition, with upwards of 460 languages reportedly spoken among ELLs nationwide, native language tests are unduly costly to develop in the case of less mainstream languages, including the numerous Native American tribal languages.
Despite all the persuasive arguments against the current testing mandates, however, groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Council of La Raza, longtime advocates of bilingual instruction, resolutely defend the No Child Left Behind Act and oppose any proposals to exempt ELL students from standardized tests for more than the one year now allowed. For them, test results hold school officials’ feet to the fire to successfully move students toward meeting state standards. At the same time, these groups continue to press for valid and reliable state assessments, preferably in the student’s native language.
It cannot be denied that the NCLB has raised the visibility of ELLs among policymakers and underscored the responsibility of public schools to achieve results. Nor can anyone refute the importance of students acquiring English proficiency or the critical need to close the achievement gap between minority and white students. But in the rush to get a “quick fix” on English, the law effectively overlooks the native language of ELLs, implicitly treating it as a problem rather than a resource. In the end, it shortchanges those students with the greatest potential to cross linguistic and cultural borders in a world that is fast becoming politically and economically more inter-connected.
As congressional members wrangle over how or even whether to resolve the testing problem among the Act’s other flaws, it remains to be seen where the lines of consensus will fall. Yet one thing is certain. All seem to be caught in a baffling time warp of English monolingualism. In the meantime, as the clock ticks toward 2008, upwards of 5 million English language learners continue to be fed a steady diet of “teaching to the test” while their linguistic talents and cultural sensitivities remain largely untapped.