California's Language Woes: Possible solutions?

Dana   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 01:03 GMT
Hello! I've posted the articles below (sorry for its lengthiness), not to stir up trouble, but to get a sense of whether other countries are facing similar challenges with their burgeoning immigrant population. What is your government doing about it, and are they being met with success? I ask because I'm writing a paper for class and, as I've discovered in my readings and discussions with others, it's a very divisive and emotionally charged issue. I'd like to get an outsider's perspective and get some good examples of how other countries are meeting this challenge.

(If this is not the right forum for these questions, please direct me to one where I can discuss such things. Thank you.)

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Leaden school scores in California

By Daniel B. Wood

LOS ANGELES — When she looks out at the classes she teaches at Los Angeles High School here, Cynthia Augustine, sees students from Russia, Mongolia, Ghana, Sudan, Korea, Philippines, and Thailand.

That doesn't include Spanish speakers from 12 Central and South American countries, whose numbers have risen dramatically in the past decade.

The range of languages is one reason, she says, why the nation's most populous state is having trouble providing the top-quality education for which it was known a few decades ago.

The state is home to one of every eight US children school and spends half its yearly budget — $50 billion — on education. Yet a recent RAND study found that on most measures from funding to academic achievement, California has slipped from No. 1 in the late 1960s to below 40th today.

"If you ask why California schools have gone from the nation's best to among its worst, I would say the influx of non-English speaking immigrants tops the list of reasons," says Ms. Augustine, a 30-year teaching veteran.

An array of languages and cultures is just one factor behind the Golden State's classroom challenge. Debate on the problem, in fact, is now revisiting paths well worn during previous reform attempts in the late 1980s and mid-1990s — as the state tries to right itself. Experts point to a web of interrelated causes. The 1978 Proposition 13 tax revolt redirected funding and local control for schools. Per-pupil spending has declined, enrollment has been rising, teacher salaries are low, and class sizes are high despite a high-profile attempt to reduce them in recent years.

"We have America's biggest and most diverse student population, 1 of 4 which is learning English," says Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction. "Forty percent are from low socioeconomic conditions and some of our districts have to shut down for six weeks in winter because parents move to the Mexico crop fields as migrant workers."

Among RAND's most disturbing findings: Since 1990, average reading and math scores for fourth and eighth graders ranked California above only Mississippi and Louisiana; 15% of the state's 287,000 teachers are without full credentials; teacher pay falls below the national average (adjusted for cost of living); and despite a major initiative to reduce class sizes in K-3 grades in 1997, the state still has the nation's second-highest student-to-teacher ratio

"California has a whole host of systemic reasons why it has not coped well with the increasing challenges, over the years," says Stephen Carroll, author of the RAND study. "We have a tendency to try quick fixes.... We have not properly analyzed how very large and complicated our system is."

Pumping up the state's school system by sending "more money to the classroom" was a Top 10 priority campaign pledge by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was elected governor in 2003. But his administration is facing a $9 billion budget gap in his second year so the governor has been forced to make across-the-board cuts.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) now claims Governor Schwarzenegger has reneged on a promise last year to pay back $2 billion he borrowed from education funding during last year's budget crisis. And they say Schwarzenegger wants to weaken Proposition 98, a 1988 guarantee of minimum funding for schools.

"The governor can play with the numbers all he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that he broke his promise," says CTA President Barbara Kerr. More evidence of financial hardship, she says, is layoff notices delivered to 2,400 teachers.

But Schwarzenegger claims that during a severe budget crisis, his commitment to education is still strong. His finance department defends the squeeze on school funding, saying is their only other choice would be worse: cuts in health and human services.

"Any more reductions to health and services would have impacted families, low-income kids, and the developmentally disabled," says H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state finance department.

At the same time, the Bush administration has been pressuring the state to better identify failing school districts. Federal law calls for states to list districts in which students have not improved standardized English and math scores two years in a row. But the state has been allowing districts to avoid the list if students from low-income households reach a set score on a different measurement.

The US Department of Education is telling California state school administrators that if they do not change the way they classify struggling districts under the federal "No Children Left Behind Act," they will lose federal dollars.

As state superintendent, Mr. O'Connell and other experts see such pressure as an unfair Catch-22 that further threatens budgets.

"We support the goals of 'No Child Left Behind,' " says O'Connell. "But [federal] methodology in trying to define good schools and bad has been inconsistent with our own data. They don't recognize the diversity of California education."

Such comments underscore the challenges facing frontline teachers like L.A. High School's Cynthia Augustine who, faced with more than 20 nationalities in her classroom, says that funding isn't the only problem.

No. 1, she says: "The bureaucracy needs to be cut so that we have fewer administrators doing nameless tasks and more money for teachers in the classroom." And No. 2: Parental involvement needs to increase.

"For me it's a tossup whether not having enough money is the biggest problem or parents who don't care enough about their kids," says Ms. Augustine. On parent-conference night, she says, only 1 of 200 parents show up, but when the L.A. district attorney recently sent letters threatening jail to parents of those whose children had missed 10 or more school days, 1,200 showed up.

"Wish I'd had that much interest for my parent conferences," says Augustine.
Dana   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 01:04 GMT
LOS ANGELES, April 7 -- Low family income and education levels are slowing the ability of Spanish-speaking students in California to master English, according to a study released Thursday.

Spanish-speaking youngsters were among the lowest performers onstate language tests in fall 2003, lagging behind those who speak Korean, Chinese and Russian as their native language, said the study by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The report linked census data with the test results and also found that the state's 1.4 million Spanish-speaking students come from families with average annual income of 40,676 dollars and parents who only finished their freshman year of high school.

It also found that students who speak Mandarin Chinese showed the largest gains on the California English Language Development Test (CELDT), and came from families with more than 16 years of education and incomes of 92,189 dollars a year, according to localnewspaper the Daily News.

"I was surprised that there was such a stark difference between groups of Students," Christopher Jepsen, co-author of thereport, said. "The hope would be that policy-makers could target aid to the students that seem to need it more."

For the Los Angeles Unified School District, the study highlights the continuing challenges of educating the district's nearly 300,000 English learners, most of whom are Spanish-speaking,according to the paper.

Statewide, there are an estimated 1.5 million English learners.

The LAUSD showed gains that outpaced state averages in CELDT results released in February.

Created in 2001, the test measures the listening, speaking, reading and writing skills of students who are learning English.

The newly-released study suggests that intervention for struggling students also must be targeted at students' specific needs, including helping those whose families are poor and whose parents might have little education, it was reported.
andre in south africa   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 08:46 GMT
Mother tongue education has been proved best for children, especially younger ones. One of the reasons why black students in South Africa don't perform as well as white students, is that they are taught in what is their second, or even third or fourth languages, while white students are taught in their own languages.
Dana   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 21:13 GMT
Thank you for your response, Andre, but I have a few questions. Is mother tongue education just a suggestion/recommendation or is this already being implemented in South Africa? At what point, if ever, does English (or other dominant language of learned society) education begin? Do you think that such a policy will level the playing field when they go off and seek higher education or employment, or will they be hampered by their poorer mastery of the English language. Do you feel that such a policy will further segregate society rather than unify it?

I ask because in Los Angeles, some schools have already started a policy of mother tongue education in order to bring the educational level of Spanish-speaking students on par with their English-speaking counterparts. This may sound reasonable enough at first, but opponents of this policy argue that graduates of mother tongue education may possess the skills and brainpower to move further on in life, but they'll be hampered by their poorer English education. If they decide to go on to college or university, should they be graded on a different curve than their English-educated counterparts? What about the workforce? Will they have the same opportunities as their English-educated counterparts or will they be forced to take lesser paying jobs? Or do we just create a dual society of Spanish-speaking professionals and English-speaking professionals? Of course, ideally we should just aim for an integrated bilingual or multilingual society, but in the real world, that's going to take time and a lot of convincing.
Kirk   Sunday, April 10, 2005, 23:26 GMT
I think funding tends to be a bigger issue than the fact that a school may have native speakers of other languages besides English. For example, I'm from California and my high school had nonnative English speakers of about 40 languages, including considerable groups of Spanish, Punjabi, Portuguese, Assyrian, and Chinese native speakers, but as a whole, once those speakers attained fluency in English, they performed pretty well (I helped out with my school's ESL program). My high school was pretty middle of the road in terms of funding and performance but offered the necessary resources to those who wanted to excel (in my experience, it was more the native English speakers who really didn't care that brought down the school's performance, especially if it was being judged strictly on standardized testing). I know there are some other schools, however, that have consistent funding problems and don't offer the same opportunities to students, so even the native English speakers wanting to excel don't have as much chance to.
Ed   Monday, April 11, 2005, 02:14 GMT
<<including considerable groups of Spanish, Punjabi, Portuguese, Assyrian, and Chinese native speakers>>

I thought that language was extinct.
Lazar   Monday, April 11, 2005, 02:19 GMT
<I thought that language was extinct.>>

I looked on Wikipedia, and there is a living dialect of Aramaic called "Assyrian Neo-Aramaic". But it says that there are only 210,000 native speakers...not enough for much of a colonial diaspora. Maybe Kirk is referring to Arabic speakers from Syria.
Kirk   Monday, April 11, 2005, 02:36 GMT
Yes, I'm actually referring to Assyrian...Assyrians were the indigenous people of Northern Iraq (as the wikipedia article states if you check it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian) who conquered the Israelites in ancient times and eventually mostly became Christians, even with the Islamic conquest of their homeland. Interestingly, Assyrians still identify as Assyrian even tho their nation-state has been gone for a long time and speak a language related to (or language variety of) Aramaic they call "Assyrian." I grew up in Turlock, California (not that big of a city--about 70,000 people, in California's huge central San Joaquin Valley), which has one of the nation's highest concentrations of (usually Christian) Assyrians, who mostly have moved to the area since the 1970s. I don't live in Turlock anymore (which is abuot 400 miles north of San Diego where I go to college) but when I go back to visit friends and family Assyrian is one of the most frequent languages I hear around town. Apparently there is somewhat of a movement amongst Assyrians to regain their homeland but that seems to be mostly the domain of wishfully thinking old men who get together and chat on the sidewalks of Turlock's cafes (this is according to my friends who can understand or speak Assyrian)--most Assyrian-Americans by this point (and at least in Turlock) have been very successful and are pretty assimilated into larger society.
Lazar   Monday, April 11, 2005, 02:37 GMT
I stand corrected.
Tyrone   Monday, April 11, 2005, 02:38 GMT
The problem with living with an apartmentmate (Kirk) who got you addicted to antimoon is that you then respond to the same topic he's responding to.

Assyrian is a strange term. Lazar, Ed, and Kirk are all to a degree correct. Ancient Assyrian, the language of the eight century BC empire that conquered most of the Fertile Crescent (including the northern biblical kingdom of Israel, modern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon) before its defeat by the Babylonian Empire in the mid 500's BC, is no longer a functioning language.

However, the idea of Assyrian now applies to non-Arab ethnic peoples inhabiting northern Iraq and other nearby areas, a vast majority of which are Nestorian Christians and speak a form of Aramaic. The title maintains links to the ancient empire (although these links are somewhat tenuous and definitely debated--in a manner very similar to the ongoing debate in this forum about Romanians and Roman Catholicism/Roman language identity)

Assyrian peoples suffered like Kurds and Armenians under the Ottoman empire's later years as Turkish officials carried out systematic genocide against these peoples, resulting in the Assyrian diaspora, with many immigrating to the US, most significantly in Chicago and California.
Deborah   Monday, April 11, 2005, 06:37 GMT
Thanks, Kirk -- I learned something new about my home state. I had no idea we had an Assyrian community.

You're from Turlock, eh? Well, that explains everything.
Kirk   Monday, April 11, 2005, 07:09 GMT
Haha, yes...the exciting metropolis of Turlock--"we bulldoze fruit and almond orchards and build masterplanned communities named after them!" It's actually a pretty nice town but definitely not exciting--I think the fact that a town of only 70,000 or so builds a new Starbucks every year (every year I've gone back from college they've built a new one...I'm in my 3rd year and they're now building the 4th one) shows how little else there is to do there :)

Actually I wasn't born in Turlock, but in Chicago, and lived in Washington state till I was 5 and Dallas till I was 11, so I actually kinda grew up in those two places but my formative adolescent years and 10 years of my life (I'm now 21) have been spent in California. I've often wondered if the years in Washington state and Dallas (which tends to be heavily populated by nonnative Texans anyway) had any effect on how I speak (it'd be cool to have somewhat of a hybrid accent) but my parents are both native Bay-Areans (from San Jose) so I grew up speaking like them, and even if I hadn't, by the time I was subconsciously imitating my peers' speech (which I guess always happens but becomes more crucial in adolescence, I believe) I was in California.

Deborah, you live in The City, right?
Deborah   Monday, April 11, 2005, 07:30 GMT
I was born in San Diego, moved to the Bay Area (Cupertino) when I was two, and by the time I started kindergarten we were living in *The* City.

I knew a couple from Moscow who started an after-school program in SF, teaching math and physics in Russian to newly-arrived high school students. It was through a private school, and only affected a relatively small number of students. Too bad funds aren't there to do this on a very large scale, in other languages.
andre in south africa   Monday, April 11, 2005, 07:32 GMT
Dana

Mother tongue education has been in practice for Afrikaans- and English speaking children for many years, but not yet for speakers of African languages. The government is reluctant to do it. All children have to study at least two official languages (and pass it), and today many study three. So by the time you finish school, you are reasonably fluent in at least two languages (which would usually include English). Your situation is different to ours, in that English dominates far more than here. But I think what the solution would be, is that children should be taught in their own language, but also be compelled to study English to ensure that they are sufficiently fluent in it by the time they go out to find a job.
Tyrone   Monday, April 11, 2005, 07:36 GMT
I always find it funny that Bay Area people or those near NYC refer to SF or NYC as "the City". It's such a foreign concept to people in Los Angeles, where I grew up. =)