Say not that "227 didn't help or hurt students," say it hurt ELL kids in California in equal proportion to the extent they were being hurt pre-227.
I think the big money finding here is that implementation matters more than ideology. Or at least, in the absence of appropriate implementation, ideology is immaterial. I teach "Structured English Immersion" in California, classes filled with 33 kids who are not fluent in English, and to make the program work certain changes to be made on a widespread basis.
1) That 33 has to come down to 20. Class size tends to be overrated in affecting student outcomes, but that's only because the reductions are never big enough. If you teach ELLs, you teach 20 at a time, no more.
2) Similar to SpEd environments, classes composed entirely or primarily of ELLs need classroom aids to provide additional instruction and assistance.
3) Improve the curriculum. Of the 3-4 programs approved for SEI in California, only one (Open Court) has anything approached a phonics component, and what is present is grossly insufficient. Most, like Hampton Brown's High Point, contain awful reading selections and suffer from poor design. You cannot build with shotty tools.
4) Invest in newcomer's centers. Kids who have been in the country for two days, speaking English for two minutes should not be in the same classes as kids with (at least) conversational English. They need to be in centers designed to foster and develop the conversational, survival English necessary to make their time spent in those classes meaningful.
5) You still need bilingual programs. Immersion works for kids who possess literacy in their primary language. Those kids are able to build on a pre-existing knowledge base and aquire the skills in English that parallel their primary language. The problem is, huge percentages of kids come to our schools lacking that L1 literacy. Kids who have never been to school, kids who have been working in fields or driving trucks, kids who lived in places so remote a teacher wandered by maybe once a month. Their time is better spent learning foundational skills in their primary language (not cultural pride, actual skills), and THEN transferring to an immersion environment.
6) Figure it out. In too many schools, in too many classrooms, teachers/administrators etc. still haven't gotten the message that teaching ELLs is their mandate. This is a different type of kid and a different type of learner, now comprising more than a quarter of all kids in California schools, but because of concentration in certain geographic areas, a majority of kids in some schools. Figure it out. Don't go to BTSA meetings and say crap like, "My real problem is they don't speak English so good." Don't think becuase they can tell you about their weekend they are fluent in English. Don't pretend you don't have to change to meet these kids' needs.
A big part of the problem with bi-lingual ed in California was that kids were not exiting the program....they were being taught in Spanish with a criminal lack of english language instruction. This helped support a huge amount of educational bureaucray. As for the other kids who speak one of the hoards of other languages, they often found other means of learning the english language.
And, the kids had/have to WANT to learn English. We have way too many young people in California who are illiterate in any language.
I wish schools taught Spanish as a Second Language so that my boys could learn some Spanish. When I was in school eons ago, I learned more about the English language by taking h.s. French and German than I did in my "English" classes.
Oh, TMAO makes some excellent points, especially about the realities of our student population.
TMAO said:
"1) That 33 has to come down to 20."
Sources? References?
Polski3 said:
"A big part of the problem with bi-lingual ed in California was that kids were not exiting the program....they were being taught in Spanish with a criminal lack of english language instruction. This helped support a huge amount of educational bureaucray."
Exactly, and this is what we should've expected.
Ragnarok,
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ReducingC...lass/
index.html
and
http://www.nsba.org/site/sec_pea...=35635&
CID=1242
and
http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-...warticle/il/
457
All these highlight that increased student achievement is found when the class size drops below 20; gains are minimized or inconsistent above that level. I think there's also a common sense element to it: fewer kids means more individualized attention, means more instructional flexibility, means less time (for me) grading and more time (from me) planning interventions and lessons, and finally means a greater opportunity to build relationships between teacher and student.
Now, you can also find instances of disagreement, for example:
http://www.pacificresearch.org/
p...class_size.html
Although this latter analysis tends to focus more on implementation drawbacks/ failures and the fact it is difficult to isolate class size as the only variable in play.
That being said, we performed this experiment at my school between myself and another teacher in the academic year 2003-2004. I know you find this level of discussion the least valid, reliable and/or convincing, but I have unpublished, unverifiable data (at least unverifiable to the general public because of legal constraints) concerning achievement differences between like-ability classes, one grouped in a class of 33, two groups in classes of 15 and 17. Should I present it in this forum?
Fascinating, TMAO.
Were the kids actually assigned randomly to the three classes?
The big take-home idea, as I read the study, is that nothing can be proven one way or another by the data because not enough data was collected.
Take home #2 is that the teachers and school districts seem to have done whatever they wanted to, regardless of the law. Which is how to bet with any educational institution, and which is a good thing if you have good teachers, and a bad thing otherwise.
The element that didn't get as much attention as it ought, and I'll acknowledge would be difficult to measure objectively, is teacher skill. In the Center for Public Ed piece there was mention made of teacher skill down in the "Conclusions and Implications":
Some researchers (e.g., West & Woessmann, 2003) believe that school districts would do better to hire fewer teachers with better credentials than to hire more teachers without regard to the level of credentials and experience. They argue that the quality of the teacher, rather than the size of the class, drives student achievement.
Teacher skill was also mentioned in a brief review of the California CSR program which increased the number of teachers by 46% in a three-year period. Credentials as a proxy for teaching skill, were used to highlight the hiring pressure that caused districts to forego teacher skill to obtain teacher presence:
Many districts hired teachers without full credentials to meet this demand.
Using credentials to represent teaching skill rests on a pretty dubious assumption but, to some extent, the importance of teaching skill is acknowledged.
The ed.gov has some things to say about teacher skill as well:
Conclusion
Reducing class size to below 20 students leads to higher student achievement. However, class size reduction represents a considerable commitment of funds, and its implementation can have a sizable impact on the availability of qualified teachers. Strengthening teacher quality also leads to higher student achievement. There is more than one way to implement class size reduction, and more than one way to teach in a smaller class. Depending on how it is done, the benefits of class size reduction will be larger or smaller.
I saw those findings as well, Allen, and as a first principle I believe that nothing is as important as the quality of the teacher in the classroom.
That said, the initiative we've been citing was to reduce class size for every school in the entire state, suddenly, with no plan for how to find and train and support and professionally develop, those extra teachers. My proposal is to target those students in California's educational system who are being served the least by the current system. While these sub-groups represents about a quarter of all students, the proposal would probably effectively impact less than that because it requires a high concentration of ELLs in a district, school, and classroom. I would opertaionally define "high concentration" as somewhere around 2/3 of total class size.
The one drawback is that it would create increased demand for teachers in low-income, urban, schools that have been historically difficult to staff with quality professionals. Perhaps this would aggravate the problem. Or perhaps the opportunity to work in smaller classroom settings would act as an incentive for other educators to work in those environments.
You mention funding. State/federal government already provide signigicant funds to schools and districts to increase ELL performance. But because it comes with so many restrictions regarding use, the money ends up getting dumped into private companies that provide really bad professional "development" or after-school tutoring services that fail. That many, already earmarked to improve education for ELLs can easily be put to better use.
In practice, class size reductions have had little effect on student performance. From 1970 to 2001, the number od students per teacher nationwide dropped from 22.3 to 15.9, a 29% reduction. But test scores and grafuation rates are flat over the same period.
Rand Corp also performed a study on class size reuctions in CA. The study concluded that no link can be drawn between smaller class sizes and improved test scores.
Even the STAR study's findings (which have not be replicatable in real world settings) only found small incresases in student performance for certian subgroups in certain grades.
15.9 kids per class? In public schools? Maybe in K-2, maybe, but I'm struggling to accept the fact that there's enough classes with 10 kids in them to counter the 42 kids I sat with throughout high school or the 47 kids I taught 7th grade history to a couple years ago or the 33 kids in every 4-12 class throughout California.
"Rand Corp also performed a study on class size reuctions in CA. The study concluded that no link can be drawn between smaller class sizes and improved test scores."
Sure, because of corresponding teacher shortage requiring a lowering of standards resulting in a slush of under-qualified, ineffective educators. Do it on a smaller scale, targeting a specific subgroup, don't do so blindly, and I believe the results will be different.
Sure, because of corresponding teacher shortage requiring a lowering of standards resulting in a slush of under-qualified, ineffective educators. Do it on a smaller scale, targeting a specific subgroup, don't do so blindly, and I believe the results will be different.
Perhaps. There are also ways to form smaller instructional groups in bigger classrooms to achieve a similiar effect.
Nonetheless, I still think, and the weight of the research shows, that its better for a student to have a more effective teacher than to be in a smaller classroom. And, the push for lowering classroom sizes will necessarily dilute the pool of effective teachers even if on a smaller scale.
TMAO wrote:
My proposal is to target those students in California's educational system who are being served the least by the current system.
Proposing is one thing, accomplishing another.
You've got pretty powerful forces in place to frustrate any substantive effort to channel good teachers into lousy schools.
The first impediment is the teachers themselves. I would guess that an experienced teacher knows that schools don't turn to shit by accident. Being in a low-income area biases the schools toward crapiness and is quite often sufficient to ensure crapiness but a mediocre-to-lousy princpal is the final ingredient. An experienced teacher will know going in that they'll have to fight the kids and the circumstances of their lives but also the principal. Who needs that?
Another serious impediment is the union which, quite properly, has as its only interest the pay, benefits and security of the teachers/members. The union's unlikely to support any measure which pressures or requires that teachers teach where they don't want too.
Finally, I don't think most administrations would be all that supportive of such a measure. It's already tough enough staffing schools, why make things more difficult?
If you manage to hurdle all those barriers you end up with a set of rules that governs the behaviour of the process, determining which teachers can and can't participate in the program, and all the other minutae such a program would have to deal with. Congratulations, you've created an extension to the public education bureaucracy which means that somewhere down the line you'll discover that the program is no longer doing what you set it up to do but whatever the most powerful constituency - teachers, administration - wants it to do.
The reason I can predict with confidence that sort of outcome is because, given the structure of public education, it's the logical, and almost inevitable, outcome. If you want a different outcome you've got to do things in a fundamentally different way and, based on some of the things you've written, I doubt you'd be willing to embrace those different ways even if they give you what you say you want.
Allen, take a deep breath. The sky is not falling.
In two generations, educational prospects for the ELL in California have improved exponentially, and continue to do so. The knowledge base as to how best to educate these kids continues to grow and expand, both in the ivory tower and the trenches. And while that progress remains insufficient to the ultimate goal, it is progress, and its existence belies the doom and gloom narrative you've outlined, with all its myriad generalities, sterotypes, and unwarranted assumptions.
Don't patronize me and don't overwork your hyperbole muscle portraying the situation in the California public education system.
Yeah there's improvement although I wouldn't call it exponential, unless the word has a different meaning in California then it does in the rest of the world. A good deal of that "improvement" consists of moderating the self-destructive policies enacted in the name of phony equity, fadishness and cheap compassion. Not suprisingly, those policies, far from attaining their stated goals, often worked against them. So yeah, California's been taking some steps in the right direction but only because that's about the only direction left to go.
Unless you haven't exhausted your supply of vacuous snarkiness, perhaps you could attach some details to your "proposal".
Basically, achievement and language learning for ESL students remained the same
The authors did not even glance at English proficiency. Language learning was not part of their study.
There are three decades of SLA research (the real, empirical kind) that show immersion to be superior to all other forms of language instruction. A study that claims to find the reverse would be taken with a hefty cup of salt, for good reason.
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