Rise in Non-English Speakers Challenges Schools, Lawmakers

On this much there is no debate: Every fifth student in a Ventura County classroom speaks little or no English. Fueled by immigration and an overall growth in public school enrollment, their numbers are exploding, growing 150% to more than 25,000 over the last decade.

Yet educators, parents and lawmakers--embroiled in a decades-long debate--are irrevocably split on how best to teach these students. They are equally divided on how best to prepare for the changing complexion of Ventura County classrooms as the ranks of non-English speaking students continue to swell.

Should students with limited English skills be taught only in English, as happens in Thousand Oaks classrooms, known as the “immersion” process? Or should the students learn the basics in their home language for three to five years before being weaned into English, the so-called “late-exit” method favored by many west county campuses?

And are the multimillion-dollar programs achieving results? Or are they merely keeping 600 bilingual teachers in jobs?

With the ranks of students who speak little if any English growing faster in Ventura County than in the state as a whole, educators have been prodded to reexamine their approaches to bilingual education. They aren’t alone. Parents and lawmakers are giving the topic a long, hard look.

Some don’t like what they see. Countywide, about half of the limited English speaking pupils--94% of whom speak Spanish--get their first few years of instruction in their home language. Three in 10 are immersed in English-only classes, with special booster classes to accelerate their language development. About 14% receive no special attention at all.

Answers are elusive in the long-simmering bilingual education debate--tinged with discussions of race, class and immigration, the entrenched educational establishment and politics, money and unvarnished emotion.

“Why is it so emotional?” asked bilingual educator Steve Lopez, a science teacher at Santa Paula Union High School. “Because people don’t have enough good, hard data, so they become fanatics. Instead of using their brains, they use their hearts, emotions. And there are problems, yes. There are also successes.”

Among bilingual education’s shortcomings, critics say, are a lack of student performance data and accountability for districts that fail to simultaneously teach English and the basic curriculum to non-fluent students.

Trouble is, no one knows which approach--English “immersion” or “late-exit” bilingual--works best for children. Research on the subject is conflicting. The most comprehensive study on the subject, from George Mason University in Virginia, supports late-exit or double-immersion programs, where English-speaking students learn Spanish and Spanish-speakers learn English in one classroom.

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Nor do state guidelines require school districts to track performance of students whose first language is not English. As a result, few school officials can say definitively how their limited English speakers are progressing, how many eventually become fluent in English, how they perform on standardized tests as compared to English-speaking peers, whether they graduate from high school or go on to college.

“We’re always in a defensive mode about the program,” said Cliff Rodrigues, director of bilingual education for the Ventura County superintendent of schools office. “We’ve been so taken up in the battle to make sure the program is going to happen that we don’t do that one little piece [assessment] that we should . . . That we need to do, there’s no doubt about it.”

Gathering Statistics

To counter criticisms, Ventura County bilingual educators have begun to arm themselves with statistics to fend off unwanted changes to state law.

Supporters of bilingual programs point to the 1996 George Mason study, which traced the long-term academic success of thousands of students and concluded that those taught first in their native language perform better academically than those immersed quickly in English.

The study, which is the most comprehensive look at bilingual programs nationwide, found two-way immersion programs where English speaking and foreign language speaking students sit side-by-side, learning each other’s languages, are the most successful. But, they are also the least common.

Only last year, Ventura Unified School District compiled a study similar to the George Mason University report to see if its approach to bilingual education was working.

The study looked at the progress of 60 bilingual education students from kindergarten through high school. The results were mainly positive, said Jennifer Robles, the district’s bilingual education specialist. By fifth grade, 80% of the children had mastered oral English. Their academics were up to par by sixth grade.

“You can’t judge bilingual education based on the first three years,” Robles said. “You have to look at the long term and that’s where the pattern emerges. Unless you have a good foundation in their primary language, they peak [academically] at about fourth grade and go down from there.”

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Even in school districts where data are lacking, teachers say that 80% to 90% of their limited English speakers who begin bilingual education in kindergarten transition into English-speaking classrooms by fifth grade.

The only benchmark of a bilingual program that the state collects is the “redesignation rate”--the percentage of students who graduate from speaking little English to being fluent in any given year. Across the state and county, the redesignation rate has dropped over the last decade.

In Ventura County, the rate fell from 10.2% a decade ago to 7.5% last year. In the state, where 1.3 million public school students speak limited English, 6.5% of the pupils were redesignated in 1996.

While the nature of bilingual education--and the fact that it takes a few years to fully learn a new language--makes a 100% or even a 50% redesignation rate unlikely, critics say the rate is far too low. And not all limited English speakers enter California in the primary grades, educators point out. If learning English is hard for elementary students, they note, the degree of difficulty in high school is far greater.

State Assemblyman Brooks Firestone, who represents parts of Ventura County, would like to see more accountability in bilingual education.

The Los Olivos Republican has twice introduced a bill, which died in committee but will be reintroduced next year, that would allow for more all-English programs without wiping out native language programs. The bill, and a similar one written by Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), would require school districts to prove program results via a standardized test or rethink their methods.

“The success rate of those kids, from a lot of points of view, looks very low, in terms of drop-out rates, SATs, matriculation to college,” Firestone said. “I think they’re being short-changed.”

Late-Exit Approach

Because the state doesn’t collect such information by language status, Firestone is referring to race-based data for Latino students. Last year, 1 million Latino public school students--half of the state’s Latino school population--spoke limited English. According to state Education Department numbers, Latino students are twice as likely to drop out as their white peers. And although white and Latino students are about equally represented in public school classrooms, whites are twice as likely to enroll in the University of California, Cal State and community college systems.

Though conceding some flaws, bilingual educators and civil rights advocates charge that “late-exit” programs are the only way to guarantee that students don’t miss out on academics. Anything else is tantamount to depriving children of an education, they contend.

The “late-exit” approach, with its focus on native language instruction, rankles Elaine McKearn, a school trustee in Thousand Oaks.

“It’s not the school’s job to teach the native tongue,” McKearn said. “That’s the family’s job. I’m all in favor of bilingualism. . . . [But] they’re here in the U.S. If the goal is to compete in the society, you have to speak the language of the society.”

To some civil libertarians, that sounds like a barely concealed attack on a vulnerable target.

“I actually think this has to do . . . with the whole anti-immigrant movement in California,” said Theresa Fay-Bustillos, vice president of legal programs for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “California has been leading the way with Proposition 187 and other measures against immigrant children. People equate limited English proficiency with immigration status.”

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Although bilingual education requires reform, that reform should strengthen native language requirements rather than weaken them, she said.

The president of the Ventura County Board of Education, Marty Bates, contends that helping students acculturate rapidly into the American mainstream and giving them the language skills to succeed are solidly “pro-immigrant.”

The state’s current bilingual education law, a set of eight guidelines enforced by the Department of Education, allows school districts wide latitude in programming. Preference is given to programs that stress native language instruction from fully credentialed bilingual teachers.

Restructuring the law to favor English instruction is the only solution to the bilingual morass, Bates said.

“We spend an awful lot of dollars on bilingual programs,” he said. “That’s a mistake. I think the best thing for these students is to become English proficient as fast as possible and to move into the English program.”

The exact amount spent on bilingual programs, however, is hard to discern.

When pressed, the county’s Rodrigues can’t pinpoint the exact cost of bilingual education in Ventura County, taking into account local, state and federal dollars. But state and federal figures give a rough estimate of the total tab.

In California, bilingual education is largely funded by economic impact aid, with school districts kicking in some general fund dollars, said Jai Sookprasert, the legislative representative for the Education Department. The state is spending $360 million in economic impact aid this year, and the governor has proposed spending $415 million in the 1997-98 fiscal year.

Funding Sources

Of the economic impact aid, about $337.6 million is devoted to programs for nonnative English speakers, said Suanna Gilman-Ponce, a consultant in the bilingual education compliance unit of the Education Department. Ventura County spends about $5 million of its aid on bilingual programs or English language development, she said.

On the federal side, some Title I money--which goes to school districts with a significant population of poor families--is used for bilingual education as well, said Hanna L. Walker, an assistant superintendent of the state Education Department. Because Title I dollars benefit every student in an economically disadvantaged school, the percentage benefiting limited-English speakers is hard to pin down, she said. This school year, California schools received $718.8 million in Title I money, $8.6 million of it going to Ventura County schools.

Both Bates and Conejo Valley Unified trustee McKearn wonder if bilingual education isn’t tantamount to a jobs program for teachers.

“In my opinion, the vested interests come from the teachers unions and the bilingual educators association, which is a very large group,” he said. “The vested interests are those people and not the parents.”

Santa Paula’s Lopez--who uses props, experiments, a bilingual aide and a smattering of Spanish to make sure students learn biology--scoffs at that notion.

“It benefits the kids!” he said. “This thing benefits the kids.”

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Anyone who thinks otherwise, he challenged, should visit a bilingual classroom.

The classroom situation in Thousand Oaks could be called all English, all the time. Due to uniformly high student test scores for Conejo Valley students, the state Department of Education allows the school district to teach in English only.

Whether they arrive in kindergarten or the senior year of high school, Conejo Valley students who speak little English--about 1,400 students out of 18,000--land in mainstream classes. They learn their academics side-by-side with English-speaking peers and also take intensive “pull-out classes” to work on reading, writing and speaking English. Students and teachers like it that way.

At Park Oaks Elementary School, about a quarter of the kindergartners and first-graders enrolled speak a language other than English at home. Karla Avila--who knew some English when she entered first grade--was among them.

Now a fifth-grader, Karla says she thinks, speaks, dreams and even writes poetry in English. For her school’s book fair, the ponytailed 11-year-old recently wrote and illustrated a book called “Sunset.”

One verse about a garden reads: There are roots growing into beautiful trees and colorful, flopping butterflies

There’s the smell of rich soil and sunflowers growing

In my garden.

Clearly proud of being bilingual, Karla thinks there is no excuse for teaching students in their native languages.

“When you’re in a country, you have to speak that language, or you won’t understand anything,” she said.

Her classmate, Ana Penaloza, agrees. A fourth-grader, Ana, who spoke no English when she entered first grade, has been in all-English classes ever since. It’s been tough. And sometimes she doesn’t understand everything her classmates understand, but 10-year-old Ana thinks her early fluency in English will benefit her in future schooling. And bilingualism will be a definite advantage in her chosen career, teaching.

“It was very important to my parents,” Ana said. “They help me with my homework and talk to my teachers. Now that I’ve learned English, they don’t have to worry about me like they used to.”

High school counselor Elizabeth Dee--who speaks four languages and has worked with limited English speakers in Los Angeles, then Oxnard, and now in Thousand Oaks--has come to prefer the all-English approach, too.

“I think this is the future, because it’s relatively low-cost, kids are getting three periods of English a day, so you immerse the kids in the language and the [academic] content area,” she said of the Thousand Oaks method. “And it’s working. You can see these kids--they’re speaking the language.”

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But Thousand Oaks is educationally and economically blessed, she said. A student whose native language is not English, whose parents have likely attended college in their native country, will benefit from homework help and possibly extra tutors. Plus, the number of students needing language help isn’t nearly as high as in many other cities.

Those factors, plentiful in the affluent community, make the English-only program a success, Dee believes. But what works in Thousand Oaks may not work in Oxnard.

“In Oxnard, the students were worried about survival,” she said. “Some of them lived with rats. I had many parents who couldn’t even sign their own names. So it’s not a simple answer, ‘Should bilingual education continue?’ Yes, I think, but you have to consider all those other factors. . . . It’s a complicated issue.”

For many west county educators, the answer is an uncomplicated yes. Native language programs are good for children, they say, and they work.

To prove their point, they point to the many examples of children who started out in kindergarten with few or no English skills and are now fluent in reading, writing and speaking.

Just look at Coco Aguirre’s first-grade class at Santa Paula’s McKevett School, where the day begins with a mambo.

Blond-haired, blue-eyed English speakers are shaking their maracas, moving their piernas and twisting their caderas with their Spanish speaking classmates.

Student Quinn Pawlick, 6, pronounces the double R just as well as his friend Samara Turrubiartes. In turn, David Rodriquez can pronounce words in English as well as his friend Alexandria Parker.

Children’s Opinions

Those children are just beginning the long journey to becoming fully bilingual, useful in an elementary school district where about 1,170 students out of 3,540 speak little English. Many of the kids in bilingual classrooms say they can’t understand what all the fuss is about.

“Some people may think it’s strange to speak another language, but I think it’s cool,” said Alicia Dillon, who is an English speaker in a fourth-grade bilingual class at Ventura’s Montalvo Elementary School. “I think it’s a very good goal to have the Spanish speakers learn English.”

Their teacher, Lyntha Nelson, does not give instructions in Spanish, rather she speaks to the entire class in English. Nelson, who speaks fluent Spanish, serves more as a guide and translator for those Spanish speakers who are still reading the more complex materials in Spanish.

Becoming friends with Spanish speakers is one of the best parts about being in a mixed classroom, Alicia added.

“It’s really nice to interact with different people, other than people who just speak English,” added Alicia. “Just because they are Spanish speakers doesn’t mean they are dumb.”

Indeed, 16-year-old Jose Cruz is a product of a classroom where instruction took place in Spanish and English. Now a junior at Ventura High School, he is hoping to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to become an engineer.

Arriving in the United States at the age of 10, Jose did not speak a word of English and enrolled in fifth grade at Sheridan Way School in Ventura. Neither of his parents spoke English, so he did his homework with the help of tutors, classmates and teachers. His exposure to English-speaking children was a terrific benefit, he says.

“I think it’s better to have a mixture of people who speak English and Spanish because there are situations where you are forced to speak English,” said Jose, who was elected student body president for next year and maintains a 3.8 GPA. “But, if everyone just spoke English, and no one spoke Spanish, I wouldn’t have known what to do. I would have been real scared.”

Particularly in high school, it is a little frightening to learn English without any help in your native tongue, students say.

The hard work is bound to pay off, though, said Thousand Oaks High senior Luke Chung.

“It’s hard,” said Chung, whose speaking vocabulary was limited to “you, I, and, or, yes and no” when he arrived from Taiwan nine months ago.

“But regular classes are the best way,” he said. “You can get used to speaking English and increasing your listening skills. Using books in English, you can read better. You have to use a Chinese-English dictionary. You have to take twice as much time as the others. But it works.”

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In Ventura County, native Spanish speakers account for more than nine of every 10 students who speak little English. But students who speak Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Mandarin, Farsi and even Punjabi and Russian also live here.

Some district officials estimate that the number of east county students requiring help with English has doubled in a decade.

This demographic sea-change means that language issues aren’t going to go away, predicted counselor Dee.

“The influx of new cultures to this area is huge and growing really fast,” she said from her office at Thousand Oaks High School. “We have to be flexible and render services to minority language students. If we don’t adapt right now, we’ll be in big trouble.”

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Teaching Limited English Students

Across the state and Ventura County, the number of students who speak little or no English-often called “limited English” students or “English learners”-has grown steadily over the decade.

Countywide, the number of students who don’t speak enough English to get in their classrooms has grown 150% since 1996, outstripping that state’s 133% growth in the same time period.

Limited English Students

In Ventura County

‘96: 25,559

In California

‘96: 1,323,767

Teaching Methods

Shown at right are the bilingual services recevied by English learners statewide. Submersion refers to those students who aren’t fluent in English and receive no special instructional services. Immersion entails teaching lessons in English, using simple vocabulary. Late exist program students learn their lessons in their home language, suppleemented by English lessons.

Source: The California Department of Education’s 1996 “Language Census Report.”

Immersion: 49.2%

None / submersion: 20.6%

Late exit: 30.2%