When bilingual education is geared toward Spanish, what happens when you speak Hebrew?
As I walk alongside a school administrator, I clasp my mother’s hand tighter and tighter with each step. We reach the blue door labeled #2. My mom asks me, “are you ready?” and I think to myself, “I don’t know what to be ready for, I’m only seven years old.” As I kiss her goodbye, she reminds me of the one word in English that I knew: “bathroom.”
I find myself a seat on the carpet, surrounded by strange faces with a strange tongue. The teacher begins to speak, and I nod my head to assure the teacher I am understanding. I’ve never been one to hide my emotions successfully, and so a girl in front of me was directed to explain. I then learned my next set of words: lunch tickets. At the time, I had no idea what she wanted from me, but because of her repetition, I still hear her voice in my head 15 years later.
So, what happens to the all the language minorities? The immigrant students from all over the world? In our current educational system, a student’s English Language Development’s score determines their educational future. In an interview with N.E.W. Academy Canoga Park teacher, Hadas Peters, she describes due to lack of training, it is the teachers who are to come up with the curriculum themselves. With no books or manuals to refer to, not all students may be getting the best English language education they need to succeed. Another drawback for language minorities is that all or almost all bilingual teachers are only bilingual in Spanish.
Based on the 2016–17 LAUSD Finger Tip Facts, 94 languages other than English are spoken in L.A. Unified schools. The District has 141,490 students who are learning to speak English proficiently, and of those, 92.5%’s primary language is Spanish. The American Dream is coveted worldwide, hence why massive amounts of people of all backgrounds migrate to the U.S. daily. Just like my family, my parents came here from Israel in hopes of a better life for us. Hebrew was all we knew, and from big to small, we had to teach ourselves the language of our new home. Therefore, there are numerous amounts of different languages spoken, and unfortunately, the school system seems to primarily cater to one.
According to LAUSD, The objective of ELD (English Language Development) instruction is to increase language proficiency as measured by the ELD standards, with the goal of reclassification. It is estimated that 60% of English Language Learner students in grades 6–12 are long-term ELLs. Long-term ELLs are students who have been in U.S. schools for more than six years without attaining academic language proficiency.
Through my interview with Peters, I realized not much has changed since my time of being an English language learner.
“Of my 13 ELD students, 12 of them speak Spanish as their native language, and one of them speaks Vietnamese. The Vietnamese student is definitely at a disadvantage because when she goes to the ELD classroom, the teacher speaks Spanish. As an advantage to the Spanish-speaking students, the teacher will be able to cognate, but only for them,” said Peters. This ultimately fails the student from receiving that individual attention that they undoubtedly lack and need.
According to Peters, if students don’t test out by 5th grade, they will be placed in special education in 6th grade, making it much harder for them to check out of the system from this point forward.
Dr. Shartriya Collier-Stewart is a professor at CSUN’s College of Education, who received her Master’s degree in Bilingual/Bicultural Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Additionally, she completed her doctorate in Language Education with an emphasis in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at Temple University in Philadelphia. During our interview, we discussed the challenges bilingual students face, along with what LAUSD is/is not doing for those bilingual students.
With Prop 227 still in effect and LAUSD’s current English Learner Master Plan “teachers are unhappy,” said Collier-Stewart. The way the Master Plan works is depending on your English language proficiency you get placed in one of five levels of language proficiency. Therefore, students are grouped by their language levels. “Researchers say that it is very ineffective because what happens is they don’t have people to model the language for them, so they are all talking on the same level instead of having an advanced student talking to a lower student,” said Collier-Stewart.
In order to improve the English learning skills for students, it is both the school and the parent’s responsibility, said Collier-Stewart. Her research looks at parents, and how informed they are about current policies. “Teachers and parents both need to be held accountable to ensure their children receive the services they are supposed to receive by law,” said Collier-Stewart. “If those parents don’t speak English, the school is required to provide them with a translator.”
For change to occur to better our education system when teaching English to language minorities, hiring of more bilingual instructors or incorporating an effective curriculum is needed. Additionally, parent involvement is crucial to a child’s success. If more parents are informed about current policies and services, both they and their children are required to receive, maybe then there can be a change to help language minorities succeed.
