Crucial Year for DPS Bilingual Ed

by Rin Kelly
North Denver Tribune

The time is up for University of Colorado professor Ernest House’s watch over the Denver Public Schools bilingual education program. The three-year court-ordered monitoring period ended the day summer vacation began. Still, say DPS officials, House will likely continue observing the English Language Acquisition Program for another year as the district struggles to graduate 16,000 English learners into mainstream English classrooms.

For North Denver, where English learners account for about one-third of the public-school population, the next year could be the most crucial since ELA began, as the court order is now open to legal challenges and could even be lifted by US District Judge Richard Matsch.

“The order says that after three years anyone can come back and seek some modifications or termination,” says Wayne Eckerling, assistant superintendent for research, planning, and special programs at DPS. To date no motions have been filed, and there is “no indication that the case is coming up for review in the next few months. So as we understand it, the court order remains in effect and we expect it to remain in effect for some time.”

But the court order may not have to be lifted for ELA’s future to be in doubt. Former District 5 school board member Rita Montero is hoping that voters will quash the program and throw out bilingual education across the state.

Montero, head of English for the Children of Colorado, is spearheading a campaign to get an initiative on the ballot that would install English immersion programs and penalize teachers who rely too heavily on native languages in the classroom. The amendment would require DPS to shave its three-year exit goal down to one and replace its current three-level bilingual program — transitional native language instruction; English language development; and, the step before mainstream English classes, sheltered English — with an immersion curriculum.

Montero believes that if the bill were to pass, the ELA program would be dismantled. “DPS will have to comply,” she says. “Parents who don’t like it can get a waiver, but the district will have to follow the law and give these kids a curriculum that actually works for a change.”

Others, like English Plus political analyst John Britz, maintain that the law would have no effect on ELA, which is federally mandated and therefore may be exempt from a state-level amendment.

“Rita’s always talking about Denver,” says Britz. “But with the federal court order in place, Denver would be the only school district unaffected by the amendment. The entire state would suffer for what Rita perceives is a Denver problem.”

The truth of the matter is still being worked out, says Eckerling. It is a unique case and there are “no theoretical answers” to the question. “Certainly you’re going to hear people talk about the supremacy clause and that the federal court order takes precedence,” he says. And even if the supremacy clause holds true in thus case, he anticipates that the amendment would impact “at least parts of ELA.”

But right now, says Eckerling, “we just don’t know.”

One certainty is that North Denver will be heavily impacted by the outcome. About 30 percent of students in the schools that feed into North High School receive some form of bilingual education. That number is close to 40 percent in the elementary schools, with nine of the 12 schools that feed into North counting one-third or more of their students in ELA. At Bryant-Webster and Cheltenham the ELA populations are around 50 percent; at Valdez Elementary those classified as English language learners make up nearly two-thirds of the student body.

ELA is the outcome of a 1994 lawsuit brought against DPS by the Congress of Hispanic Educators. The group charged the district with creating what was essentially a separate-but-equal system, subjecting non-English-proficient students to inadequate instruction from unqualified teachers. The US Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) agreed, finding in 1997 that DPS practices violated the Civil Rights Act. The OCR turned the case over to the Justice Department; a year and a half later, ELA was the compromise that finally quieted the feds.

The program was implemented in the fall of 1999 with the goal of transitioning all English-language learners into English-language classrooms within three years. Previously, there had been no limit to the amount of time students could spend in native-language instruction. The court order required all ELA teachers to receive 150 hours of training. It also asked each school to create an Instructional Services Advisory team comprised of two teachers and an administrator to oversee student progress and placement.

House filed eight reports over the three-year duration of the monitoring program. His earliest analysis, filed just before the 1999 school year began, described ELA as “off to a promising start” with “enough trained teachers to staff the ELA classes,” though he also added that not all the teachers were ideally qualified. Also noted in his first report were problems of decentralized administration, questionable quality of student assessment and placement, and the fact that “significant numbers of students in the higher grades” were traditionally neglected by bilingual programs.

Three years later, writes House, ELA “has made significant progress,” though it is “not yet implemented to the degree that it is in compliance with the court agreement.” The final year of the program was particularly successful, with the number of students who were properly served by the program up six points to 92 percent. But implementation and teacher aptitude remain a problem, and high school students continue to fall through the cracks. The annual number of English learners actually exiting ELA has actually fallen since 1997 — from 14.2 to 12.2 percent.

For Montero, this is proof of the ineptitude of bilingual education. “Kids who are being placed in Spanish-language classrooms can be in there for umpteen years, and they never get out,” she says. Montero believes that the goal of exiting students in three years is not being met and that DPS continues to supply a substandard education to non-English-proficient students.

“It’s an inferior curriculum. They water it down and they make assumptions that because they’re second-language learners, they have an inability to learn,” she says. “They say their goal is exiting the students in three years, but they don’t care if these children never learn English.”

Lucia Guzman, the school board member who won the District 5 seat from Montero in 1999, would not be opposed to an English-immersion curriculum if ELA ultimately proves to be untenable. Montero, she says, could very well be right about the merits of English immersion — but ELA “has not been sufficiently guided” and needs to be in place for a few more years before a decision as to its efficacy can be made.

“We need to fund that program, enforce that program, and make sure that we have adequately credentialed people running the program,” she says. “And then if those kids haven’t transitioned from that program within those three years, then something needs to be done.”