Education Week - February 27, 2013 - 13

EDUCATION WEEK

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

www.edweek.org

Experts Eye
Uniformity
On ELLs
by public schools, regardless of
where they live.
In California, where more than
1,000 school districts can make
their own rules for deciding when
an English-learner has reached
proficiency in the language, a student who meets one district’s criteria can easily fall short in another.
The same is true between states
when it comes to identifying English-learners. A student flagged
for English-language-acquisition
services in Texas, for example,
may not be judged the same way
in Arizona.
“Before common core, this would
have been virtually impossible
because of the variation among
content standards in the states,”
said Robert Linquanti, a senior research associate at WestEd, a San
Francisco-based research group,
referring to the Common Core
State Standards that have been
adopted by all but four states. “But
because of the shared alignment,
there is now a reasonable shot at
doing this.”

State Pushback?
Mr. Linquanti and H. Gary Cook,
an associate research scientist at
the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, are finalizing
a set of recommendations to states
about how to proceed toward developing a common definition of
English-learners. They presented
their initial recommendations to
state education officials earlier this
month in Atlanta.
One national education analyst
said she wouldn’t rule out pushback from states, which might see
such a move as further erosion
of their authority over education
policy.
“While a common definition may
be very logical and make perfect
sense, and states may choose to
come around, I think the risks
continue to ratchet up that people
are going to say, ‘Enough. This is
our business,’ ” said Kathy Christie, a vice president at the Denverbased Education Commission of the
States.
The U.S. Department of Education is a main driver behind the
momentum toward defining English-learners in a common way.
Under its requirements for
states in either of the commonassessment groups being funded
through federal Race to the Top
money—the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or
parcc—participants must agree to
a uniform definition of an Englishlearner.
That requirement is the same
for the states that also are part of
either of the two federally funded
groups developing new Englishlanguage proficiency exams to

Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

measure ells’ progress toward
meeting the language demands in
the common standards. Those two
consortia are Assessment Services
Supporting ELs through Technology Systems, or assets, and English
Language Proficiency Assessment
for the 21st Century, or elpa 21.

Timetable for Rollouts
The new common assessments
will roll out in the 2014-15 school
year, with the new English-language-proficiency tests expected
to debut in 2015-16.
Though membership in the four
testing consortia remains in flux,
many states belong to at least one
of the Race to the Top-funded consortia and one of the groups creating the new English-languageproficiency tests.
To help the states work together
on this issue across all four testing groups, the Washington-based
Council of Chief State School Officers last year convened an ell
assessment task force to make
recommendations. That task force
is composed of members of all four
testing consortia, as well as experts on the assessment of special
education students.
“The more that things can be
standardized across the consortia, the better and easier it will
be for states to implement the assessments,” said Scott Norton, the
director of standards, assessment,
and accountability for the ccsso.
“and as students move around
and between states, having a common understanding of who they
are and how well they are doing is
really important.”
Having a shared definition of
English-learners is also an important component to the work that
Smarter Balanced and parcc test
designers are doing to decide what
types of testing accommodations
ells should get. This is another
politically difficult task because
of the differences among states on

the current supports that are allowed for English-learners taking
standardized tests.
Mr. Norton, however, cautioned
that reaching consensus will be
complicated. Each state has its
own political and policy environment to consider, and policies and
practices around English-learners
may be deeply ingrained.
“Even assuming that everyone
wants to agree on this, it’s not
going to be a simple matter,” Mr.
Norton said.

Crazy-Quilt Approach
With such a crazy-quilt policy
and practice approach to Englishlearners, comparability between
states and even districts is a
major challenge.
For example, the English-language-proficiency test currently
given in California gives an even
weight in scoring the four tested
domains of listening, speaking,
reading, and writing, at 25 percent each. In the numerous states
that use the assessment developed by the World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, or
wida, proficiency is more heavily
weighted toward students’ literacy performance in the reading
and writing domains. In Texas, for
example, how an ell performs on
the reading domain is the largest determining factor for judging
proficiency.
“If you take a look at the national collection of data now and
try to say something about ells
across the country, you really
can’t,” said Mr. Cook, the University of Wisconsin-Madison
researcher. “There is difficulty
even trying to understand what
an English-language learner is at
that level.”
The lack of uniformity also leads
to a distribution of federal Title
III funds—aid that helps pay for
instructional programs for ells—
that many states and districts say

doesn’t match the actual number
of English-learners they are serving in their schools..
Because of the wide variation
in how ells are defined and classified, the federal Education Department uses census data rather
than state-reported counts of enrolled ells to determine levels of
Title III aid. California, for example, gets funding for the roughly 1
million English-learners who are
captured by census data collected
through the American Community
Survey, rather than the 1.4 million actually enrolled in its public
schools, said Mr. Linquanti.

Key Issues
To move toward a common
definition, Mr. Linquanti and Mr.
Cook say, states will have to wrestle with four key issues.
The first is identifying the pool
of potential English-learners,
which is done by school districts
through the use of home-language
surveys. Even though such surveys are widely used, the types of
questions they ask and the results
they yield vary dramatically.
The second is establishing similar criteria for confirming, or ruling out, that a potential Englishlearner actually needs services
and establishing the level of support that a student needs.
The third is defining, in a common way, what it means to be
English-proficient.
The fourth is agreeing to consistent criteria in deciding if a student is no longer an ell.
“We can’t have criteria for reclassification all over the map,”
Mr. Linquanti said. “There are
places where a kid can be kept
as an ell based on a single grade
that has nothing to do with his or
her language proficiency.”
Both Mr. Linquanti and Mr.
Cook said that teachers and
other educators who are close to
the students should still be able

Students change classes last
week at Abraham Lincoln High
School in San Francisco, where
students who are Englishlearners come from a variety of
backgrounds. In California,
more than 1,000 school districts
can make their own rules for
deciding when an Englishlearner has reached proficiency
in the language.

to weigh in on the readiness of
an English-learner to exit from
language-acquisition services,
but that having clear and common criteria, a checklist of sorts,
would lead to more consistency in
reclassification.
“It’s figuring out where the
sweet spot is,” Mr. Cook said.
Another advantage to making English-learner policy more
consistent across states is that it
would create a bigger demand for
high-quality instructional materials for ells, said Kenji Hakuta,
an education professor at Stanford University who co-directs
the Understanding Language effort that is developing free, opensource common-core materials for
educators who work with Englishlearners.
“This would also motivate publishers and service providers to
take advantage of a critical mass
market and develop better and
differentiated materials for the
diversity of [English-language
learners],” said Mr. Hakuta, who
also coordinates a ccsso group on
assessment of ells and enlisted
Mr. Linquanti and Mr. Cook to
write recommendations for states.
And, Mr. Hakuta said, as concerns persist over the needs of certain types of English-learners, particularly those long-term ells who
have been receiving services for six
or more years with little progress
toward reaching proficiency, consistency will help lead to “better
differentiation of instruction for
different levels of kids.”

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Education Week - February 27, 2013

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