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By Gil Klein WASHINGTON -- Latino advocates told a House panel yesterday that the No Child Left Behind law has produced significant gains for school-age English-language learners and warned not to undermine that progress. Before the law was passed five years ago, students learning English were ignored by many schools, Delia Pompa of the National Council of La Raza told the House Committee on Education and Labor. With the law, she said, the debate has changed to: "How can schools improve the academic achievement and attainment of English-language learners?" Pompa was one of 44 education leaders testifying before the committee as it moves to renew the five-year-old No Child law. Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., is pushing to have a bill ready for House debate by the end of the month. Educating students who do not speak English has been a particular problem for many Southern states, including Virginia, where immigrants did not begin to show up in large numbers before the 1990s. Some states have bristled under the Education Department's mandate for testing students still learning English. "States need flexibility as they tackle difficult issues, such as how best to include non-English-speaking children in state accountability systems," Billy K. Cannaday Jr., Virginia's superintendent of public instruction, told the committee. "All we ask," he said, "is for the freedom to move forward with innovative, peer-reviewed strategies without being strangled for months or years by a rigid one-size-fits-all structure dictated from Washington." The law now requires that 2014 schools have all students proficient in reading and math. Each year, schools must show that all students, including black, Hispanic, special-education and English-language learners, are making adequate yearly progress toward that goal. The draft proposal for the law's renewal requires states with a sizable proportion of English-language learners to develop assessment tests in the students' native languages within the next two years. Then it extends from three years to five -- or seven, in special cases -- the number of years that an English-language learner can be in a school system before he or she is required to take the tests in English. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said giving a school system seven years before requiring the test be given in English could mean a student who arrived in the third grade would not be tested until the 10th grade. Advocates for English-language learners say more than 80 percent of them were born in the United States of immigrant parents and enter the school system in kindergarten. Peter Zamora of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said he supports the changes in the draft bill and is ready to work with the states to improve tests for English-language learners. What cannot happen, he said, is for school districts to carve out the English-language learners and say they do not have to be tested. Pompa said forcing students to take a test in English before they are ready "will not accurately reflect their knowledge," she said. But Dianne Piché, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, was wary of giving states too much flexibility is assessing English-language learners. "A patchwork system of local assessments will be gamed to the max by districts under tremendous pressure to show improvements in performance," she told reporters after testifying. Cannaday said the new proposal is moving in the right direction. "The committee is making a thoughtful, deliberate effort," he said. "That's better than thinking everything is fine." Contact Gil Klein at gklein@mediageneral.com. |
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