Busting a language barrier

by Jennifer Anderson, The Portland Tribune

When it’s time to read at Whitman Elementary School, kids don’t get to pick their favorite SpongeBob or Scooby Doo book from the rack.

Reading time here at this quiet little school in outer Southeast Portland is serious business, and for good reason: there are benchmarks to meet, levels to advance.

With one out of three students learning English as a second language at Whitman, Principal Lori Clark makes it a priority to boost literacy not just for those students, but also for every child, through intensive two-hour blocks of reading time each day. The blocks are staggered, to make the most of the school’s two-and-a-half ESL teaching positions and one bilingual assistant.

The creative scheduling — and buy-in from all teachers and staff — have helped Whitman become Portland Public Schools’ highest-performing elementary school for English as a second language students. This success is occurring at a time when the district as a whole is getting blasted for poor results and lack of collaboration.

“Because PPS has been out of compliance for so many years, the district and the ESL department (have) been in an ongoing reactive mode,” an October audit by district auditor Richard Tracy states. “… The inability to implement a compliant and stable program … has affected the image and reputation of PPS.”

To parent Marta Guembes, the audit just affirmed what she and others have already known: that PPS has not been serving its 4,700 ESL students adequately, and in fact has been out of compliance with state and federal ESL laws for 13 of the past 17 years.

“What’s the new news?” she says. “They’re just wasting money to know that they already have a problem. … Nobody wants to be accountable for this broken system.”

Guembes has been advocating for fixes to the system for years, filing several complaints that have triggered state reviews that eventually resulted in the withholding of $617,000 in federal money last year. The district has since come into compliance and the funding was reinstated.

Yet many problems still exist, the audit shows. As the ESL population grows, the situation appears to be getting worse.

Near the end of each school year, students are tested to see if they should advance to the next English ability level. Those who leave the program after level five are deemed “proficient.”

Districtwide, 47 percent of students were proficient in 2006, but that dropped to 32 percent in 2008. The district did not meet the state target of 50 percent in the past three years, although several schools did so on their own.

That’s what the district calls “pockets of excellence” — and that’s where Whitman scores big. Fifty-seven percent of ESL students are proficient in English, compared with rates as low as 5 percent, 8 percent and 9 percent at other elementary schools.

District leaders are scrambling to figure out why more students don’t progress and become proficient.

“This is just so egregious, and it’s been a situation that doesn’t ever get resolved,” says Carla Randall, the district’s newest chief academic officer.

“The school board made it very clear in (a recent) student achievement committee meeting that they want a 30-day plan, 60-day plan, 90-day plan and yearlong plan of how to turn the (English Language Learner) program around. It’s a very high priority.”

Intensive reading helps
At Whitman Elementary, Principal Clark has for the past seven years had a clear vision of how to serve her 130 students who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian — a third of her school.

In her staggered schedule of two-hour reading blocks, every student works on a classroom lesson for the first hour, no matter what the student’s reading ability.

For the second hour, the students split into smaller groups to work at their own reading level and at their own level of need for English language development. As they improve, they move up another level — so the groups are constantly in flux.

It all sounds very regimented, but it’s working, Clark says.

“There was pushback in the beginning” by teachers over the new way of scheduling, Clark says. “But our scores went up. Even teachers who felt a little restricted said, ‘I get it.’ ”

The challenge for the district, Randall says, is to help all schools become successful in that way.

“There are schools that stand out when you slice the data different ways,” she says. “Let’s look at where it’s working well and influence the overall program.”

Both she and Clark say it’s more than just scheduling that makes the difference.

The successful schools have “built a culture with the teachers there,” Randall says. “They believe in what they’re doing, and all of their efforts are honed toward getting that result. There’s strong leadership, teacher buy-in and teacher empowerment.”

That’s not true in every school, judging by the uneven progress.

At three of the high schools that otherwise have high performances, ESL students do not fare well: At Cleveland, 32 percent are proficient in English; Wilson has a 36 percent rate; and Lincoln comes in at 50 percent.

Benson and BizTech (on the soon-to-be-closed Marshall campus) had the highest proficiency rates in the district among ESL students, at 62 percent and 65 percent, respectively.

Randall says the district just posted an ESL handbook online, to help set the department’s expectations.

The district also has hired a consultant to shadow ESL Director Diana Fernandez two days per week to identify ways to increase collaboration and take other steps to improve.

The consultant is Deborah Sommer, a team-building and conflict resolution expert who is the assistant director of Portland State University’s Center for Student Success. The district will pay up to $8,000 for the contract, which runs through June.

Guembes, who leads the ESL parent advisory group, says she doesn’t understand the thinking behind that action.

She continues to be frustrated with the district’s attempts to fix the problems and on Oct. 28, shortly after the audit’s release, sent a letter to all school principals and the district’s top leaders with some “friendly reminders.”

ESL parents would like to make visits to the schools, she said. They’d like to know how their children are doing on a regular basis, what kind of support they can receive if they’re struggling, how discipline is being handled and how parents can be involved in school decision-making.

She hopes it’s not falling on deaf ears. “Nobody’s acknowledged the letter,” she says.

Welcome centers tend to families

While district leaders struggle to address the problem from the top down, Mary Krogh works on the front lines with students and families at the district’s Northside Family Support Center.

About 1,600 ESL students trickle into her center and another one in Southeast Portland each year, to be tested for their English ability level and screened for their education history.

Families may talk with friendly “community agents” —people who are who are bilingual in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese and Russian —to get referrals to social services such as food stamps and health clinics.

The support center also provides interpretation and translation help for the schools, and runs the annual school readiness fair for Spanish-speakers in the district.

Krogh says the support centers are a real strength for the district, but they are not being maximized.

Instead, the district cut ESL staffing this year in the budget process, reassigning seven ESL teachers on special assignment, two of whom worked at the support centers.

Now, the support centers use a patchwork of part-time teachers and specialists to perform the assessments — a critical piece that, if missing, could impede teachers’ ability to teach students, Krogh says.

In a dream world, she says, the district could do a lot of good by providing more outreach services and bilingual counselors for students.

“It would be great if we had more staff here that were dedicated to following kids that were struggling, either through attendance or grades,” she says. “We really drop the ball with high-schoolers. Hispanic kids graduate on time at a rate of 31 percent.”

Critics might question why the public school system must embrace social services to families of non-English speaking students. To Krogh, a former county social worker of 12 years, she thinks it’s obvious.

“You have to take the families as a whole unit,” she says. “Are their parents undocumented? Is it hard for their parents to find meaningful, living-wage work? Do they have enough to eat? Are they homeless? Are their lights on? When you can stabilize those factors for families, kids do better in school. Language is just an additional barrier.”

http://portlandtribune.com/news/print_story.php?story_id=128942579843364600