brown skin + Foreign Birth automatically means ELL?!

I got a new student yesterday. He had been living in Mississippi for two years and before that had grown up in Saipan, an island north of Guam, where he was born. He was placed in my self-contained ESL class because, as I was told, “he hasn’t been tested yet.” This meant he had not yet been given an English proficiency test called the LAB-R. This test is only given – excuse me is *supposed to only be given* to students who speak a different language at home. There is a sheet the parents fill out to figure this out. And my new student only speaks English at home, as listed on this paper! They teach school in English in Saipan and are a US Commonwealth.

And yet he was placed in my class. There was no reason to think he would even need to be tested unless all you do is notice the mother’s accent, his foreign birth, and brown skin. And it took two days and four teachers to get the administration and office to recognize this error. It hasn’t been fixed yet of course. Granted today is the second day he has been here but he is already feeling like my class is home. It’s unfair this was done to him.

Aside from moving around a lot, I learn today that the reason they left Saipan is because the father “broke bones” on the mom’s body, which I assume means he beat her repeatedly. (his mom’s first language is Nepalese but she is also literate in Hindi and English. This may indicate she is from a fairly upper class family in Kathmandu since so many Nepali women are not literate or educated from what I know). So this boy has clearly been through enough.

To upset me even more, on my train ride home, a teacher friend who has the second grade bilingual class discussed some experiences with teachers at our school who are just so against trying to understand our ELLs – understand their language issues or even think they may have strengths, etc. Call it lazyness, call it racism, or wilfull ignorance. Whatever you call it, there really is no excuse for it because almost all our students are ELLs. So I am worried that this new student of mine, who speaks a different variety of English from what teachers expect from “native” speakers here, will be treated as a “dumb” “ELL”, both of which are wrong labels for him.

Argh!

A handy site if you write in other languages..

http://spanish.typeit.org/

Halfway there…

So, 56% of my students are “approaching grade level” in reading (according to the Teachers College Readers Assessment Project), 5 are at grade level, and 5 are considered “in need of support”.  As most readers know, I teach a self-contained ESL classroom, so while there are grade-level benchmarks, my students also have personalized goals called AYPs (A Year’s Progress). For ELLs, the goals is for them to make a year and a half’s worth of progress because, typically, they are that far behind and then some. So, while we can say that 61% are still “below grade level”, the majority have made and even surpassed their AYP.

The first column is their reading levels when they entered third grade. For those who don’t know, A-I is generally first grade. I-L is second grade. M-Q is third grade.  The ones who met or exceeded their AYP are in green (as I recall anyway – I don’t have the sheet in front of me to reference). As you can see, many of my students moved from first grade level to third grade in half a year.

I hate to say it, but I have no idea if these kinds of leaps are normal (anyone know?), but I’m told that the percentages in my class are “practically that of the general ed” classes at my school. I put that in quotes since basically all our classes are majority ELLs, just that the general ed ones tend to have more advanced ELLs. The majority of my students are Intermediate and Beginner. I’m very proud of their progress and excited to see how much further they go. ELLs tend to “stall” at level M at our school, and more broadly at level N because the language tends to get more idiomatic and difficult for them — they get the gist, but not the deeper meaning. So, we’ll see where they end up in June. Of course, thanks to the way Teachers College assesses students, the major leaps they made don’t matter when it comes to their report card. Only the benchmarks used to assess native speakers matter.

F	I
F	L
I	L
K	M
H	M
F	L
H	M
I	N
I	L
C	E
L	N
F	H
H	J
I	M
K	M
F	L
F	L
E	J
K	N
E	N
I	M
F	N
G	L