Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012 - 23

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tant professor of language and literacy education at the University of Miami. Such ties help students academically, she says. “It does make a difference that you do have that mixed income represented across the community, and that you do have people with very strong voices who have been here for a very long time,” Gort says. “No one will argue that you don’t need English, but it’s not just English that you need.” Despite those advantages, other school systems can still learn from Miami-Dade’s example, says Carvalho. The district’s practices are “fully exportable and scalable to other districts,” he argues. “My advice to superintendents and educators is that they do what their colleagues are doing—come and visit and inspect our practice,” he says. “How do we move the needle of language achievement?” In Miami-Dade, Carvalho says, “the question is not whether Hispanic students can achieve at high levels, it’s ‘where is this being done?’ ” When it comes to fostering English proﬁciency, for example, the district provides a menu of options. To both promote students’ English acquisition and preserve their heritage languages, Miami-Dade maintains bilingual programs in some of its schools, where students can spend 40 percent of the day getting core academic instruction taught in Spanish and 60 percent receiving academic instruction in English. The district also maintains secondary magnet programs where students use the academic curricula of such countries as Spain and Italy. The school system has also become adept at evaluating incoming students’ language and academic skills quickly, administrators say. Most English-learners are given a double dose of English-language instruction each day. One class— or block of time, at the elementary level—is spent on grade-level reading and language arts. Because the district serves so many English-learners, it’s able to divide those classes further,

keeping students who are less proﬁcient in English together, and grouping students who have better English skills in a different class. All students eligible for Englishas-a-second-language services also take a second class that is devoted to English-language development. The developmental class includes a mix of students at various levels of English proﬁciency. For most students, other subjects are taught in English. But thanks to a 1990 consent decree, every teacher of basic subjects, in addition to every administrator and guidance counselor, is required to have training in strategies for teaching students with limited English proficiency. That decree grew out of a lawsuit between the state of Florida and eight organizations, led by the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC. The plaintiffs “have continued to maintain their interest in the well-being of English-minority students,” says Rosa Castro Feinberg, a former Miami-Dade school board member and a retired professor of education at Florida International University in Miami, who does consulting work with LULAC.

says Caridad M. Perez, a regional supervisor in the district’s department of bilingual education and world languages. “And, they want that security blanket,” she says of students. Finally, administrators and teachers say they watch for students who show the ability to do higher-level work, even if those students are still struggling to master English. “You have teachers who often help guide students toward those upper-level courses,” says Lisa L. Pizzimenti-Bradshaw, the principal of W.R. Thomas Middle School.

one perspective. Another view of the district’s work with Englishlanguage learners can be found in Leidy Vargas’ 1st grade class at the 1,300-student Kensington Park Elementary. The school, about 97 percent Hispanic, has 700 English-language learners at varying levels of proﬁciency, says principal Genaro Navarro.

Classroom View
In Vargas’ classroom, the students come in with little or no proﬁciency in English, and sometimes

“Accept the principle that the home language is a resource. And put it to work on behalf of students.”
Rosa Castro Feinberg
Florida International University

“I tell them, this is a family,” she adds, “and we’re not here to make fun of anybody.” Vargas says she identiﬁes with her students because of her own experience. She moved to MiamiDade from Cuba when she was in 2nd grade, and her teachers did not speak Spanish. “I was a struggling student in the beginning,” she says. Now, her classroom is a riot of text, with English labels on everything, from the closet to the teacher’s desk to the restroom. By January, she says, those shy students of a few months earlier have been transformed. “It’s like they’re a new set of students,” she says. “I see the jump.” Some have learned English well enough that Vargas recommends them for the school’s dual language program, which educates English- and Spanish-speaking students in both languages.

Reaching Teenagers
Jorge Euceda, who teaches 7th and 8th grade students at the 1,015-student Citrus Grove Middle School, also works with students with barely any English skills, and often limited Spanish skills. It’s harder, though, for the older students to break through their fear of trying a new language, he says. So, he enlists the other students to help. After the ﬁrst few days of class, “if a student says something to me in Spanish, I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you,’” Euceda says. Then he sends the student off to one of his or her peers for help. “There’s always someone who knows a little more language than the one who comes in,” he says. The student giving help feels proud to be considered a classroom leader, and the student who gets the help learns more about his or her classmates, Euceda says. Euceda doesn’t place labels on objects in his classroom as teachers of younger students often do. He takes advantage of technology,
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‘Security Blankets’
In middle and high schools, if enough students speak Spanish, the school is assigned a teacher or paraprofessional who serves as an “HLAP teacher,” which stands for Home Language Assistance Program. That instructor, who has access to classroom materials, works with beginning English-learners solely in their home language to translate textbooks and assignments. The home-language-assistance program is also available for students who speak Haitian Creole. A multilingual team based out of the central ofﬁce provides support in 20 additional languages, such as Mandarin and Hebrew. HLAP helps ensure that students don’t fall behind in other subjects while they’re learning English,

Her school of 750 students, nearly all of whom are Hispanic, has a college-preparatory Cambridge Academy magnet program. “You never want to hold a kid back,” Pizzimenti-Bradshaw says. And each high school offers Advanced Placement courses or dualenrollment programs with local institutions of higher education. But the top-level view of Miami-Dade as a district offers only

with little or no literacy skills in Spanish—though they speak the language, they may not know how to form letters or read. The combination makes for some quiet days at the very beginning of the school year, Vargas says. She says she uses Spanish in the very beginning, but adds a small ﬁb: “I tell them my Spanish is not very good, so they’re forced to speak to me in English.”

29 17 21

27 13

NATIONAL AVERAGE

TUDA DISTRICT AVERAGE

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY

NATIONAL AVERAGE

TUDA DISTRICT AVERAGE

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY

SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2011 Mathematics and Reading Assessments.

4TH GRADE READING

8TH GRADE READING
DIPLOMAS COUNT 2012 |

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Diplomas Count - Issue 34, 2012

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