Education Week - January 7, 2015 - 18

Fla. Will Delay Use of ELLs' Test Scores in School Grades
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
federal requirement that Englishlearners'
performance on state
content tests be part of school accountability
after such students
have been enrolled in U.S. schools
for one year.
In a Dec. 22 letter to Florida
Education Commissioner Pam
Stewart, Deborah S. Delisle, the
assistant secretary for the office of
elementary and secondary education,
wrote that the federal department
had reconsidered Florida's
request for testing flexibility because
the state will still publicly
report on performance of recentlyarrived
English-learners and include
their scores in the growth
component of the state's school
grading system.
With the move, federal officials are
following the lead of state legislators
in Florida, who changed the law in
2014 to reflect that students still
learning English should not be expected
to immediately excel on the
state's annual tests. That law gives
students two years in a U.S. school
before educators must include their
test scores in schools' annual accountability
ratings.
"We are granting this waiver
after carefully considering Florida's
request," said education department
spokeswoman Dorie Nolt
in a statement.
"The state's particular approach
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to accountability for newly arrived
English-language-learner
students ensures schools have
baseline data beginning with each
student's first year in the United
States-data that helps inform
teaching and extra supports
[needed] to help the students succeed-and
calls for the state to
fully incorporate student growth
into its statewide accountability
system in the second year of the
waiver," she said.
Earlier this year, the Education
Department scolded Florida officials
as they renewed the state's waiver
from nclb requirements, warning
that they risked having the waiver
revoked if the state did not comply
with federal law on using ell test
scores after one year.
National Push?
The Education Department's reversal
on Florida's stance on ell
testing could breathe new life into
the debate over how schools are
judged for serving English-learners,
including giving them that extra
year of instructional time before
testing them for accountability purposes
on content in a language they
are still learning.
Research indicates that it takes
five to seven years for students
with no English-language skills to
gain fluency.
"In many cases, students fail the
test, not because they don't know
the content," said Jamal Abedi,
a professor of education at the
University of California, Davis.
"It's because they don't know the
language."
Federal education officials said
"
In many cases,
students fail the
test, not because they
don't know the
content. It's because
they don't know the
language."
JAMAL ABEDI
University of California, Davis
Florida's exemption is not immediately
applicable to other states
with sizable ELL populations.
"This is one model that other
states could look to when they are
considering how to have a fair accountability
system for ells," Ms.
Nolt said.
Ms. Stewart, the state education
commissioner, and Gov. Scott
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praised the Education Department's
decision to reverse course and allow
the state to retain the two-year testing
timeline it had been using for recently
arrived English-learners for
its pre-waiver state accountability
system.
"Our teachers and schools have
made significant strides closing
the achievement gap for Englishlanguage
learners, and it is critical
that we stay on the trajectory that
has yielded excellent results," Ms.
Stewart said.
Measuring Impact
The growing number of Englishlanguage
learners in Florida and
elsewhere poses challenges for
educators striving to ensure that
such students get access to the core
curriculum in schools and acquire
academic knowledge, as well as
English-language skills.
About 1 in 10 Florida students,
roughly 250,000, were Englishlanguage
learners in the 2013-14
academic year.
In the wake of the federal education
department's decision, Florida
officials did not specify how many
of those students are tested under
the requirements of No Child Left
Behind.
"I never got a sense of how many
kids were going to be affected or
the level of proficiency of these students,"
said Robert Linquanti, the
project director for English-learner
evaluation and accountability support
at WestEd, a San Franciscobased
research group. "What
we had here was a debate about
fairness."
Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent
of the 345,000-student
Miami-Dade County school district,
said in a statement that the
decision brought "reason, respect,
and fairness to one of the most
fragile groups of students anywhere
in America, English-language
learners."
The waiver could be significant
for Miami-Dade, the state's largest
school system and home to close to
a third of the state's K-12 Englishlearner
students.
Mari Corugedo, a Miami-Dade
teacher, hopes the waiver paves the
way for more substantive changes
in how the state educates and evaluates
its language-learners, including
bolstered bilingual instruction.
"Children do need more than a
year," Ms. Corugedo said. "It's a
good start. But in order (for them)
to make the transition, we need
to strengthen the bilingual programs
and step up funding in the
schools. That's the way we make a
difference."
The LEARNING THE LANGUAGE
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this issue. www.edweek.org/go/
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Education Week - January 7, 2015

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