Bilingual blues

When Thalia Reyes, a lively 16-year-old from Mexico City, arrived in Pasadena at her uncle’s house two years ago, she quickly realized that the formal English she had learned at her private school was not going to help her very much. “I knew how to read and write [English],” she said. “I didn’t really speak it at all.”

Luckily for Reyes, her cousins are bilingual and helped her practice speaking and listening —practice that Reyes says she was not getting at her English Learner (EL) classes at John Muir High School.
“[The teacher] gave us writing exercises all the time; writing, writing, writing,” she said. “The EL teachers have to focus more on pronunciation and help us get rid of this fear of speaking English, this fear of messing up.”

She should know. After only a year and a half in the EL program, Reyes was able to “reclassify,” or become officially English-proficient — stunningly fast compared to her peers, none of whom was able to reclassify.

Nearly 22 percent of students in Pasadena Unified School District — 4,494 of 20,826 students in the 2006-07 school year — were ELs (pronounced “ells” by staff and administration), enrolled in a different kind of foreign language class than the ones most high schoolers muddle through.
PUSD, which includes 20 elementary schools, four middle schools and five high schools, has native speakers of languages as diverse as Urdu, Korean, Armenian and French, but they are by far the minority. The vast majority of ELs are Spanish-speaking, and about three-fourths of them are in elementary school.

Though the overall numbers of English learners are going down across the district, in several schools, like Madison Elementary, the numbers are rising.

Meeting these needs is a Herculean challenge for the district. To learn a language well enough to receive academic instruction in it, especially after a certain age, usually requires years of study and intensive practice speaking and listening. Since 1998’s Proposition 227, the Unz Initiative (so-called for its millionaire businessman author, Ron Unz), mandated English immersion schooling for immigrant children, not only are ELs expected to learn a second language, but also to keep up with academic content being taught to them in a language that they can barely speak. Obviously, those who accomplish this task overcome incredible odds.

Just ask Silvia Magallanes, language development resource teacher at Madison Elementary School in Northwest Pasadena. Magallanes oversees “structured English immersion classes” for 375 ELs (about half of Madison’s student body). “These kids actually do wonderfully well,” she said, especially in light of the “stringent criteria” for moving ahead. Those criteria include achieving a certain level on the California Standards Test, passing the OCR (Open Court Reading) assessment, receiving teacher permission to leave the program and getting a good report card. “That’s pretty hard for a kid to do, especially when he doesn’t have the English language down very well.”

Indeed, most ELs don’t manage it, especially if they haven’t done so by third grade. At that point, it becomes much harder for them to keep up with both language learning and the academic content for their grade level, according to Rosio Ramirez, a mother of three EL students and an active member of the English Learner Advisory Committee at Madison. Many of them get stuck at the CELDT 3, the test that measures English proficiency in writing. “Only 22 students reclassified last year,” Ramirez said, looking at a binder of charts and graphs tracking the progress of ELs from kindergarten through fifth grade. Though she thinks the program itself has enough money, “there are not enough resources. … There’s got to be enough personnel to help the teacher.”

Reyes, too, is pessimistic about the program’s efficacy. “It’s such a joke that you can be getting an A or a B in the class and think you’re ready to take the exam and then not be able to pass it,” she said. Even if they pass the proficiency exam, they may get to regular classes only to be sent back to the EL classes. “I believe that when they [the students] realize there’s such a huge gap, and that maybe the teachers aren’t doing their job, the kids don’t do their job either.”

Sadie Gonzalez, secretary of the EL program at Madison and mother of two EL students, one of whom was reclassified in the second grade, says that she, at least, is satisfied with the program. “For me, in my case, it worked,” she said. But Gonzalez also made sure her children had plenty of outside practice in English with things like Cub Scouts and tutoring, instead of relying only on the teacher.
Parental support is essential, but its absence is certainly not the main reason most kids cannot become English-proficient. “We have kids that are coming in without any English and sometimes without any school,” said Magallanes. “They are put into classes and they’re supposed to be listening to the teacher [in English] … and there’s nothing going on, they don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

According to Magallanes, the district is thinking through some sort of “newcomer program,” wherein Spanish-speakers would first be required to develop Basic Communication Skills (BCS) before being put in a classroom. “How are you going to teach someone academics when they don’t even have the survival skills?”

It’s a fair question, and Pasadena Unified School District, along with the rest of California, is going to have to find some answers soon.