Rethinking Education for English Language Learners
As newly-arrived immigrants continue to enter America’s schools, many states are looking to Florida as a model for how to teach them.
The Sunshine State is one of America’s most linguistically diverse places, and Florida is considered by many to be a testbed for methods for preparing teachers for students who are still learning English. But three experts at the University of Florida’s College of Education are not so sure the Sunshine State couldn’t be doing it better. They’re taking a comprehensive look at just how effective our teacher preparation methods really are.
Equipped with a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Assistant Professor Maria Coady and Associate Professors Ester de Jong and Candace Harper are delving into Florida’s K-20 Education Data Warehouse a massive database on Florida teachers and students — to track the outcomes of second-language learners who have had UF-prepared educators as their teachers in elementary school.
“This study is long overdue,” said Coady, who teaches UF’s education students foundations of language and culture in English for Speakers of Other Languages (or ESOL). “We’re becoming the model for other states, but we’ve had the same approach to ESOL for more than a decade, and we’ve never collected data that show if, and how, our approach is working.”
At issue is infusion, the Sunshine State’s approach to preparing teachers for the linguistically diverse classroom. But to explain infusion, we need to go back almost two decades, to a time when many educators were becoming alarmed by the fate of students from non-English-speaking homes.
By the early 1990s many years of tests had shown that second-language learners were performing at a level far below the performance of native speakers of English. A coalition of Latin American groups, educators’ organizations and other groups sued the state, arguing that a lack of proper teacher training in ESOL was one of the roots of the problem. The court agreed, and ordered Florida to require ESOL classes for all teachers in the state.
There was one problem. The court ordered the equivalent of 15 credit hours of ESOL instruction a full semester of training. There was no way to fit this into the course load at most colleges of education where prospective teachers are typically led through a tight sequence of state-prescribed classes. So the state came up with a compromise plan infusing ESOL concepts throughout the courses in Florida’s education colleges, so prospective teachers would confront ESOL-related questions in many of their courses.
UF’s professors believe they’ve hit on a formula for infusion that really does get the job done. But no one has ever taken a hard look at the data to see if the K-12 students of UF-trained teachers, and graduates of other infused teacher education programs in Florida, really do go on to succeed academically.
That’s exactly what the researchers propose to do‚ sifting through the Data Warehouse to find ESOL elementary students taught by graduates of UF’s ProTeach program, then tracking those students’ academic performance through the sixth grade.
“Our study fits nicely with the current trend in education, which is moving more toward outcome-based analyses of policies,” said researcher Ester de Jong. “Education research produces all sorts of interesting insights, but in the end, the only thing that really matters is whether or not kids are learning.”
The researchers say they’re not going to stop with just the figures from the Data Warehouse. They’ve sent questionnaires to 1,200 Elementary ProTeach graduates, to find out how they feel about the preparation they’ve had for the ESOL classroom, and what they feel is lacking in the current program. The researchers will also conduct case studies in a small group of ESOL classrooms in four school districts. The information they collect could be particularly valuable if the numbers from the data warehouse prove to be murky.
“The numbers can’t tell us everything we need to know,” said researcher Candace Harper. “Everyone in the state has been using the infusion model, so I won’t be too surprised if we see little difference between the students of UF graduates and the average ESOL student in Florida
But the numbers will at least let us know whether or not ESOL students are doing well under the infusion model, and the surveys and case studies will help us find out why,” Harper said.
The researchers are also on the lookout for factors in student success that go beyond teacher preparation. ESOL students are not a monolithic group, Harper notes. From the children of globetrotting college professors to the sons and daughters of migrant farmworkers, ESOL students come from every economic stratum of society. There’s always the chance that many of UF’s graduates typically in high demand as expert teachers have wound up in well-resourced schools where students have educational advantages outside the classroom.
Or those UF graduates may have landed in school systems where there’s a wealth of in-school support. Harper says the best teacher preparation in the world won’t help ESOL teachers if they work in schools that don’t respect or utilize their skills. In this age of No Child Left Behind, Harper said, it’s not uncommon for ESOL teachers to be called away from their own successful, content-based ESOL courses so they can teach basic skills courses to kids at risk of doing poorly on standardized tests.
No Child Left Behind has been a double-edged sword in this field,” Harper said. “It has made English Language learners visible by counting them as a separate category for accountability purposes but many schools are taking decision-making out of the hands of qualified teachers as a result of the demands of accountability.”
Recognition of the need for teachers with ESOL skills may be on the rise. With ESOL populations growing in many areas that have not historically had large non-English-speaking populations, a number of states are now looking at an ESOL requirement for their teachers for the first time. And naturally, they’re looking to Florida, California and other diverse states for models of how ESOL should be done. Because of that, the researchers say, the UF study could have an impact well beyond the Sunshine State.
This is a crucial time,” Coady said. “As other states begin considering infusion, we need to present them solid information on what works and what doesn’t.”
