	Sept/Oct 2006
California Textbook Bill Stirs Debate on How to Teach ELLs By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer If you learned some conversational Spanish—enough to order dinner—and took a week-long trip to Mexico, you'd have fun. If, on the other hand, you learned a dinner's worth of Spanish and someone plunked you down in a seventh-grade classroom and handed you a Spanish language arts textbook, your first thought would probably be, "I'm doomed!" That's exactly what it's like for ELLs learning in California's English classrooms with the state's current instructional materials, says Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, president of California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (CATESOL). "The [English] curriculum is based on the idea that [English] is your native language," she says. This state of affairs has come about because "learning English" in California actually has two aspects. California has two sets of standards that dictate when and how students are expected to learn English-related skills. The first set is English language arts (ELA) standards, rules for when students-assumed to be fluent English in English-should learn reading, writing, written and oral English language conventions, listening, and speaking skills. The second is English language development (ELD), rules developed to document ELLs' progress in learning English as a second language. In English classes, students learn primarily language arts skills. But California's yearly assessment tests measure students not only on ELA skills but also on how proficient they are in English. That's a problem, says Cadiero-Kaplan, because as of 2002, the last time California's instructional materials were revised, the curriculum didn't include enough time for helping students develop English. The state is now seeking new instructional materials for 2008, and the board of education and the legislature are locked in conflict over the two kinds of standards. The conflict, now nearly a year old, has culminated this summer in the legislature's eliminating the board's funding and passing a new instructional materials bill. The battleground is the board of education's 2008 framework and adoption criteria, which tell publishers how to develop materials that meet state education standards. The board of education says that with the new adoption criteria, publishers will be able to write materials that will help ELLs feel less like under-prepared tourists. But Democratic lawmakers disagree. They charge that the existing framework and adoption criteria don't ask publishers to build in enough English language development help for ELLs. And they feel so strongly about the matter that they have removed the board of education's funding from the state budget and ushered through a bill that would compel the board of education to change its guidelines and add more ELD. The bill, now on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk, would require the board of education to give publishers the option of developing instructional materials that support California state ELD standards as well as ELA standards. Beyond giving publishers the option to develop additional support for ELLs, the bill would also restore funding to the board of education. Democratic lawmakers deleted the board's funding from the state budget in May after a long standoff that began last fall when the board of education's curriculum committee first published a draft of its framework and adoption criteria. Although the curriculum committee included educators and solicited input from the public, some educators felt shut out. They approached Democratic Senator Martha Escutia, the bill's principal sponsor, and other legislators to complain that the five curriculum options in the committee's draft document didn't include enough language development for ELLs. The educators asked Escutia and other Democratic legislators to intervene with the curriculum committee. The legislators felt that the educators' requests were valid, says Nichole Muñoz-Murillo, consultant to Senator Escutia. "It is the responsibility of the legislature to make sure our funds are being used in the best way possible," says Muñoz-Murillo. "And when 1.6 million of our students are not having their needs met, that's an issue." In 2005, more than 85 percent of English learners scored below the "proficient" level on the California Standards Test of English Language Arts. Nor has the performance gap between English learners and native speakers narrowed, says Muñoz-Murillo, who points to a recent study conducted by the California Department of Education under a mandate by the state legislature. The study looks at the effects of Proposition 227, which outlawed bilingual education in California in 1998. Since the passage of Proposition 227, students across all language classifications in all grades have improved their performance on state achievement tests. However, the gap between English learners and native English speakers remains. The bill on Governor Schwarzenegger's desk, says Muñoz-Murillo, would narrow the gap. But Dale Webster, the board of education's policy consultant, says the framework and adoption criteria, as written, will ensure the gap is narrowed. The two "basic" language arts programs outlined in the guidelines-Option 1 and Option 2-require publishers to create instructional materials for 2 to 2 ½ hours per day of English language arts for first- through fifth-graders. Option 1 calls for 30 minutes of ELD for English learners, and Option 2 calls for an hour of ELD. "It's a mandate to the publishers to create an hour's worth of materials for teachers to use as they see fit, not a mandate to teach an extra hour of separate English language development," says Webster. The lessons in the extra hour would tie in to the themes of the core reading program. "So if you're learning about fossils, you're going to have a parallel ELD unit that's also talking about fossils and building language and vocabulary and sentence structure work loosely related to fossils." Teachers can still use their current set of ELD materials if they choose, says Webster. "This just provides another option for school districts to say, wow, we really like the idea of having connected materials." Webster also praises the committee's efforts to beef up the vocabulary and writing components in the core language arts programs, which were last revised for the 2002 school year. "There's a huge addition in terms of vocabulary development, also writing, fluency, and assessment," Webster says. And the board of education added a reading intervention kit to assist kids who need help with decoding, fluency, or vocabulary. "English learners learn to read in a very similar path that native English speakers do, but they just need more time, they need lots and lots of vocabulary development, they need opportunities for language development," Webster says. He says the committee listened carefully to the educators and legislators' requests and added language that specifically directed that extra time be aligned with ELD standards. But Escutia and the other legislators and educators felt the board of education's efforts weren't enough. They wanted not only the supplemental time but also the core program to align with the ELD standards. "We have an accountability system that's based on standards, the ELD standards," says CATESOL's Cadiero-Kaplan. "[ELLs] have to take the CELDT [California English Language Development Test] every year, but there's no curriculum that aligns to those tests. Some districts can do a good job with supplemental materials for ELD, but some don't, they just use ELA materials." In March, Escutia and 31 other legislators, declaring that the committee had failed to honor their requests for better ELD materials, threatened to withdraw funding to the board of education. On April 17, shortly before the board approved the adoption criteria 6-4, there was a meeting to hear both sides of the issue. Each side had 30 minutes to present its case. Muñoz-Murillo feels that format hurt her side's ability to make itself heard. "Our side was not a cohesive side," she says. "We have people from up and down the state and different points of view. There never was a presentation by the people who were proposing [Option 6-the curriculum option aligned to both ELD and ELA standards] on what it would look like. To this day, I don't think the board of education really knows what we're proposing." Webster doesn't dispute this view. "They haven't really come to the table with a very specific set of criteria for what this Option 6 would look like," he says. And he believes that the two sides, despite excellent intentions on both parts, were talking past each other. "When you're talking with another group of people, a lot of times it seems like you're saying the same thing, but you're coming from different places or motivations, so a lot of times you're not hearing what the other people are saying." In the end, the two groups were unable to reach a compromise, and legislators deleted the board of education's funding from the state budget and launched Senate Bill 1769. The bill does not compel the board of education to adopt materials developed as a result of the bill, nor does it require school districts to buy them. It also doesn't specify anything about the nature of the materials that publishers would develop, other than that they would be aligned to both ELD and ELA standards. That leaves a lot to the public imagination. Muñoz-Murillo offers one possible vision: "You probably have on the page whatever the academic content is that you're trying to teach the child, and below that you have the different proficiency levels and strategies for teaching the academic content, systematically teaching them English." The bill does say that the materials are intended for use in communities with a majority of ELLs. The bill and its associated politics have caused an uproar in California. Media coverage in California has included articles with headlines like "Proposal Revives Bilingual Education Debate" (Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2006), even though the bill stipulates that all materials must be developed in English only. In the Los Angeles Times article, Ron Unz, author of California's English-only education law, Proposition 227, is quoted as saying, "I'm awfully suspicious that this may, in fact, represent an attempt to sneak bilingual education back into California through the back door." Language like Unz's, says Muñoz-Murillo, inflames the public. "It's a fear thing. When you hear 'bilingual education,' there's a knee-jerk reaction that happens." Governor Schwarzenegger himself, in whose hands the fate of the bill now rests, wrote a letter to Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata expressing his opposition by making reference to the bilingual education battle. "I learned English by immersion and believe in my heart that full immersion is the best approach to teaching language that exists," says the letter. Governor Schwarzenegger also says in the letter that he fears the bill would segregate learners based on their level of English competency. This is the primary charge leveled at the bill by its opponents, who include members of the state board of education, many Republican lawmakers, and former California governors Gray Davis and Pete Wilson. Escutia has said that the opposite would be the case. She believes that since current instructional options call for segregating learners into separate classrooms for the language development portion of the curriculum, the new materials will actually provide a more integrated environment, one in which all learners can achieve language arts and language development goals at the same time in the same place. Cadiero-Kaplan says that the perception that the bill would cause segregation comes from a failure to understand the idea of "differentiated instruction." As a teacher, she says, you differentiate-or adjust-your instruction to meet each of your students at his or her own level: "You have to say, 'What is it that is going to best help me teach the children sitting in front of me today?'" Many teachers in California already do this for their ELLs, says Cadiero-Kaplan, often by using supplemental materials that aren't a built-in part of the curriculum. The bill, if passed, would let teachers continue this practice in a much more fluid way. All the students could use one textbook, but the teacher could make reference to a number of different kinds of lessons, illustrations, or "scaffolding" (ways of providing support for language tasks that are beyond a student's proficiency level) to get the message across to each student, says Cadiero-Kaplan. She admits this depends on school systems actually adopting and using the new materials in the way they're intended, which wouldn't always happen. One former board of education member expressed concern that the bill would result in more affluent communities purchasing one set of materials and communities with predominantly English learners purchasing a different set. Opponents of the bill sometimes describe this still-hypothetical set of materials used by English language learners as "dumbed-down" or "simplified." But proponents of the bill want care taken with the use of the term "simplified materials," since "simplified" doesn't necessarily mean inferior, says Muñoz-Murillo. "How can you be dumbing something down when you're meeting the same standards?" she asks. "Meeting the standards" is the one thing proponents and opponents of the bill can agree upon: Somehow or other, the standards must be met. Since the bill arrived on Governor Schwarzenegger's desk on September 1, state educators have received some bad news. California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell released a finding that only 65 percent of California's schools met their adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for improvement in math and English to meet standards set by No Child Left Behind, and 600 more California schools have been added to a list of poorly performing schools that require "drastic improvement measures." The gap between ELLs and native speakers is just one part of the problem, but it's an important part. If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.
Copyright © 2006 Course Crafters, Inc.® All rights reserved.

Sept/Oct 2006

California Textbook Bill Stirs Debate on How to Teach ELLs

By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

If you learned some conversational Spanish—enough to order dinner—and took a week-long trip to Mexico, you'd have fun. If, on the other hand, you learned a dinner's worth of Spanish and someone plunked you down in a seventh-grade classroom and handed you a Spanish language arts textbook, your first thought would probably be, "I'm doomed!"

That's exactly what it's like for ELLs learning in California's English classrooms with the state's current instructional materials, says Karen Cadiero-Kaplan, president of California Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (CATESOL). "The [English] curriculum is based on the idea that [English] is your native language," she says.

This state of affairs has come about because "learning English" in California actually has two aspects. California has two sets of standards that dictate when and how students are expected to learn English-related skills. The first set is English language arts (ELA) standards, rules for when students-assumed to be fluent English in English-should learn reading, writing, written and oral English language conventions, listening, and speaking skills. The second is English language development (ELD), rules developed to document ELLs' progress in learning English as a second language. In English classes, students learn primarily language arts skills. But California's yearly assessment tests measure students not only on ELA skills but also on how proficient they are in English. That's a problem, says Cadiero-Kaplan, because as of 2002, the last time California's instructional materials were revised, the curriculum didn't include enough time for helping students develop English.

The state is now seeking new instructional materials for 2008, and the board of education and the legislature are locked in conflict over the two kinds of standards. The conflict, now nearly a year old, has culminated this summer in the legislature's eliminating the board's funding and passing a new instructional materials bill. The battleground is the board of education's 2008 framework and adoption criteria, which tell publishers how to develop materials that meet state education standards. The board of education says that with the new adoption criteria, publishers will be able to write materials that will help ELLs feel less like under-prepared tourists. But Democratic lawmakers disagree. They charge that the existing framework and adoption criteria don't ask publishers to build in enough English language development help for ELLs. And they feel so strongly about the matter that they have removed the board of education's funding from the state budget and ushered through a bill that would compel the board of education to change its guidelines and add more ELD.

The bill, now on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk, would require the board of education to give publishers the option of developing instructional materials that support California state ELD standards as well as ELA standards. Beyond giving publishers the option to develop additional support for ELLs, the bill would also restore funding to the board of education. Democratic lawmakers deleted the board's funding from the state budget in May after a long standoff that began last fall when the board of education's curriculum committee first published a draft of its framework and adoption criteria. Although the curriculum committee included educators and solicited input from the public, some educators felt shut out. They approached Democratic Senator Martha Escutia, the bill's principal sponsor, and other legislators to complain that the five curriculum options in the committee's draft document didn't include enough language development for ELLs. The educators asked Escutia and other Democratic legislators to intervene with the curriculum committee. The legislators felt that the educators' requests were valid, says Nichole Muñoz-Murillo, consultant to Senator Escutia. "It is the responsibility of the legislature to make sure our funds are being used in the best way possible," says Muñoz-Murillo. "And when 1.6 million of our students are not having their needs met, that's an issue." In 2005, more than 85 percent of English learners scored below the "proficient" level on the California Standards Test of English Language Arts.

Nor has the performance gap between English learners and native speakers narrowed, says Muñoz-Murillo, who points to a recent study conducted by the California Department of Education under a mandate by the state legislature. The study looks at the effects of Proposition 227, which outlawed bilingual education in California in 1998. Since the passage of Proposition 227, students across all language classifications in all grades have improved their performance on state achievement tests. However, the gap between English learners and native English speakers remains. The bill on Governor Schwarzenegger's desk, says Muñoz-Murillo, would narrow the gap.

But Dale Webster, the board of education's policy consultant, says the framework and adoption criteria, as written, will ensure the gap is narrowed. The two "basic" language arts programs outlined in the guidelines-Option 1 and Option 2-require publishers to create instructional materials for 2 to 2 ½ hours per day of English language arts for first- through fifth-graders. Option 1 calls for 30 minutes of ELD for English learners, and Option 2 calls for an hour of ELD. "It's a mandate to the publishers to create an hour's worth of materials for teachers to use as they see fit, not a mandate to teach an extra hour of separate English language development," says Webster. The lessons in the extra hour would tie in to the themes of the core reading program. "So if you're learning about fossils, you're going to have a parallel ELD unit that's also talking about fossils and building language and vocabulary and sentence structure work loosely related to fossils." Teachers can still use their current set of ELD materials if they choose, says Webster. "This just provides another option for school districts to say, wow, we really like the idea of having connected materials."

Webster also praises the committee's efforts to beef up the vocabulary and writing components in the core language arts programs, which were last revised for the 2002 school year. "There's a huge addition in terms of vocabulary development, also writing, fluency, and assessment," Webster says. And the board of education added a reading intervention kit to assist kids who need help with decoding, fluency, or vocabulary. "English learners learn to read in a very similar path that native English speakers do, but they just need more time, they need lots and lots of vocabulary development, they need opportunities for language development," Webster says. He says the committee listened carefully to the educators and legislators' requests and added language that specifically directed that extra time be aligned with ELD standards.

But Escutia and the other legislators and educators felt the board of education's efforts weren't enough. They wanted not only the supplemental time but also the core program to align with the ELD standards. "We have an accountability system that's based on standards, the ELD standards," says CATESOL's Cadiero-Kaplan. "[ELLs] have to take the CELDT [California English Language Development Test] every year, but there's no curriculum that aligns to those tests. Some districts can do a good job with supplemental materials for ELD, but some don't, they just use ELA materials." In March, Escutia and 31 other legislators, declaring that the committee had failed to honor their requests for better ELD materials, threatened to withdraw funding to the board of education.

On April 17, shortly before the board approved the adoption criteria 6-4, there was a meeting to hear both sides of the issue. Each side had 30 minutes to present its case. Muñoz-Murillo feels that format hurt her side's ability to make itself heard. "Our side was not a cohesive side," she says. "We have people from up and down the state and different points of view. There never was a presentation by the people who were proposing [Option 6-the curriculum option aligned to both ELD and ELA standards] on what it would look like. To this day, I don't think the board of education really knows what we're proposing."

Webster doesn't dispute this view. "They haven't really come to the table with a very specific set of criteria for what this Option 6 would look like," he says. And he believes that the two sides, despite excellent intentions on both parts, were talking past each other. "When you're talking with another group of people, a lot of times it seems like you're saying the same thing, but you're coming from different places or motivations, so a lot of times you're not hearing what the other people are saying."

In the end, the two groups were unable to reach a compromise, and legislators deleted the board of education's funding from the state budget and launched Senate Bill 1769. The bill does not compel the board of education to adopt materials developed as a result of the bill, nor does it require school districts to buy them. It also doesn't specify anything about the nature of the materials that publishers would develop, other than that they would be aligned to both ELD and ELA standards. That leaves a lot to the public imagination. Muñoz-Murillo offers one possible vision: "You probably have on the page whatever the academic content is that you're trying to teach the child, and below that you have the different proficiency levels and strategies for teaching the academic content, systematically teaching them English." The bill does say that the materials are intended for use in communities with a majority of ELLs.

The bill and its associated politics have caused an uproar in California. Media coverage in California has included articles with headlines like "Proposal Revives Bilingual Education Debate" (Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2006), even though the bill stipulates that all materials must be developed in English only. In the Los Angeles Times article, Ron Unz, author of California's English-only education law, Proposition 227, is quoted as saying, "I'm awfully suspicious that this may, in fact, represent an attempt to sneak bilingual education back into California through the back door." Language like Unz's, says Muñoz-Murillo, inflames the public. "It's a fear thing. When you hear 'bilingual education,' there's a knee-jerk reaction that happens." Governor Schwarzenegger himself, in whose hands the fate of the bill now rests, wrote a letter to Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata expressing his opposition by making reference to the bilingual education battle. "I learned English by immersion and believe in my heart that full immersion is the best approach to teaching language that exists," says the letter.

Governor Schwarzenegger also says in the letter that he fears the bill would segregate learners based on their level of English competency. This is the primary charge leveled at the bill by its opponents, who include members of the state board of education, many Republican lawmakers, and former California governors Gray Davis and Pete Wilson. Escutia has said that the opposite would be the case. She believes that since current instructional options call for segregating learners into separate classrooms for the language development portion of the curriculum, the new materials will actually provide a more integrated environment, one in which all learners can achieve language arts and language development goals at the same time in the same place.

Cadiero-Kaplan says that the perception that the bill would cause segregation comes from a failure to understand the idea of "differentiated instruction." As a teacher, she says, you differentiate-or adjust-your instruction to meet each of your students at his or her own level: "You have to say, 'What is it that is going to best help me teach the children sitting in front of me today?'" Many teachers in California already do this for their ELLs, says Cadiero-Kaplan, often by using supplemental materials that aren't a built-in part of the curriculum. The bill, if passed, would let teachers continue this practice in a much more fluid way. All the students could use one textbook, but the teacher could make reference to a number of different kinds of lessons, illustrations, or "scaffolding" (ways of providing support for language tasks that are beyond a student's proficiency level) to get the message across to each student, says Cadiero-Kaplan.

She admits this depends on school systems actually adopting and using the new materials in the way they're intended, which wouldn't always happen. One former board of education member expressed concern that the bill would result in more affluent communities purchasing one set of materials and communities with predominantly English learners purchasing a different set. Opponents of the bill sometimes describe this still-hypothetical set of materials used by English language learners as "dumbed-down" or "simplified." But proponents of the bill want care taken with the use of the term "simplified materials," since "simplified" doesn't necessarily mean inferior, says Muñoz-Murillo. "How can you be dumbing something down when you're meeting the same standards?" she asks.

"Meeting the standards" is the one thing proponents and opponents of the bill can agree upon: Somehow or other, the standards must be met. Since the bill arrived on Governor Schwarzenegger's desk on September 1, state educators have received some bad news. California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell released a finding that only 65 percent of California's schools met their adequate yearly progress (AYP) goals for improvement in math and English to meet standards set by No Child Left Behind, and 600 more California schools have been added to a list of poorly performing schools that require "drastic improvement measures." The gap between ELLs and native speakers is just one part of the problem, but it's an important part.

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.