Schrag: History Tells Us California’s Future Depends on the Children of Immigrants and Their Education

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

The new scores on the California English Language Development Test that students designated as English learners take each year are encouraging. But they don't mean much. They're driven largely by the number of English learners, most of them immigrants, who come into the state's schools each year and by the number who become proficient enough so that they're reclassified and are no longer counted.

But they're powerful evidence of the incredibly high-stakes task California schools have taken on – high stakes for all sorts of reasons. One-fourth of our students – 1.6 million – are classified as English learners. Another 18 percent are students whose primary language is also not English but who have been designated or redesignated as fluent English proficient.

That comes to roughly 43 percent of California's enrollment – 2.7 million of California's 6.3 million students – who start out speaking some other language. No school system on the globe has taken on a task of that magnitude or one tied to such huge political and social consequences for the future of its people.

The scores, released last week, were up. Roughly 33 percent of the 1.3 million English learners tested in 2006-07 met the test's criterion for English proficiency, compared to 29 percent the prior year. But the scores can't get much higher until the number of new English learners, meaning immigrants, goes down.

Nor does it mean that those 33 percent will now automatically be reclassified as FEP, fluent English proficient. Reclassification depends on a lot beside the California English Language Development Test: teacher evaluation, parental wishes and results of the English language arts tests that all students take each year. Given the high rate at which English learners pass the English language part of the state's exit exam, the reclassification rate, which is controlled by the districts, is probably too low.

But the enormous number of students who come from homes where English isn't the primary language underlines the urgency of moving those students to English proficiency – and to American acculturation and then to higher education – as rapidly as possible.