May 9, 2007
On Education
English Language Learners as Pawns in the School System’s Overhaul
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN, NY TIMES

Let’s call this the mystery of the missing ELLs. An ELL, you need to know, is the abbreviation for English Language Learner. These students, immigrants or their children, are legally entitled to special classes intended to make them fluent readers, writers and speakers of their new language.

Another way of defining ELLs, though, is frequently as pawns in the overhaul of New York City’s public schools. And in repeated cases they have been moved around, shunted aside and denied the very kind of instruction they are due.

As for the missing ELLs, that brain-twister takes us to Columbus High School in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. Just three years ago, Columbus was a traditional neighborhood high school with 548 ELLs among its 3,491 students. It served the new Americans with an entire department devoted to English as a Second Language, with six licensed teachers.

Fast-forward to the current school year. The Columbus building is now known formally as the Columbus campus. It includes a downsized version of the former high school and four minischools, part of the Department of Education’s adoption of the small-school model as the answer to what ails secondary education in New York City.

The Columbus campus has 3,389 students, close to the number of three years ago. Yet of those, only 344 are ELLs. And fewer than one-third of them are in the minischools, which were not required to accept such students for their first two years of operation.

So where did the missing 200 ELLs go? Nobody at the department suggests that the number of immigrant students has suddenly dropped. They have to be somewhere, but where is somewhere? And what is the quality of the English as a second language services they are receiving there?

Hold on to that question while we take up another mystery. There are 86 ELLs in the four minischools at the Columbus campus, but few if any have been receiving the required level of English-fluency classes because those minischools do not offer them. Yet right in the very same building, an entire department at Columbus High School provides precisely what the state mandates.

Does that make sense?

Melody Meyer, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, issued a formal statement yesterday acknowledging that “some schools on the Columbus campus are not providing the required instruction” for ELLs. She added that “no student should be without the instruction they need and deserve,” and that the department was working with principals to rectify the situation.

Lisa Fuentes, the principal of Columbus High, referring to the other schools in the building, said, “You’d think we’d discuss our programs together, but we don’t.” When asked if she would be willing to open her English as a Second Language classes to students from the minischools, she replied, “We’d gladly do it.”

Becca Shim is the sole English as a Second Language teacher at Global Enterprise Academy, one of the minischools, which has 36 ELLs. While state regulations stipulate separate classes for each level of fluency — three periods a day for beginners, two for intermediates, one for advanced — she said the school allowed her to pull eligible students from their regular classes for only one period a day. Rick Levine, the principal of Global Enterprise, said he resisted having separate ELL classes because “I want as much as possible not to segregate the kids.”

So Ms. Shim has roughly 45 minutes to deal with perhaps a half-dozen students whose English skills differ widely. Global Enterprise, she said, does not have such basic teaching materials as textbooks and work sheets for ELLs at any level.

But in the rigid division of the campus, a reflection of the Education Department’s antipathy to traditional large high schools, Ms. Shim and her students are not allowed access to the separate classes and large number of materials under the same roof.

“As it stands now, I’m not servicing them as thoroughly as I’d like to,” Ms. Shim said of her students. “There’s only one of me. A whole department would be beneficial.”

Among the other minischools, Pelham Prep offers no English-fluency classes for its 11 eligible pupils, the official course schedule shows. Astor Collegiate, which has 23 ELLs, hired an English as a Second Language teacher in March, more than halfway through the academic year. The Collegiate Institute for Math and Science, the last of the minischools at the Columbus campus, lumps ELLs of all levels into a single class that meets for only one period a day and is led by a teacher licensed in Spanish.

“The difference is phenomenal,” said Christine Rowland, who has taught English as a Second Language at Columbus for 15 years and also trains teachers in the subject. “I would never say teachers in the small schools don’t care about the ELLs, but they’re not trained. They have 34 kids in a room and two of them are ELLs and they don’t know what to do.”

Columbus’s four-year graduation rate for ELLs stands at 38 percent, Ms. Fuentes said. On the other hand, the school receives nearly 100 new immigrants in any given academic year, and its percentage of such students far exceeds the average.

Sunia Rana came to the Bronx from Bangladesh as a 13-year-old in the eighth grade. She made the transition from Bengali to English during her four years at Columbus, and is now a sophomore at Hunter, majoring in education. The choice of subject, she said, reflects the admiration she has for the Columbus teachers who not only nurtured her in the classroom but stayed after school to work with her on college applications.

Let’s not forget, though, about those 200 missing ELLs, teenagers like Miss Rana’s younger self. Perhaps some wound up at DeWitt Clinton or Grace Dodge Vocational, two Bronx high schools that have had a spike in ELL enrollment.

Ms. Meyer of the Education Department said that many ELLs from the Columbus area were attending New World High School, a minischool in the borough.

This much is certain: With the pressure of No Child Left Behind, which uses standardized test scores to determine compliance with the law, what school would seek out new immigrants, who may not score well? Columbus, after all, has failed to make “adequate yearly progress” in language arts.

“The situation at Columbus is, unfortunately, not unique,” said Ujju Aggarwal, an organizer for the Center for Immigrant Families, an advocacy group. “Rather, it points to a proactive strategy fueled by No Child Left Behind, to continue to marginalize low-income children of color. By dismantling schools that have historically been under-resourced into smaller schools under the pretense of ‘choice,’ immigrant children continue to be displaced by our public education system.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail address is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.