Not English-only

As the city welcomes immigrants, the District struggles with growing language diversity.

by Dale Mezzacappa

Photo: Harvey Finkle

Students and parents gather outside Southwark Elementary in South Philadelphia for the first day of school. A group of immigrant parent activists from South Philadelphia, including Anastacia Lorenzo (in green shirt) of the community group JUNTOS, has been campaigning for improved services for English language learners.

Philadelphia’s foreign-born population is growing, and Mayor Nutter wants to make the city, including its school system, more welcoming to immigrants.

 But the School District’s effort to teach an ever-changing and diverse group of English language learners (ELLs) has been plagued by disorganization, insufficient teacher training, and a lack of consistent, effective instruction.

 Advocates and the District’s own evaluations point out that in many schools, these students are marginalized academically and their families effectively shut out of meaningful communication about their children.

The state has begun to institute some new requirements, but there has been uneven referral of students to English for Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) programs, little systematic tracking of their progress, and no standards for exit into regular English classes.

Of some 12,000 students placed in ESOL, only 11 percent reach a level of proficiency in English necessary to exit from the program, according to District data.

Even so, there has been little consistency from school to school in who leaves ESOL, who stays, and why.

“It was like the wild, wild West; everybody did what they thought best,” said Ana Sainz de la Pena, who oversaw the District’s ESOL and bilingual programs for five years through the Office of Language, Culture, and the Arts (OLCA). “Some stayed in ESOL two years, some 12 years.”

The problems are not just in the classroom.

Immigrant parents and advocates have petitioned the District for months to increase the number of bilingual counselor assistants, or BCAs, to facilitate school communication. They have met with little success – even though the District has ended the past several budget years with a reserve of federal funds targeted for ELL support services (see more about federal funds).

Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and her new deputy for teaching and learning, Linda Chen, promise to usher in change.

“My fear is that these are young people who need different kinds of programs, and we’re certainly going to have to focus in a very different way than we did in the past,” Ackerman said. “Educating ELLs is not something that happens only with ESOL teachers; it happens in the regular classroom.”

In a September 3 interview, Ackerman said that management of services for English language learners has been pulled out of OLCA and will be given more prominence as an issue of academics rather than culture. A national search is underway for someone to head instruction for ELLs within the teaching and learning office, she said.

“We’re trying to build an awareness at every level on developing the strategies and supports that ELLs need,” added Chen, who has written a book about literacy and young English language learners. “There are English language learners everywhere.”

Advocates agree that the time for revamping instruction for ELLs and recognizing their learning needs is long overdue, but they warn that it will require much more than administrative reorganization.

“OLCA is the least of the problems,” said Len Rieser of the Education Law Center. “The problems are the other departments where ELLs are not prominently on the radar screen.”

Twenty years ago, Rieser and the Center filed a class action suit against the District on behalf of a Cambodian student who was receiving inadequate services. Most of the programs that have evolved and the monitoring of ELLs done today grow out of that ongoing lawsuit, known as the Y.S. case, after the initials of the plaintiff.

The profiles drawn in internal District evaluations and those done to determine compliance with Y.S. show that schools vary widely in how they deal with their ELLs.

Circumstances are different; some schools have many ELLs, and others just a few. In some, students speak many languages; in others, just one or two.