Can achievement gap be closed with extra tutoring?

[Anonymous]

If all ESOL kids would be removed and all kids with parents who are illegal residents be removed from the school system - would the achievement gap among blacks be closed?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If all ESOL kids would be removed and all kids with parents who are illegal residents be removed from the school system - would the achievement gap among blacks be closed?

Some black kids are ESOL kids. Some black kids have parents who are here without authorization.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ESOL teacher here. Out of my 40 students, 32 of them are U.S. citizens. This is the case from year to year for the most part.

How can you know this if it is illegal to ask?

Are their parents US citizens? Very often these are the anchor kids.

These kids are US citizens for the same reason that I'm a US citizen (I don't know about you): we were born in the US. That's how the ESOL teacher knows - because the kids have US birth certificates.

Now, if you don't like the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, you can take yourself over to the politics forum and discuss it. It's off topic for the Maryland Public Schools forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I've lived in Germany and I can confirm that kids are placed in language immersion schools for several months or years (depending on the student) before being mainstreamed into German schools. This is paid for by the government, although most people from DMV probably wouldn't think much of the quality of instruction or of the fact that they keep all of these German learners totally separated from the other students. There's usually no interaction at all. (It would be kind of like keeping all the SN kids in one classroom in the US.) I personally know someone who started in one of those schools and ended up insisting on getting a personal exception to mainstream earlier, before learning more than just a few words of German, because they were picking up one of the immigrant languages much more than actual German due to the other kids talking it all the time. They muddled through and eventually figured it out in a normal school, but definitely had ambition and intelligence way beyond what most students possess. The students don't just learn language in those classes, it's also the culture, main customs and traditions, and usually they simply can't move over until they reach a certain level.

However, you need to understand that Germany also has one of the strongest and most strict student tracking systems in any educational system in the world. From a relatively young age, kids are sorted and tracked according to their demonstrated ability. Most of the refugees and immigrants end up in the lowest tracks. Having different expectations and opportunities removes a lot of the behavioral issues in the schools, lowers teacher frustration, etc. They simply aren't trying to teach calculus to a bunch of kids struggling with basic math operations, etc etc. The kids in the lowest track get a lot more help with basic math and literacy subjects, take less academic electives, and almost always end up in something like a trades school. Which most are happy with since they learn practical skills and end up employable that way. And only the kids in the top track (where behavioral issues are very rare) end up eligible for university study (which is also basically free in comparison with the US). In this way, many German kids are totally insulated from the immigrants. So yes, Germany is quite welcoming when it comes to refugees and undocumented immigrants, but not at the direct expense of the German students.

Thanks for this context. There are elements of the German model (which is similar to an Eastern European model with which I'm personally familiar) that are an anathema to Americans. That includes strict tracking, which flies in the face of both American law (IDEA, ADA, LRE) but also our values about upward mobility and the potential of every child.

With that said, the discussion was about whether any other country in the world grants a right to an education, food, shelter, and target language instruction. The answer, of course, is yes.

Well obviously you can't take one thing and hold it up as an example when it has other implications that you don't want to accept. I don't think Germany (or other countries) would be doing it if they did it in such a way that it had major negative implications for the entire education system.

And I don't actually think that the tracking model flies in the face of upward mobility at all. I can see why some people who aren't familiar with the concept may think that, but the reality is that it can actually be very helpful for upward mobility. The higher tracks are not just available to rich kids in rich areas. And when you take the kids who show potential and a willingness to learn out of a classroom full of kids who just don't care, don't value education and are often mucking around, and put them together with kids who might also be poor and not have advantages of college educated parents and lots of books at home and private tutoring but at least want to learn, then that can really improve their learning outcomes and ultimately open way more doors for them. The kids aren't tracked in kindergarten (where it may indeed be tracking based at least in big part on SES) but it's more like 6th or 7th grade when they've had a good opportunity to show the teachers that they want to learn. The teachers and admins doing the tracking in lower SES areas are also familiar with their students and their struggles so I'm sure these things are taken into account with the tracking.

Personally, as someone who came from a low SES with classrooms full of kids who mostly didn't want to learn or struggled at best, I know it would have been helpful for me and the others in my position to have tracking in place. It's frustrating not having much support at home and then also not being able to concentrate much in the classroom either. And it wasn't until I got to college (first in my family) that I even started to understand all the academic opportunities (including competitions and clubs but also full ride scholarships to private schools based on exams that I knew I would have done well in) that most of my peers had taken advantage of that I simply had no idea about and had certainly never been offered to me.

[Anonymous]

Answer to the question is No.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ESOL teacher here. Out of my 40 students, 32 of them are U.S. citizens. This is the case from year to year for the most part.

How can you know this if it is illegal to ask?

When students register for school, they are required to give their birth certificate. A copy is made and placed in their cumulative file. That’s how we know. Do you have kids? A parent would know this.

[Anonymous]

Or they don’t have any documents, period.
Either way they get all the bells and whistles from MoCo and MCPS ESOL.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ESOL teacher here. Out of my 40 students, 32 of them are U.S. citizens. This is the case from year to year for the most part.

How can you know this if it is illegal to ask?

When students register for school, they are required to give their birth certificate. A copy is made and placed in their cumulative file. That’s how we know. Do you have kids? A parent would know this.

Not always. Not sure what the actual rule is, but we are at a FOCUS school, and we gets lots of students who come and go. At our school, we get a huge rush of K kids right before school starts, at the end of August, and the school is REQUIRED to let them attend. They cannot turn them away. So, we do have kids without appropriate documentation who enroll.

Also, FTR, it is incredibly easy to forge birth certificates from certain countries. We have had that come up as an issue in our cluster several times.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ESOL teacher here. Out of my 40 students, 32 of them are U.S. citizens. This is the case from year to year for the most part.

How can you know this if it is illegal to ask?

When students register for school, they are required to give their birth certificate. A copy is made and placed in their cumulative file. That’s how we know. Do you have kids? A parent would know this.

Not always. Not sure what the actual rule is, but we are at a FOCUS school, and we gets lots of students who come and go. At our school, we get a huge rush of K kids right before school starts, at the end of August, and the school is REQUIRED to let them attend. They cannot turn them away. So, we do have kids without appropriate documentation who enroll.

Also, FTR, it is incredibly easy to forge birth certificates from certain countries. We have had that come up as an issue in our cluster several times.

Is the US one of those countries? If not, and they are falsifying a birth in some other country, it's not really relevant to citizenship counts.

[Anonymous]

Same here, September walk ups at our ES are significant. No papers and head right to the counselor session, health appt at school, and skill assessment. With a translator.
Then they are assigned a grade, they often say the exact same thing or story so we’re often guessing at the age, but doesn’t matter for ES.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:ESOL teacher here. Out of my 40 students, 32 of them are U.S. citizens. This is the case from year to year for the most part.

How can you know this if it is illegal to ask?

When students register for school, they are required to give their birth certificate. A copy is made and placed in their cumulative file. That’s how we know. Do you have kids? A parent would know this.

Not always. Not sure what the actual rule is, but we are at a FOCUS school, and we gets lots of students who come and go. At our school, we get a huge rush of K kids right before school starts, at the end of August, and the school is REQUIRED to let them attend. They cannot turn them away. So, we do have kids without appropriate documentation who enroll.

Also, FTR, it is incredibly easy to forge birth certificates from certain countries. We have had that come up as an issue in our cluster several times.

How is this relevant to the US birth certificates that the ESOL teacher has on file?

[Anonymous]

we never sent in a birth certificate when starting ES. just the health forms and a bill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If we could put all struggling students in a different classroom with ESOL support and extra aides - we would be able to do it cheaply. The whole school does not need ESOL or extra aides. Struggling students and disruptive students should not be in the regular classroom. It is as simple as that.

This is one big IDEA violation right here.

Children, including English language learners, those with learning disabilities (struggling students), and those with "disruptive" behavioral differences have a legal right to a least restrictive environment.

And you can also be white, wealthy and a fluent English speaker and still be a very disruptive student.

[Anonymous]

Luckily those are usually at one of the 50+ area private schools in 16 person classes with two teachers and constant pullouts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If we could put all struggling students in a different classroom with ESOL support and extra aides - we would be able to do it cheaply. The whole school does not need ESOL or extra aides. Struggling students and disruptive students should not be in the regular classroom. It is as simple as that.

This is one big IDEA violation right here.

Children, including English language learners, those with learning disabilities (struggling students), and those with "disruptive" behavioral differences have a legal right to a least restrictive environment.

And you can also be white, wealthy and a fluent English speaker and still be a very disruptive student.

I think PP’s point was that while we can’t legally put all disruptive students into one classroom, or all ESOL students into one classroom, or all students struggling with academics into one classroom, it would probably (or at least be possibly) be better for student performance en mass to do this. I personally agree - it really does seem like classrooms are getting overrun with other issues and that the actual teaching part is lagging. And while the rates of SN seem to be skyrocketing at a pretty alarming rate for some mysterious reason or set of reasons, there are still more students without behavioral issues who shouldn’t have their educations derailed by some politicians’ misguided attempts at fairness.

At an absolute minimum, the law should be amended to specifically qualify that it should be the least restrictive environment such that no other student is adversely affected by the person being in the mainstream class. So pullouts for speech or physical therapy or reading support are fine, but disruptive behavior or students who can’t keep up in any subjects shouldn’t be something that’s mainstreamed.

And yes, of course you can be white and wealthy and still a behavioral problem to disrupt the class. They should be included in the class for behavioral issues. Not sure why anyone would think or suggest otherwise.