Child getting pulled out for ESL help but isn’t an English language learner

[Anonymous]

ETA all these “pulled groups” happen within the classroom settting. Mos5 classrooms don’t look like ours did 30-40 years ago. Much of reading and math instruction occurs in small leveled groups.

[Anonymous]

OP, I hope you get to the bottom of this.

Unfortunately it is a well documented issue that school systems juke the numbers of EML (the new acronym for ESL) students to get more funding. It is absolutely racist and hurts kids. I hope this is not the case for your child, but unfortunately I would not be surprised if this is what happened.

Parents of kids of color have to advocate for their kids in ways that parents of white kids do not.

[Anonymous]

Language is Not the Problem, Racism is the Problem – Demystifying Language Project https://share.google/0W0HRXGZd6yQ3IXIO

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m an ESOL teacher and I sometimes pull non-ESOL students into my small group. They need additional support learning letters and sounds. It doesn’t mean they are an ESOL student.

How do you decide they just don’t need to be in class during that time?

The entire class is in a small group at that time. The teacher has a group, the para has a group, the intervention teacher has another group and I have a fourth group. Every group is working on their own needed skills then. Nobody is missing any instruction.

[Anonymous]

To keep an ESL position? The school needs a certain number of students, in a certain category or maybe falling among categories, or the school loses an ESL/other teaching position. The position is gone, it's no longer funded. A teacher is lost.

IDK. Call me suspicious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m an ESOL teacher and I sometimes pull non-ESOL students into my small group. They need additional support learning letters and sounds. It doesn’t mean they are an ESOL student.

How do you decide they just don’t need to be in class during that time?

The entire class is in a small group at that time. The teacher has a group, the para has a group, the intervention teacher has another group and I have a fourth group. Every group is working on their own needed skills then. Nobody is missing any instruction.

But the teacher is presumably teaching the kids on grade level. So by pulling the kid who doesn’t need to learn those “skills” you are depriving them of learning.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m an ESOL teacher and I sometimes pull non-ESOL students into my small group. They need additional support learning letters and sounds. It doesn’t mean they are an ESOL student.

How do you decide they just don’t need to be in class during that time?

The entire class is in a small group at that time. The teacher has a group, the para has a group, the intervention teacher has another group and I have a fourth group. Every group is working on their own needed skills then. Nobody is missing any instruction.

But the teacher is presumably teaching the kids on grade level. So by pulling the kid who doesn’t need to learn those “skills” you are depriving them of learning.

You envision a classroom where kids magically parse out into one “on grade level” group and the rest interventions, but that’s not realistic. We also flexibly switch groups: who needs work on vowel teams this week, who needs the silent e, who needs blah blah. The groups change depending on the instructional focus. In math, for example, I might do a preassessment on Monday, groups T W Th, and wrap up Friday, then do the same thing with a new concept next week, and no, the groups aren’t the same every time. It’s all a multi ring circus, and often kids take turns working with different teachers in the same room on different skills. Particularly at the early levels, students are better able to focus and work in small groups.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To keep an ESL position? The school needs a certain number of students, in a certain category or maybe falling among categories, or the school loses an ESL/other teaching position. The position is gone, it's no longer funded. A teacher is lost.

IDK. Call me suspicious.

Yeah, what EL teachers want is BIGGER caseloads to manage given impossible scheduling constraints.

In my district, kindergarten students are assessed individually by well trained screeners to determine their need for services. That’s because 4 and 5 year olds can’t yet take computer based tests very well. After that, states use standardized measures like the WIDA test, and teachers do not score any part of the assessment—it’s like an SOL.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m an ESOL teacher and I sometimes pull non-ESOL students into my small group. They need additional support learning letters and sounds. It doesn’t mean they are an ESOL student.

How do you decide they just don’t need to be in class during that time?

The entire class is in a small group at that time. The teacher has a group, the para has a group, the intervention teacher has another group and I have a fourth group. Every group is working on their own needed skills then. Nobody is missing any instruction.

But the teacher is presumably teaching the kids on grade level. So by pulling the kid who doesn’t need to learn those “skills” you are depriving them of learning.

They’ve already been taught the on grade level lesson in whole group prior to small group time. They aren’t missing anything.

[Anonymous]

I’d be less concerned that it happened in the first place and more concerned why it went on all last year and no one from the school told you, and your son never mentioned it to you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I ran into the mother of my daughter’s classmate at school and she mentioned that she also knew my son because she’d worked with him at school. I said, oh, doing what? And she said she had been the ESL teacher.

The thing is, my son was not an English language learner. He is Korean but his language at home is English. I must’ve sounded really stupid trying to understand why he had been pulled out all last year for this. She said he had tested out (obviously).

Why would the school do this?

The exact same thing happened to me! My son is Korean but spoke English from birth. Pulled out for esl.

It’s racist.

The only perk is he met other Korean boys to play with that he wouldn’t have met otherwise.

OP's child received extra personalized educational attention in a way that caused him no personal harm or shame. I assume there was no issue since mom didn't know it was happening so the kid must have taken the help at face value.

My sister is white. Her biracial Korean American child received additional reading support in a very fine school district partly at her insistence. He is bright but refused to practice reading in K-1. So he had some mild deficits. All gone now, partly thanks to early 1:1 intervention work with teachers.

My white husband from an all-English-speaking family received speech therapy at school because of making a few sounds wrong. This was partly due to having low-income parents with non-standard pronunciations.

It sounds like these cases were triggered by a check box.

If everyone throws racism into the mix as a casual explanation, help and support will be reduced. Why would you want to contribute to that kind of world?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I ran into the mother of my daughter’s classmate at school and she mentioned that she also knew my son because she’d worked with him at school. I said, oh, doing what? And she said she had been the ESL teacher.

The thing is, my son was not an English language learner. He is Korean but his language at home is English. I must’ve sounded really stupid trying to understand why he had been pulled out all last year for this. She said he had tested out (obviously).

Why would the school do this?

The exact same thing happened to me! My son is Korean but spoke English from birth. Pulled out for esl.
It’s racist.
The only perk is he met other Korean boys to play with that he wouldn’t have met otherwise.

I'm Korean, but my kids don't speak it (bad me). I know of a half South American kid that this happened to. It's because they spoke another language at home. And the schools do it because they get extra funding per each ESL student.

[Anonymous]

also, I think schools do this to make test scores look good.

School districts around here split out ESL student test scores, and of course, these native English speakers will test well, thereby bumping up the test scores for the ESL group.

[Anonymous]

And the schools do it because they get extra funding per each ESL student

I think schools do this to make test scores look good. School districts around here split out ESL student test scores, and of course, these native English speakers will test well, thereby bumping up the test scores for the ESL group

This is what I believe

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I ran into the mother of my daughter’s classmate at school and she mentioned that she also knew my son because she’d worked with him at school. I said, oh, doing what? And she said she had been the ESL teacher.

The thing is, my son was not an English language learner. He is Korean but his language at home is English. I must’ve sounded really stupid trying to understand why he had been pulled out all last year for this. She said he had tested out (obviously).

Why would the school do this?

The exact same thing happened to me! My son is Korean but spoke English from birth. Pulled out for esl.
It’s racist.
The only perk is he met other Korean boys to play with that he wouldn’t have met otherwise.

I'm Korean, but my kids don't speak it (bad me). I know of a half South American kid that this happened to. It's because they spoke another language at home. And the schools do it because they get extra funding per each ESL student.

PP. Schools are generally underfunded and want to retain access to specialists whenever they can. So they can easily provide needed services. I do not believe this is a racist conspiracy to provide additional ESL jobs. Education is an underfunded mess right now. I don't blame admins for proactively checking checkboxes to make sure they have resources and overproviding tailored instruction and assessments. As the professional above indicated, there are always fluid small groups forming and reforming in early grade literacy/English instruction with the goal of remediation issues and getting all children to display skill growth.

Keep in mind that the political winds right now are quite energized around removing supports and assistance for learners with non-English backgrounds of any type. Complaining about racism when help is being given to your child just throws gasoline on the fire.

As a parent, you should be informed of what is going on with your child and have some ability to turn off services. But you are basically substituting your opinions for what teachers have been trained to do as part of their profession. It's possible for parents to be correct and also for parents to be wrong. Sometimes it's too grey to ever know what the right choice should be. I say that if your kid is making skill progress and is neutral about pullout, there is no reason to intervene.