What does having a high percentage of English learners in a class mean in practice?

[Anonymous]

If you want your kid in a school or even a class full of over achievers so that all lessons and activities can be aimed at that group then you are definitely going to have to send them to private. They have the option of excluding ESL students, low SES students, sped students, behavior students and basically any student.

Therefore, if a teacher in public determines your kid already knows whatever the lesson happens to be it is possible that kid will get an independent assignment as opposed to small group instruction. This does not indicate a lack of critical instruction, your kid will likely end up in big law anyway, so relax.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hey everyone - we're a few years away from kindergarten and I've been looking at the statistics for our Arlington Public Schools elementary school. Folks in the neighborhood have said good things about it but a couple have mentioned the high percentage (26%) of English learners require extra attention and resources so that lower needs kids might not get much attention. First time parent with only daycare experience so I don't know how to interpret that. I'm sure going to school while learning the language is tough - so how does that work? I'm sure it doesn't matter much for a kindergartner (coloring inside the lines crosses all languages) but how does this play out when more structured learning begins?

My wife attended a semi-rural public school in the midwest and felt held back with teachers focusing their energy on the kids who needed it the most. I know she's worried about the same thing happening here. Of course APS has a much better reputation than my wife's old school district but I'm curious what this looks like in the real world.

Best practices in EL and special education translate to best practices for all students--assuming your school is one of those great APS schools. If you aren't interested in having your children educated in a diverse setting, there are many lovely private schools where you are almost guaranteed that all students will look like yours and be "high achievers".

My husband moved here when he was 11. He was an EL kid. He has a four year degree and earns a ridiculous amount of money utilizing his bilingual skills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I teach in a school which has about 60% EL population. What does this mean?
Amazing kids from all over the world, who are eager to learn, caring, interesting and funny people. Many of them are smart enough to speak 2, 3 or 4 languages.

My kids who aren't as gifted linguistically, those who can only speak English, are not put on computers so I can "catch everyone else up". Nor are they given a book to read while I "catch everyone else up". In fact, the students who are only able to speak one language are often just in much of "catching up" as my bilingual and multilingual kids, if not more. Yes, even the white, middle income kids need remediation.

I think we need to stop saying our bilingual and multilingual kids need remediation and insist that every single student become proficient in at least two languages in order to graduate 8th grade. And then let's test the kids whose first language is English and see how they perform on assessments after a year or two in Urdu or Spanish or Polish. My guess is everyone else would have to sit around waiting while the "I only speak English" crowd has to catch up.

But, to the OP's question, it means that your child will have friends from different places, who speak different languages and what a rich school environment that will be! I put my own child in a heavily Spanish speaking school. She's now fully bilingual and headed to college on a full ride scholarship in her field of choice. We Americans need to stop understanding "smart" as a 1600 SAT and a top ten university and need to start understanding smart as learning more than one language.

You've done a great job of outlining the positives of having a large cohort of EL students in class but by leaving out the downsides it sounds like propaganda.

Seriously, what are the tradeoffs for the diversity and richness these ELs bring to class? Great Schools says white students are getting 10/10 on assessment tests at this school while hispanic students are 4/10 - are you really saying teachers don't spend more time helping EL kids catch up and close a gap that large? I'm not even implying that's a bad thing, I'd understand if that's the reality but I'd like to understand what that looks like. You sound more knowledgeable than anyone else in here so I'd love it if you could share more.

In my school, every teacher has an ESL certificate, so we all have training to help kids with language learning. We also have an ESL teacher who pushes in and helps those kids specifically. But really, I personally feel very strongly that all kids deserve a significant amount of small group time, not just kids who are struggling. Yes, my lowest group might be seen in a small group 4 days a week, I still try to ensure my higher kids get seen 3 days a week. And yes, it helps that the reading specialist also pushes in daily and can help see groups. But my kids who only speak English truly are not sitting there bored or doing tons of independent work. Every kid reads independently for 15 minutes each day, but all abilities are doing that.
I think the misunderstanding here is that K classes ALWAYS have a huge range of kids. I've had kids who come in who don't know the difference between letters and numbers, kids who are 5 and not potty trained, kids who don't know how to hold a book. And every year, I have kids who come in reading at a first or second grade level. That's in schools with high levels of multilingualism and those with very low levels. My lessons are scaffolded to get at all learners.

Here's an example: It's writer's workshop time in February. I'm doing a lesson on how to write a note to mom or dad. I model what the letter could look like. I give the sentence stem "I love you, _____." The kids decide who they want to say that about and they all turn and talk with their partner. John says, "I love you, Dad." Jose says, "I love you, Mom." Then, we all count the number of words in one of those sentences. I write 4 lines on the board. Amy comes up and writes the word "I". Abed comes and writes the word "lov". (he forgets the e, but this is kindergarten and that's developmentally appropriate. Alejandra comes to write the word you, but is really struggling. I write the letter Y and she traces it. Kids learn to write the first letter of a word before they write more, usually. And Carl comes up and writes Mom. When they sit down to write themselves, yes, some struggle. And my kids who are flying in writing? When I drop by their table and see they have a perfect sentence with a cute picture, I ask them, "What more would you like to tell your mom? Can you write more? What would you say?" They tell me and they get started on writing more. I make a note of the 3 kids who are writing more and the next day, I pull them over for a small group conference on just that.

Kindergarten teachers are masters at differentiation and while I do believe that a very small percentage of teachers are still just teaching to the middle or to the lowest group, this has not been my experience.

I think when you have large groups of kids, living in poverty, also trying to master English, and you have large class sizes and underfunded schools, that's where things get dicey. But I really encourage you to embrace your multilingual school. At least, give it a shot. You might find that it's not propaganda at all. My classroom has kids who speak English, Spanish, Polish, Urdu, and a few other languages. By year's end, 90% of my students are at or above level. As the mother of two very high achieving kids, I made sure my high achievers (whatever language they speak or whatever their economic status is) have the opportunity to excel. You might be surprised how many other teachers feel this way and make that happen, too.

This sounds fine for kindergarten, but I do think it becomes more of an issue in 1st and 2nd where kids still can't really work independently but there is huge pressure to make sure every kid is reading. In my daughter's 1st grade class the table with the gifted cluster was reading Harry Potter, Roald Dahl and Percy Jackson. The lowest level learners in her class couldn't read "cat" yet. The teacher needed to get those kids reading and that's where her time was spent. My daughter's table got 15 minutes of teacher time every couple of weeks. The other half of the class got small group instruction daily. This turned around in 3rd grade when mostly everyone could read and the kids started reading to learn.

To illustrate, we showed up to a parent teacher conference and it was very apparent that the teacher didnt know what our daughter had been doing in class. The kids at her table cluster had invented codes and were writing messages to each other when they were supposed to be writing in their writer's journal. It clearly had been going on for months. The teacher had no idea until she pulled the notebook out of our daughter's desk and couldn't explain the content of dots, dashes and other shapes. We had to ask our daughter when we got home. We learned that most of class was unsupervised time at desks for her group so they entertained themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I teach in a school which has about 60% EL population. What does this mean?
Amazing kids from all over the world, who are eager to learn, caring, interesting and funny people. Many of them are smart enough to speak 2, 3 or 4 languages.

My kids who aren't as gifted linguistically, those who can only speak English, are not put on computers so I can "catch everyone else up". Nor are they given a book to read while I "catch everyone else up". In fact, the students who are only able to speak one language are often just in much of "catching up" as my bilingual and multilingual kids, if not more. Yes, even the white, middle income kids need remediation.

I think we need to stop saying our bilingual and multilingual kids need remediation and insist that every single student become proficient in at least two languages in order to graduate 8th grade. And then let's test the kids whose first language is English and see how they perform on assessments after a year or two in Urdu or Spanish or Polish. My guess is everyone else would have to sit around waiting while the "I only speak English" crowd has to catch up.

But, to the OP's question, it means that your child will have friends from different places, who speak different languages and what a rich school environment that will be! I put my own child in a heavily Spanish speaking school. She's now fully bilingual and headed to college on a full ride scholarship in her field of choice. We Americans need to stop understanding "smart" as a 1600 SAT and a top ten university and need to start understanding smart as learning more than one language.

Omg this is some fantasy land BS right here
Other posters have already covered the truth about elementary - your average or above average kid will be basically ignored and handed a book, ipad or some coloring sheets or simple worksheets during 75% of the day. The teacher will say glowing things bc your kid doesn’t have behavior issues and bc they teach at a level sufficient for grade level your child will be excelling. Side note - “grade level” is a low bar bc it’s a universal standard for an slightly below average student. If your child is struggling they will sweep it under the rug bc they don’t want to have to deal with parents who are going to push for services bc they already have too many kids and too few people to provide services.

also as far as having an UN delegation for friends like the PP claims - yeah that doesn’t happen. Kids self segregate in elementary and the non English speaking kids stick together as do their parents. Shocker - their parents don’t trust white Americans a lot of the time and don’t want to get involved with them more than necessary. I don’t necessarily blame them on this one.
i

I have a similar experience both as a parent of a middle class child in a high poverty school k-2 and someone working at such a school for a short time (I left because the atmosphere was just so depressing).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:IME as a teacher 20-30% EL is the sweet spot—you have your core curriculum and then have groups for enrichment, remediation, or language support. Particularly at the lower grades and particularly for literacy, key instruction happens in small leveled groups. I see much more of an impact on the gen ed curriculum when you get to 70% EL or more.

I am an instructional assistant and I agree with this assessment, except of course 0% ESL would be even better lol

What's been your experience with ESL students in class?

It mostly depends on “class”, not on language status. When there are many high poverty kids from families with little education it is very challenging for the teacher and it reflects on the overall atmosphere. Disciplining takes up so much time and effort that there is little left for joy, spontaneity, and hands on learning

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hey everyone - we're a few years away from kindergarten and I've been looking at the statistics for our Arlington Public Schools elementary school. Folks in the neighborhood have said good things about it but a couple have mentioned the high percentage (26%) of English learners require extra attention and resources so that lower needs kids might not get much attention. First time parent with only daycare experience so I don't know how to interpret that. I'm sure going to school while learning the language is tough - so how does that work? I'm sure it doesn't matter much for a kindergartner (coloring inside the lines crosses all languages) but how does this play out when more structured learning begins?

My wife attended a semi-rural public school in the midwest and felt held back with teachers focusing their energy on the kids who needed it the most. I know she's worried about the same thing happening here. Of course APS has a much better reputation than my wife's old school district but I'm curious what this looks like in the real world.

Best practices in EL and special education translate to best practices for all students--assuming your school is one of those great APS schools. If you aren't interested in having your children educated in a diverse setting, there are many lovely private schools where you are almost guaranteed that all students will look like yours and be "high achievers".

My husband moved here when he was 11. He was an EL kid. He has a four year degree and earns a ridiculous amount of money utilizing his bilingual skills.

20 years ago he would have been served in a special ESL track which meant they were focused on his group and let mainstrain do their own thing. We would all be excited to repeat the model that worked for your DH.

I’m pretty skeptical his bilingual skills have anything to do with his high income, unless he is dealing with manufacturing in Asia. Translators are paid squat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you want your kid in a school or even a class full of over achievers so that all lessons and activities can be aimed at that group then you are definitely going to have to send them to private. They have the option of excluding ESL students, low SES students, sped students, behavior students and basically any student.

Therefore, if a teacher in public determines your kid already knows whatever the lesson happens to be it is possible that kid will get an independent assignment as opposed to small group instruction. This does not indicate a lack of critical instruction, your kid will likely end up in big law anyway, so relax.

I am so over this “looks like me” nonsense. How come black and brown people get to say that they want to be around people “who look like them,” but white people have to say that they want to be in a diverse environment or they are deemed racist?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hey everyone - we're a few years away from kindergarten and I've been looking at the statistics for our Arlington Public Schools elementary school. Folks in the neighborhood have said good things about it but a couple have mentioned the high percentage (26%) of English learners require extra attention and resources so that lower needs kids might not get much attention. First time parent with only daycare experience so I don't know how to interpret that. I'm sure going to school while learning the language is tough - so how does that work? I'm sure it doesn't matter much for a kindergartner (coloring inside the lines crosses all languages) but how does this play out when more structured learning begins?

My wife attended a semi-rural public school in the midwest and felt held back with teachers focusing their energy on the kids who needed it the most. I know she's worried about the same thing happening here. Of course APS has a much better reputation than my wife's old school district but I'm curious what this looks like in the real world.

Best practices in EL and special education translate to best practices for all students--assuming your school is one of those great APS schools. If you aren't interested in having your children educated in a diverse setting, there are many lovely private schools where you are almost guaranteed that all students will look like yours and be "high achievers".

My husband moved here when he was 11. He was an EL kid. He has a four year degree and earns a ridiculous amount of money utilizing his bilingual skills.

I am so over this “looks like me nonsense.” How come black and brown people get to say that they want to be around people who “look like them,” but white people have to say that they want to be in a diverse environment or they are deemed racist?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I teach in a school which has about 60% EL population. What does this mean?
Amazing kids from all over the world, who are eager to learn, caring, interesting and funny people. Many of them are smart enough to speak 2, 3 or 4 languages.

My kids who aren't as gifted linguistically, those who can only speak English, are not put on computers so I can "catch everyone else up". Nor are they given a book to read while I "catch everyone else up". In fact, the students who are only able to speak one language are often just in much of "catching up" as my bilingual and multilingual kids, if not more. Yes, even the white, middle income kids need remediation.

I think we need to stop saying our bilingual and multilingual kids need remediation and insist that every single student become proficient in at least two languages in order to graduate 8th grade. And then let's test the kids whose first language is English and see how they perform on assessments after a year or two in Urdu or Spanish or Polish. My guess is everyone else would have to sit around waiting while the "I only speak English" crowd has to catch up.

But, to the OP's question, it means that your child will have friends from different places, who speak different languages and what a rich school environment that will be! I put my own child in a heavily Spanish speaking school. She's now fully bilingual and headed to college on a full ride scholarship in her field of choice. We Americans need to stop understanding "smart" as a 1600 SAT and a top ten university and need to start understanding smart as learning more than one language.

You've done a great job of outlining the positives of having a large cohort of EL students in class but by leaving out the downsides it sounds like propaganda.

Seriously, what are the tradeoffs for the diversity and richness these ELs bring to class? Great Schools says white students are getting 10/10 on assessment tests at this school while hispanic students are 4/10 - are you really saying teachers don't spend more time helping EL kids catch up and close a gap that large? I'm not even implying that's a bad thing, I'd understand if that's the reality but I'd like to understand what that looks like. You sound more knowledgeable than anyone else in here so I'd love it if you could share more.

In my school, every teacher has an ESL certificate, so we all have training to help kids with language learning. We also have an ESL teacher who pushes in and helps those kids specifically. But really, I personally feel very strongly that all kids deserve a significant amount of small group time, not just kids who are struggling. Yes, my lowest group might be seen in a small group 4 days a week, I still try to ensure my higher kids get seen 3 days a week. And yes, it helps that the reading specialist also pushes in daily and can help see groups. But my kids who only speak English truly are not sitting there bored or doing tons of independent work. Every kid reads independently for 15 minutes each day, but all abilities are doing that.
I think the misunderstanding here is that K classes ALWAYS have a huge range of kids. I've had kids who come in who don't know the difference between letters and numbers, kids who are 5 and not potty trained, kids who don't know how to hold a book. And every year, I have kids who come in reading at a first or second grade level. That's in schools with high levels of multilingualism and those with very low levels. My lessons are scaffolded to get at all learners.

Here's an example: It's writer's workshop time in February. I'm doing a lesson on how to write a note to mom or dad. I model what the letter could look like. I give the sentence stem "I love you, _____." The kids decide who they want to say that about and they all turn and talk with their partner. John says, "I love you, Dad." Jose says, "I love you, Mom." Then, we all count the number of words in one of those sentences. I write 4 lines on the board. Amy comes up and writes the word "I". Abed comes and writes the word "lov". (he forgets the e, but this is kindergarten and that's developmentally appropriate. Alejandra comes to write the word you, but is really struggling. I write the letter Y and she traces it. Kids learn to write the first letter of a word before they write more, usually. And Carl comes up and writes Mom. When they sit down to write themselves, yes, some struggle. And my kids who are flying in writing? When I drop by their table and see they have a perfect sentence with a cute picture, I ask them, "What more would you like to tell your mom? Can you write more? What would you say?" They tell me and they get started on writing more. I make a note of the 3 kids who are writing more and the next day, I pull them over for a small group conference on just that.

Kindergarten teachers are masters at differentiation and while I do believe that a very small percentage of teachers are still just teaching to the middle or to the lowest group, this has not been my experience.

I think when you have large groups of kids, living in poverty, also trying to master English, and you have large class sizes and underfunded schools, that's where things get dicey. But I really encourage you to embrace your multilingual school. At least, give it a shot. You might find that it's not propaganda at all. My classroom has kids who speak English, Spanish, Polish, Urdu, and a few other languages. By year's end, 90% of my students are at or above level. As the mother of two very high achieving kids, I made sure my high achievers (whatever language they speak or whatever their economic status is) have the opportunity to excel. You might be surprised how many other teachers feel this way and make that happen, too.

This sounds fine for kindergarten, but I do think it becomes more of an issue in 1st and 2nd where kids still can't really work independently but there is huge pressure to make sure every kid is reading. In my daughter's 1st grade class the table with the gifted cluster was reading Harry Potter, Roald Dahl and Percy Jackson. The lowest level learners in her class couldn't read "cat" yet. The teacher needed to get those kids reading and that's where her time was spent. My daughter's table got 15 minutes of teacher time every couple of weeks. The other half of the class got small group instruction daily. This turned around in 3rd grade when mostly everyone could read and the kids started reading to learn.

To illustrate, we showed up to a parent teacher conference and it was very apparent that the teacher didnt know what our daughter had been doing in class. The kids at her table cluster had invented codes and were writing messages to each other when they were supposed to be writing in their writer's journal. It clearly had been going on for months. The teacher had no idea until she pulled the notebook out of our daughter's desk and couldn't explain the content of dots, dashes and other shapes. We had to ask our daughter when we got home. We learned that most of class was unsupervised time at desks for her group so they entertained themselves.

Okay, this is really awful and a similar situation drove us to private. No regrets.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thats not a high percentage of English Learners in NOVA

That's insanely high if you're talking about a good school. Anything more than single digits and it means everything will move slower than it otherwise should

Racist much?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thats not a high percentage of English Learners in NOVA

That's insanely high if you're talking about a good school. Anything more than single digits and it means everything will move slower than it otherwise should

Racist much?

It is reality at many schools, not racism. Just because it doesn’t exist in your ivory tower SJW bubble doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They have the option of excluding ESL students, low SES students, sped students, behavior students and basically any student.

Assuming "behavior students" means students who have trouble managing their emotions and frequently disrupt the class by acting out, cussing at the teacher, etc then that's absolutely 100% a student subset I could do without exposing my children to. My wife had kids like that in her public school growing up and was always incredibly frustrated by it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thats not a high percentage of English Learners in NOVA

That's insanely high if you're talking about a good school. Anything more than single digits and it means everything will move slower than it otherwise should

Racist much?

How is that racist though? Of course trying to learn a language while taking classes in that language is going to be more difficult.

Great Schools for Long Branch show white kids with 10/10 test scores and Hispanic kids with 4/10. Academic progress is 9/10 and 5/10, respectively. It would be insane to think language skills wouldn't play a role in how quickly a class can move together through subject matter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thats not a high percentage of English Learners in NOVA

That's insanely high if you're talking about a good school. Anything more than single digits and it means everything will move slower than it otherwise should

Racist much?

How is that racist though? Of course trying to learn a language while taking classes in that language is going to be more difficult.

Great Schools for Long Branch show white kids with 10/10 test scores and Hispanic kids with 4/10. Academic progress is 9/10 and 5/10, respectively. It would be insane to think language skills wouldn't play a role in how quickly a class can move together through subject matter.

Clearly, though, then the data shows that those EL students aren't hurting the achievement of the kids who only know one language. If the white kids scores are 9/10 or 10/10, there's no harm no foul.

[Anonymous]

How come we allow admission and tracking requirements in public colleges but not public middle and high schools? The education is arguably more important and should meet the student where they