Testimony of Catalina Fortino before the State Assembly Committee on ELLs: Oct.12, 2007
Oct 12, 2007 1:00 PM
Thank you, Chairwoman Nolan, and members of the NYS Assembly Standing Committee on Education. My name is Catalina Fortino. I am coordinator of ESL/ELL professional development for the UFT Teachers Center. Before joining the Teacher Center staff, I served as a bilingual early childhood and special education teacher in two schools in Central Brooklyn. I also chair NYSUT’s ELL committee and serve on a number of task forces and professional boards, including the New York State Professional Standards and Practices Board for Teaching.
Let me add that I was once an English Language Learner myself, having come to this country with my family from Argentina as a nine-year-old who spoke or read no English on arrival.
You’ve just heard my NYSUT colleague, Chuck Santelli, lay out our state union affiliate’s state-wide perspective. It is one the UFT shares and endorses, too. I will focus on what the situation looks like at the New York City level and what remedies the UFT recommends.
New York City’s student population of English Language Learners is huge, heterogeneous and growing. Those students whose primary language is not English and who are learning English as a second language represent some 15 percent of New York City’s public school students. While more than 175 languages are represented in the schools, most are clustered into one of five language groups-- Spanish. Chinese, Russian, French/French Creole and Italian-- with nearly two out of three ELL students being native Spanish speakers
There are two critical things to understand about these students. First, that as second language learners, they are—in the words of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York—doing “Double the Work.” They are both learning English and at the same time they are studying core academic content areas.
Second, not only are such students from diverse language and cultural backgrounds, but their education needs are diverse. Even within one language group, one size-intervention does not fit all. We have long-term English Language Learners. We have students with interrupted formal education, many of whom lack basic native-language literacy skills and academic preparation. Then we have recently arrived immigrants who are coming in to the school system functioning at or above grade level, but in their native language, and who will use their native-language literacy skills to learn to read and write in English. So any comprehensive plan has to reflect this heterogeneity.
Lastly, they are receiving assessments that don’t test what they’ve learned. Here’s what Katy Kurjukovic, an ESL teacher from PS 11, Queens told this committee last year. I think it bears repeating:
In the course of one year [the student] learned a new alphabet, is able to have a social conversation [in English], and can read a simple sentence. If I teach him the new vocabulary, he can write a simple letter or report, and can perform grade-level work in math and science (if instructed with ESL methodologies.
In short, [he] is succeeding. He is mastering all that I teach, and I have high expectations. I would describe [him] as typical of ELLs in my school. In fact, my school, P.S. 11, is consistently cited for the performance of our ELLs as measured by the NYSESLAT (New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test).
So far, so good. Our PS 11 ESL teacher is teaching and her ELL students are learning. She has high expectations, and this student, like so many others, is meeting them. So what’s the problem? The teacher continues:
What I cannot do, as hard as he and I work, is to condense seven years of English Language Arts instruction into one year. I have put together a list of words in a sample reading from the three-day, 6th grade ELA test. Do you think it reasonable to expect [him] to know the following words: cargo, transatlantic, reference, lumpy, leveled, launch ramp, flocked, airstrip, navigation, single-engine, tri-motor, (and) daredevil stunts?
On a subsequent day, is it reasonable to ask him to write an essay analyzing the imagery of a poem?
So, how do we better serve the needs of this disparate population? Here are four ways to do that.
1-Target school budgeting for ESL while better structuring resources.
New York’s latest school reorganization empowers principals to make key decisions. Most will. We need to ensure that every principal has the guidance in making the best decisions. ESL/ELL budgeting has to be at the center of every year’s budget. That means continuing to ensure small class sizes for this vulnerable population, especially for beginning students. The older system of categorical funding capped the size of the double or single period “support” classes at 21. Now, with co-mingled funds, even beginners are typically taught in classes of 34, with a noticeable slowdown in their progress.
Attention should also be paid to adapting ESL to a specific school’s program. So, if a school chooses an extended day format, a Saturday academy or summer school, there have to be commensurately more ESL resources for that revised program.
And when schools are creating their Comprehensive Education Plans and districts their
DCEPs, their efforts need to be monitored closely by both the state and city education departments. Principals in a district such as D. 6, in upper Manhattan, which has a large number of ELL students, will likely be cognizant of the need to use funds appropriately. We need mechanisms in place to ensure that every principal makes the right decision.
2-Faciltate an increase in ESL Teacher Certification through financial aid.
City schools suffer from a shortage of ESL and bi-lingual teachers, and the problem has gotten worse with the increase in the number of small schools, which admit few ELLs unless they were created AS ELL schools. Even where small schools feature ESL classes, there is a strong push for heterogeneous classes, which limits the participation of ELLS at varying levels of competency and ill-serves all students. The solution: increase the number of bilingual certified teachers by at least several hundred by encouraging more teachers to enter the field through loan forgiveness, tuition repayment and state scholarships to encourage second certifications.
3-Provide Program Choices
We don’t want to go back to the ancient system of “sink or swim,” in which too many children immersed into an all-English environment sank. The three programs that do work well are: a) English language classes augmented by push-in/pull-out special services; b) transitional bilingual education, where the native language is slowly phased out as English is phased in; and c) dual language classes. All three work, all should be supported, all should have full resources, including classroom libraries, and parents ought to be able to choose which is best for their child.
4-Move up the timing of assessments and disaggregate the test data
If the point is to assess how this year’s ESL students are doing in order to address and correct problems, that isn’t happening. Under current conditions, students are assessed in May, but the results do not reach the schools until well into September, after the beginning of the school year, which leaves too little quality planning time to prepare to meet the needs of students as judged by those assessments. Results must be released earlier, and the test data disaggregated by the type of ELL student, so we have an accurate picture of how each of the three broad subgroups within this heterogeneous population is doing.
Two last caveats regarding assessments. Given the heterogeneity of the ELL population, the requirement that every ELL student after one year and one day sits for the ELA exam is a recipe for failure. Not only do these students need differential instruction, they also need equal assessment opportunities that respect their differences and offer accurate test results.
The other problem: ESL teachers report spending too much time testing, not teaching. In a school with a sizable number of ELL students, our teachers spend four weeks at the beginning of the year and another four to six weeks in May testing and scoring. That means ELL students lose eight to ten weeks of needed instruction.
Now I am happy to answer any of your questions.
