There are obviously a lot of changes to be made, but to start with, the university should admit the highest scorers, and give them remedial instruction. The fact that they didn't learn English shouldn't disqualify them. Doesn't the University know how to teach English?
Not a Single Liberian Student Passed This Year's University Admission Test
28 August 2013
Written by Ndesanjo Macha
Global Voices
As Liberia marks the 10th anniversary of the Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the 14-year civil war, nearly 25,000 school-leavers failed this year's admission test to the University of Liberia. It is the first
time that not a single candidate passed the admission test.
Liberia's president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel peace laureate, acknowledges that the education system in Liberia is “in a mess”. Public Domain photo from the US State Department.
The BBC has reported that Liberia's Education Minister Education Minister, Etmonia David-Tarpeh, found it hard to believe that not a single candidate passed. She therefore intends to meet university officials to discuss the matter. She describes the failure rate as “mass murder.”
However, a private consultant, James Dorbor Jallah, who was hired by the university to manage the entrance examination confirmed the report and said the days are over when students were admitted into the University of Liberia through bribery or based on how many important people they know.
The world has reacted on Twitter with shock and disbelief at the news.
This is how Kenyan Harvard Kennedy School Professor Calestous Juma (@calestous) described the news:
King Leopold II of Belgium was the sole and de facto owner of the Congo Free State, the present day the Democratic Republic of the Congo, from 1885 to 1908.
Showing posts with label English learners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English learners. Show all posts
Friday, August 30, 2013
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Language Wars: Should Spanish-Speaking Students Be Taught in English Only?
Language Wars: Should Spanish-Speaking Students Be Taught in English Only? (VIDEO)
PBS
July 18, 2013
SUMMARY
Educators have struggled to improve students' reading proficiency in the mostly Latino school district of New Britain, Conn. When administrators decided to eliminate a dual-language program for native Spanish-speaking students, not everyone agreed with that tactic. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports.
Transcript
JUDY WOODRUFF: There's long been debate about bilingual education in the United States and what's the most effective way to make sure students are proficient in academics in the English language.
Special correspondent John Tulenko reports on a Connecticut school district th
at's taking a different road, one that may yield results, but is sparking a battle over its approach. JOHN TULENKO: From kindergarten to third grade, these are the reading years. But when students exit them, national tests show, only 35 percent read proficiently.
Here in New Britain, Conn., the figure is just 25 percent, among the lowest in the state. But this urban, mostly Latino school district is trying to turn that around.
The effort began with home visits to address chronic absenteeism among kindergartners.
JOE VAVERCHAK, New Britain Public Schools: Chronic absenteeism last year was 30 percent. So, that means we had approximately 1,000 -- around 1,000 kids last year. And 30 percent of them were missing at least 18 days of school.
JOHN TULENKO: Attendance officers Joe Vaverchak and Jerrel Hargraves have made some 400 home visits this year.
JOE VAVERCHAK: We're not there to put a hammer to the parent, because there's lots of issues that cause truancy and absenteeism, a lot.
WOMAN: The good thing about the school is that they're helping me potty-train him. That's why his attendance has...
JOE VAVERCHAK: Poverty plays a key piece, clothing associated with poverty, hygiene. Again, each case, you need to really sit down with them, and speak to them a little bit, talk to them, find out what we might be able to do to help you.
JOHN TULENKO: A recent study found that among chronically absent kindergartners, more than 80 percent were behind in reading by the time they finished third grade.
JOE VAVERCHAK: We want the little guys in school.
WOMAN: OK.
JOE VAVERCHAK: OK? Because they're the ones that need to be in school.
JOHN TULENKO: Home visits are making a difference, reducing chronic absenteeism among kindergartners from 30 percent last year to just under 18 percent.
Along with getting more students in the door, New Britain has changed reading instruction, especially for its sizable population of students who arrive at school speaking only Spanish. Nearly all of them were sent here, K-through-eighth-grade DiLoreto school, where, by design, half the students spoke Spanish and the other half English.
DiLoreto's selling point was its dual language approach. Teachers here taught in Spanish one week, English the next, with the goal that all students would graduate fully bilingual.
But test scores over several years showed DiLoreto was struggling. Seventy percent of all students and 85 percent of those learning to speak English were failing Connecticut's reading test.
So, last fall, New Britain replaced DiLoreto's original dual-language approach with something very different.
Now Deirdre Falla's class of mostly Spanish-speaking second-graders receives virtually all their instruction in English, like this lesson on conjugating irregular verbs. Each day includes two hours of intensive English grammar instruction.
WOMAN: The idea is teach the foundation of English, the syntax rules, the way that sentences form, so they can write correctly. And writing is really a springboard to reading.
KELT COOPER, New Britain Public Schools: When it comes to English-language learners, I make it very clear. Our job and our objective is to get them to acquire English as rapidly as possible, so they can be in the mainstream.
JOHN TULENKO: Requiring that instruction be delivered in English was the first major policy change by New Britain's new superintendent, Kelt Cooper. He had extensive experience with Spanish-speaking students, having just come from Texas, where he ran schools along the U.S./Mexico border.
KELT COOPER: For all of those years that they were struggling through language blocks, they're getting a fraction of what's being instructed. Our English development program is to teach them English as rapidly as possible, so that they can get math, science, and social studies content as early as possible to 100 percent.
JOHN TULENKO: But not everyone favors the district's emphasis on English only.
ARAM AYALON, New Britain School Board: The message, of course, is that you don't value the first language and the culture that goes with that.
JOHN TULENKO: Aram Ayalon is a professor of education who serves on New Britain's School Board.
He argued for strengthening DiLoreto's original dual-language approach, which a recent state audit found had been implemented incorrectly, hampered by increases in class size, limited resources, and frequent changes in leadership, not by any problem with dual-language instruction itself.
ARAM AYALON: The best way to learn English is to tie it to the first language.
For example, you do a comparison. You learn how grammar in Spanish, for example, the adjective comes after the noun, for example, kind of like in Hebrew, you say man handsome, not handsome man in Spanish. So you learn -- through comparison, you learn how English and Spanish are connected and how they're different.
A basic truth in teaching is you start with what your students know, which may be Spanish, German, Polish, and you build on that.
JOHN TULENKO: The debate isn't confined to New Britain. With some five million students in the United States learning English for the first time -- and most struggling -- it matters tremendously which approach works better.
When you look at the research, it strongly suggests that a better approach is to teach students first in their native language. What do you say?
KELT COOPER: Well, there's a lot of different academics. You can make everything fit what you want. I'm doing things different, because if we continue to do the same things we have always done here, we're going to get the same results, and the results here are why I'm here.
JOHN TULENKO: While sink-or-swim English only has been shown to be less effective, New Britain's version comes with supports, daily lessons for teaching the language itself.
KELT COOPER: We're teaching English as a foreign language. It's a lot of different fun methods, sentence surgery. Classic terms we use is sentence diagramming.
JOHN TULENKO: What was with the writing on the desks? You're not supposed to write on the desk.
WOMAN: Darn it. You're not supposed to tell people about that. They had to write a 14-word sentence using several adjectives to describe the noun. It's a great tool.
JOHN TULENKO: But others see a fundamental flaw in the grammar-based approach.
School Board member Aram Ayalon:
ARAM AYALON: You can do all the gimmicks you want, but grammar isn't something that is meaningful to kids. Adults are better at that. Kids want stories. Kids want to interact with each other with language, and this takes the meaning out of the instruction.
JOHN TULENKO: Something else we noticed, nearly every inch of classroom wall space was devoted to grammar, very little social studies, very little science, very little math.
KELT COOPER: It's deliberate. We're less concentrating on the content of math, science, social studies at the same time, whereas other methods try to blend these all together.
JOHN TULENKO: Well, to a lot of observers, you're shortchanging the kids. What do you say?
KELT COOPER: That's where we place our value. If you don't acquire English, then you're effectively barred from all sorts of different opportunities.
JOHN TULENKO: Though it had been less than a year, was the approach working?
Boys and girls, I'm going to write some sentences on the board.
I asked these second-grade English-language learners to fix them.
The kittens was cute.
Young man in the back right over there.
STUDENT: The "was" needs to change to "were."
JOHN TULENKO: Excellent.
Next, a little harder.
Yesterday, the dog Brown come to town.
OK, Elian.
STUDENT: Brown needs to go before dog.
STUDENT: Because the adjectives come first.
JOHN TULENKO: Ah, OK.
STUDENT: And come needs to be changed to came.
JOHN TULENKO: And why is that?
STUDENT: Because come is that you're coming right now. If it was past, it needs to be came.
JOHN TULENKO: That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
KELT COOPER: The proof is in the pudding. It's very clear that the ones that have gone through these programs have a better articulation of the English language, better understanding of the English language, understand the grammar rules and are much more proficient in English than their native English counterparts in the mainstream.
JOHN TULENKO: Cooper bases that on his own experience. He used this approach for four years in his former district in Texas. And in terms of English-language learners who reached English proficiency, his district rose from nearly the bottom statewide to nearly the top.
But that's not the whole story. In math and science, scores for English-language learners fell by as much as 15 percent to levels below state targets, leading the district to abandon the program after Cooper left.
ARAM AYALON: When you spend so much time on grammar, I think it kind of reduces education and it reduces kids' motivation to learn. The bottom line is that it's doomed from the beginning.
KELT COOPER: Yes, I can go to the same people that say do it the same way and same way. I don't want to do it the same way. I could still have kids not acquiring English and they're still not writing a sentence in proper English by the time they're a senior in high school too.
And the things could go on their merry way, just the way it is. But my job is to fix this and get this place out of the ditch.
JOHN TULENKO: New Britain will soon get an early look at whether its attendance and reading policies are making a difference. Results from the latest state test will be released this July.
PBS
July 18, 2013
SUMMARY
Educators have struggled to improve students' reading proficiency in the mostly Latino school district of New Britain, Conn. When administrators decided to eliminate a dual-language program for native Spanish-speaking students, not everyone agreed with that tactic. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports.
Transcript
JUDY WOODRUFF: There's long been debate about bilingual education in the United States and what's the most effective way to make sure students are proficient in academics in the English language.
Special correspondent John Tulenko reports on a Connecticut school district th
at's taking a different road, one that may yield results, but is sparking a battle over its approach. JOHN TULENKO: From kindergarten to third grade, these are the reading years. But when students exit them, national tests show, only 35 percent read proficiently.
Here in New Britain, Conn., the figure is just 25 percent, among the lowest in the state. But this urban, mostly Latino school district is trying to turn that around.
The effort began with home visits to address chronic absenteeism among kindergartners.
JOE VAVERCHAK, New Britain Public Schools: Chronic absenteeism last year was 30 percent. So, that means we had approximately 1,000 -- around 1,000 kids last year. And 30 percent of them were missing at least 18 days of school.
JOHN TULENKO: Attendance officers Joe Vaverchak and Jerrel Hargraves have made some 400 home visits this year.
JOE VAVERCHAK: We're not there to put a hammer to the parent, because there's lots of issues that cause truancy and absenteeism, a lot.
WOMAN: The good thing about the school is that they're helping me potty-train him. That's why his attendance has...
JOE VAVERCHAK: Poverty plays a key piece, clothing associated with poverty, hygiene. Again, each case, you need to really sit down with them, and speak to them a little bit, talk to them, find out what we might be able to do to help you.
JOHN TULENKO: A recent study found that among chronically absent kindergartners, more than 80 percent were behind in reading by the time they finished third grade.
JOE VAVERCHAK: We want the little guys in school.
WOMAN: OK.
JOE VAVERCHAK: OK? Because they're the ones that need to be in school.
JOHN TULENKO: Home visits are making a difference, reducing chronic absenteeism among kindergartners from 30 percent last year to just under 18 percent.
Along with getting more students in the door, New Britain has changed reading instruction, especially for its sizable population of students who arrive at school speaking only Spanish. Nearly all of them were sent here, K-through-eighth-grade DiLoreto school, where, by design, half the students spoke Spanish and the other half English.
DiLoreto's selling point was its dual language approach. Teachers here taught in Spanish one week, English the next, with the goal that all students would graduate fully bilingual.
But test scores over several years showed DiLoreto was struggling. Seventy percent of all students and 85 percent of those learning to speak English were failing Connecticut's reading test.
So, last fall, New Britain replaced DiLoreto's original dual-language approach with something very different.
Now Deirdre Falla's class of mostly Spanish-speaking second-graders receives virtually all their instruction in English, like this lesson on conjugating irregular verbs. Each day includes two hours of intensive English grammar instruction.
WOMAN: The idea is teach the foundation of English, the syntax rules, the way that sentences form, so they can write correctly. And writing is really a springboard to reading.
KELT COOPER, New Britain Public Schools: When it comes to English-language learners, I make it very clear. Our job and our objective is to get them to acquire English as rapidly as possible, so they can be in the mainstream.
JOHN TULENKO: Requiring that instruction be delivered in English was the first major policy change by New Britain's new superintendent, Kelt Cooper. He had extensive experience with Spanish-speaking students, having just come from Texas, where he ran schools along the U.S./Mexico border.
KELT COOPER: For all of those years that they were struggling through language blocks, they're getting a fraction of what's being instructed. Our English development program is to teach them English as rapidly as possible, so that they can get math, science, and social studies content as early as possible to 100 percent.
JOHN TULENKO: But not everyone favors the district's emphasis on English only.
ARAM AYALON, New Britain School Board: The message, of course, is that you don't value the first language and the culture that goes with that.
JOHN TULENKO: Aram Ayalon is a professor of education who serves on New Britain's School Board.
He argued for strengthening DiLoreto's original dual-language approach, which a recent state audit found had been implemented incorrectly, hampered by increases in class size, limited resources, and frequent changes in leadership, not by any problem with dual-language instruction itself.
ARAM AYALON: The best way to learn English is to tie it to the first language.
For example, you do a comparison. You learn how grammar in Spanish, for example, the adjective comes after the noun, for example, kind of like in Hebrew, you say man handsome, not handsome man in Spanish. So you learn -- through comparison, you learn how English and Spanish are connected and how they're different.
A basic truth in teaching is you start with what your students know, which may be Spanish, German, Polish, and you build on that.
JOHN TULENKO: The debate isn't confined to New Britain. With some five million students in the United States learning English for the first time -- and most struggling -- it matters tremendously which approach works better.
When you look at the research, it strongly suggests that a better approach is to teach students first in their native language. What do you say?
KELT COOPER: Well, there's a lot of different academics. You can make everything fit what you want. I'm doing things different, because if we continue to do the same things we have always done here, we're going to get the same results, and the results here are why I'm here.
JOHN TULENKO: While sink-or-swim English only has been shown to be less effective, New Britain's version comes with supports, daily lessons for teaching the language itself.
KELT COOPER: We're teaching English as a foreign language. It's a lot of different fun methods, sentence surgery. Classic terms we use is sentence diagramming.
JOHN TULENKO: What was with the writing on the desks? You're not supposed to write on the desk.
WOMAN: Darn it. You're not supposed to tell people about that. They had to write a 14-word sentence using several adjectives to describe the noun. It's a great tool.
JOHN TULENKO: But others see a fundamental flaw in the grammar-based approach.
School Board member Aram Ayalon:
ARAM AYALON: You can do all the gimmicks you want, but grammar isn't something that is meaningful to kids. Adults are better at that. Kids want stories. Kids want to interact with each other with language, and this takes the meaning out of the instruction.
JOHN TULENKO: Something else we noticed, nearly every inch of classroom wall space was devoted to grammar, very little social studies, very little science, very little math.
KELT COOPER: It's deliberate. We're less concentrating on the content of math, science, social studies at the same time, whereas other methods try to blend these all together.
JOHN TULENKO: Well, to a lot of observers, you're shortchanging the kids. What do you say?
KELT COOPER: That's where we place our value. If you don't acquire English, then you're effectively barred from all sorts of different opportunities.
JOHN TULENKO: Though it had been less than a year, was the approach working?
Boys and girls, I'm going to write some sentences on the board.
I asked these second-grade English-language learners to fix them.
The kittens was cute.
Young man in the back right over there.
STUDENT: The "was" needs to change to "were."
JOHN TULENKO: Excellent.
Next, a little harder.
Yesterday, the dog Brown come to town.
OK, Elian.
STUDENT: Brown needs to go before dog.
STUDENT: Because the adjectives come first.
JOHN TULENKO: Ah, OK.
STUDENT: And come needs to be changed to came.
JOHN TULENKO: And why is that?
STUDENT: Because come is that you're coming right now. If it was past, it needs to be came.
JOHN TULENKO: That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
KELT COOPER: The proof is in the pudding. It's very clear that the ones that have gone through these programs have a better articulation of the English language, better understanding of the English language, understand the grammar rules and are much more proficient in English than their native English counterparts in the mainstream.
JOHN TULENKO: Cooper bases that on his own experience. He used this approach for four years in his former district in Texas. And in terms of English-language learners who reached English proficiency, his district rose from nearly the bottom statewide to nearly the top.
But that's not the whole story. In math and science, scores for English-language learners fell by as much as 15 percent to levels below state targets, leading the district to abandon the program after Cooper left.
ARAM AYALON: When you spend so much time on grammar, I think it kind of reduces education and it reduces kids' motivation to learn. The bottom line is that it's doomed from the beginning.
KELT COOPER: Yes, I can go to the same people that say do it the same way and same way. I don't want to do it the same way. I could still have kids not acquiring English and they're still not writing a sentence in proper English by the time they're a senior in high school too.
And the things could go on their merry way, just the way it is. But my job is to fix this and get this place out of the ditch.
JOHN TULENKO: New Britain will soon get an early look at whether its attendance and reading policies are making a difference. Results from the latest state test will be released this July.
Friday, January 25, 2013
A bouquet for the Los Angeles ACLU for caring about education in San Diego; a brick for the San Diego ACLU
The Los Angeles ACLU has been working hard for years for education reform. The San Diego ACLU has actively tried to suppress information about what's wrong with schools.
The San Diego ACLU seems to have some conservative donors who demand that educational issues NOT BE PURSUED in San Diego. I am disgusted with the board of the San Diego ACLU, as well as lawyers David Loy and Kevin Keenan. It seems that their principles are for sale. They all seem to serve as rubber stamps for unknown, powerful paymasters.
Here's some recent evidence of the vigilance of the Los Angeles ACLU.
State Error Led ACLU to Jump on Grossmont Union HS District
“False” report on English learners “reflects a data reporting problem,” says the school district.
By Ken Stone
La Mesa Patch
January 24, 2013
The state Department of Education fed the ACLU bad data, suggests the Grossmont Union High School District in a response to accusations by that and another activist group.
According to a statement released Thursday [attached as PDF], an error in state data led the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center to accuse the district of not giving English-language learners the help they need.
The groups this week sent a letter to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and the state Board of Education, threatening to sue unless English-language classes were provided to non-native speakers in the Grossmont and other districts in compliance with state and federal law.
“Each additional day an EL child goes without language instructional services is another day that child is effectively foreclosed from a meaningful education,” said Jessica Price, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.
“The children who are neglected today, in schools with no EL services, become the long-term English learners of tomorrow, sometimes struggling their entire school careers without anyone stepping in to make sure they have the tools to learn,” she said.
But the Grossmont district rebutted that idea, saying district data made it look as if 1,300 English-learning students were not getting the help they needed.
“This is false and reflects a data reporting problem,” according to a district statement. “GUHSD will work with the California Department of Education to better align our data to CDE’s classifications.
“The Grossmont Union High School District serves more than 3,300 English Learner students. The 1,300 English Learner students in question are in fact proficient enough to be enrolled in mainstream English classes and receive extra support.”
The four-paragraph statement concluded: “The Grossmont Union High School District has been committed to enhancing and expanding services to our ever-growing English Learner population.”
The ACLU is being contacted for its response.
—City News Service contributed to this report.
The San Diego ACLU seems to have some conservative donors who demand that educational issues NOT BE PURSUED in San Diego. I am disgusted with the board of the San Diego ACLU, as well as lawyers David Loy and Kevin Keenan. It seems that their principles are for sale. They all seem to serve as rubber stamps for unknown, powerful paymasters.
Here's some recent evidence of the vigilance of the Los Angeles ACLU.
State Error Led ACLU to Jump on Grossmont Union HS District
“False” report on English learners “reflects a data reporting problem,” says the school district.
By Ken Stone
La Mesa Patch
January 24, 2013
The state Department of Education fed the ACLU bad data, suggests the Grossmont Union High School District in a response to accusations by that and another activist group.
According to a statement released Thursday [attached as PDF], an error in state data led the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center to accuse the district of not giving English-language learners the help they need.
The groups this week sent a letter to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and the state Board of Education, threatening to sue unless English-language classes were provided to non-native speakers in the Grossmont and other districts in compliance with state and federal law.
“Each additional day an EL child goes without language instructional services is another day that child is effectively foreclosed from a meaningful education,” said Jessica Price, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.
“The children who are neglected today, in schools with no EL services, become the long-term English learners of tomorrow, sometimes struggling their entire school careers without anyone stepping in to make sure they have the tools to learn,” she said.
But the Grossmont district rebutted that idea, saying district data made it look as if 1,300 English-learning students were not getting the help they needed.
“This is false and reflects a data reporting problem,” according to a district statement. “GUHSD will work with the California Department of Education to better align our data to CDE’s classifications.
“The Grossmont Union High School District serves more than 3,300 English Learner students. The 1,300 English Learner students in question are in fact proficient enough to be enrolled in mainstream English classes and receive extra support.”
The four-paragraph statement concluded: “The Grossmont Union High School District has been committed to enhancing and expanding services to our ever-growing English Learner population.”
The ACLU is being contacted for its response.
—City News Service contributed to this report.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Arizona Subpoena Seeks Researchers' ELL Data
This story about Arizona subpoenaing the names of teachers who participated in an English-learner study is particularly interesting in the light of the SB1070 controversy.
Arizona Subpoena Seeks Researchers' ELL Data
By Mary Ann Zehr
Edweek.org
August 12, 2010
A subpoena seeking research data related to the education of English-language learners in Arizona is drawing fire from civil rights advocates and researchers....
Arizona’s schools are mandated to provide ELLs with a four-hour block of English until they pass the state’s English-language-proficiency test. The findings of the three studies suggest the program will have negative consequences for ELLs. One study, for example, found that 85 percent of 880 teachers surveyed throughout the state were very concerned about the “segregation” of students in the classes, and that most said a majority of students were not meeting grade-level standards through them.
For the study based on that teacher survey, Mr. Horne’s lawyers asked the University of Arizona to turn over “[a]ny and all documents, records, memoranda, recordings showing or reflecting the name, school, and grade of each teacher who participated in the surveys described in the report.” They made similar requests for a second study conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona and an additional study carried out by researchers at Arizona State University...
Arizona Subpoena Seeks Researchers' ELL Data
By Mary Ann Zehr
Edweek.org
August 12, 2010
A subpoena seeking research data related to the education of English-language learners in Arizona is drawing fire from civil rights advocates and researchers....
Arizona’s schools are mandated to provide ELLs with a four-hour block of English until they pass the state’s English-language-proficiency test. The findings of the three studies suggest the program will have negative consequences for ELLs. One study, for example, found that 85 percent of 880 teachers surveyed throughout the state were very concerned about the “segregation” of students in the classes, and that most said a majority of students were not meeting grade-level standards through them.
For the study based on that teacher survey, Mr. Horne’s lawyers asked the University of Arizona to turn over “[a]ny and all documents, records, memoranda, recordings showing or reflecting the name, school, and grade of each teacher who participated in the surveys described in the report.” They made similar requests for a second study conducted by researchers at the University of Arizona and an additional study carried out by researchers at Arizona State University...
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