Suit to fight for bilingual testing

[The Straight Story]

Suit to fight for bilingual testing

CHULA VISTA – The Chula Vista Elementary and Sweetwater Union High School districts are among 10 school districts statewide that plan to file suit against the state of California this week to put a stop to English-only testing of students who are learning English.

The suit will ask the state to enforce the federal No Child Left Behind Act provision that calls for each state to give English learners "to the extent practicable, assessments in the language and form most likely to yield accurate data on what such students know."

In South County that means Spanish, the home language of more than 90 percent of students who are learning English. One of the attorneys representing the school districts, Mary Hernandez, said the lawsuit sets three goals: modifications such as oral directions in students' native language, state tests in Spanish and a plan for developing tests in other languages.

The California Association for Bilingual Education, Californians Together, the League of United Latin American Citizens and eight other school districts in the state will join Chula Vista Elementary and Sweetwater in the suit.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050601/news_7m1language.html

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Reality versus how people think things should be is often the cause of much pain.

[melissinha]

1. Makes sense to me

As former a Spanish language major... I have to agree with these school districts... YOu don't KNOW how many democrats I fight with on this issue.. its so sickening to hear the "they're in this country, they should learn the language" BS.

I think what all concerned shoudl really concentrate on is that they need to evaluate the students in the best manner possible. How can you evaluate children on subjects other than English without using their first language??? THe point is to evaluate which will enable the district to determine what to include in their curriculum.

[Ready4Change]

2. Sorry. I disagree.

I suspect my point of view on this isn't popular here on DU, but here it is.

I think bilingual education only serves to enable non-english speaking students to become non-english speaking citizens. To my mind that's a disservice to them.

Instead, get them to speed in English asap. If immersed they'll be to speed in 6-12 months, and functional for a lifetime. If this isn't done, then our entire society will need to meet, not just their needs, but the needs of every non-english speaking citizen for the rest of time.

And the key point is that this isn't a BI-lingual issue. It's MULTI-lingual.

Pick up, say, one of those cans of Pillsbury rolls. Read the cooking directions. Now imagine if those directions had to also be in Spanish, and German, French, Portugese, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Multiple dialects for Chinese and Native Americans...

Taken to it's natural conclusion, a multilingual society is enormously inefficient.

[The Straight Story]

3. From the article:

"Chula Vista and Sweetwater contend that by choosing to offer English-only tests, the state isn't measuring how well English learners learn content – reading comprehension and math word problems, for example. The low pass rates say only that these students don't understand the questions."

So it appears that the kids are learning english but the wording of some tests rely on a deeper understanding of the language to which they have not gotten yet.