English Learner Education in Sacramento
and the Elk Grove School District

Looking at the Elk Grove school district website (www.egusd.k12.ca.us), there is a nice chart on the demographic makeup of the district (www.egusd.k12.ca.us/district/demo.htm).  This chart can be summarized as follows:

• 32% white
• 20% African American
• 20% Latino
• 19% Asian
• 6% Filipino
• 2% Pacific Islander
• 1% American Indian

Although this chart shows some consciousness of the diversity of the Elk Grove student body, it seems disturbingly race oriented as opposed to being culturally oriented.  It was hard to find similar statistics showing the percentage of immigrants in the district or a pie chart showing the ratios of student first languages.  To me this seems to prioritize the subject of diversity as mostly just an issue of skin color as opposed to being related to educational requirements of the students.  On the other hand, the Elk Grove website does devote a separate page to the issue of whether kids should say the "Pledge of Allegiance" with the phrase "under God" in it (in case you're wondering the district supports it - and please excuse the sarcasm, it just caught my eye).

I did locate a very nice site with data on the California English Language Test results (http://celdt.cde.ca.gov/).  I've copied some of the data for the Elk Grove school district below.  This data is the summary for ELL students grade K-12:

Note that this data only goes back to 2001-2002, so this represents the limits of the full range of data available.  From the Elk Grove website noted above, EGUSD had about 47,000 students in 200, while it currently has about 58,000 students.  Given that general growth rate, I was a little surprised that the number of ELL students tested has actually done down during that period.  It could be that most of the new housing in the district has been more expensive, so the growth in the number of new immigrants moving in is not matching the overall growth in the district.  Still, the numbers indicate that roughly 14% of the current student population are ELL students.

Note that 14% ELL students is an average for the district.  According to the Valley High School accountability report card (http://www.egusd.k12.ca.us/sarc/SARC2_en_Valley-3430170h.pdf), their EL population is a pretty astounding 32%, while the more affluent Sheldon High School only has an ELL population of 11%.

After some digging through the menus of the Elk Grove school district site, I did find a section devoted to standards and benchmarks, and a subsection devoted to English language development in particular (http://www.egusd.k12.ca.us/StandBenchmark/englangdev.htm).  This section seemed fairly detailed in some respects.  The following is good partial example which can be found under the section for Reading: Fluency and Systematic Vocabulary Development for grades 3-5 in the "early intermediate" section (http://www.egusd.k12.ca.us/StandBenchmark/stdbench/eld/Fluency/flue3-5.pdf):

This standard seems to have fairly positive goals that demonstrate at least some awareness of the proper sequence of learning required to pick up a second language.  I also liked the fact the program was tailored for each level at each different grade.

However, the standard had no suggestions on how to support the ELL students continuing education in fundamentals (i.e., math, science, etc.) while the students were acquiring English.  In other words, it makes no attempt to address the need for bilingual education during any kind of transition period.  In fact, it is not specific about whether bilingual education is supplied at all.

I did manage to find a little more specific information on the web about the David Reese Elementary School in a third party website (source http://www.schoolsmovingup.net/cs/nclb/view/sdp/2):

As with the student population at large, the services for English Learners begin with data analysis in the co-op meetings. Based on this information, English Learners at Reese are placed in various interventions, including an after-school language acquisition program. Twelve teachers at Reese are trained in this intensive language acquisition program.

In addition, both certificated and classified staff are trained to handle the needs of English Learners in the regular classroom. The bilingual associates at Reese speak the four main languages spoken by students at Reese. These bilingual associates come into the classrooms to help children who are still very early on in the process of acquiring English language skills. Also, most of the teachers at Reese have their Cross cultural Language and Academic Development (CLAD) and Bilingual, Cross cultural, Language and Academic Development (BCLAD) credentials.

Or to put it another way, the ELL curriculum at David Reese is mostly assisted immersion based, with a supplemental after school assistance program and a handful of bilingual associates to assist in classrooms (via tutoring and pullouts I would assume).  Although I'm sure they are trying their best, it sounds like it would be a very tough transition to make for the beginning ELL students.  Looking at the accountability report card for this school (http://www.egusd.k12.ca.us/sarc/SARC2_en_Reese-6033021e.pdf), it has an astonishing 40% ELL population (as opposed to a fairly high 24% average for elementary schools in the district).  If this heavily ELL weighted school does not have bilingual classes, I doubt that any school in the district does.

Notes on Target Elementary School

I had a chance to talk with the teacher of the class where I am tutoring some ELL students (see my logs for more of my experiences tutoring).  I am leaving out some names and changing others because I post my logs on the web and I want to guard privacy of the students I am tutoring.  This particular school is in an area with a high immigrant population (largely Russian), and the school has a very high number of ESL students.  It is also something of a magnet school for immigrants in the area, because it has a reputation for working well with these students.

This school has 4 different classrooms dedicated to newcomers.  The classes are multi-grade level (usually 2 grades in one classroom), and they are taught by instructors with experience dealing with new immigrants.  However, the classes are not bilingual.  After one year of attending newcomer class, the immigrant students are mainstreamed back into the regular population (pretty much whether they are ready or not).

The school has some bilingual aides available, but probably not nearly as many as needed.  Typically these aides will pull out students who need help a couple of times a week for half an hour - which is about all they can do given their level of resources and funding.  Karen (pseudonym for the teacher I am working with) characterized the school principal as being very dedicated to doing the best job possible helping the kids, including moving them around informally sometimes (off the books) to special classes where they can get extra help.  Apparently there are a lot of administrative roadblocks which keep teachers from directing students to the special classes when needed (the blocks are in place until the student actually fails the mainstream class), and the principal is flexible enough to let some students work informally in these classes on a part-time basis until the system catches up and classifies the kids as needed.  Unfortunately, it appears that the system does a poor job of separating language based problems from other learning difficulties - so kids who are behind on language issues probably get shuffled into academically slower classes fairly frequently.