California's Children

"Hodgepodge" of bilingual programs isn't working for 850,000 CA students

Hispanic students make up 82% of the over 1 million English learners (ELs) in the California public schools, but data from standardized test scores show that these students are struggling to achieve the same level of academic success as their native-English-speaking peers. Their needs are being met by a hodgepodge of programs, bilingual and English-only, according to Sarah Garland (at left) of California Watch, who wrote a series of stories this week on the achievement gap and how best to educate this bilingual (mainly Spanish speaking) population.

Neither of these programs has proved to be effective in narrowing the achievement gap, but it's not because of a lack of desire or knowledge on the part of the schools (officials at the California Department of Education (CDE) published a book  last year detailing research-based approaches for improving the educational outcomes for ELs--the book sold out overnight); however, steep budget cuts already in reading programs and special programs for the English learners, such as the English Language Acquisition Program, make it almost impossible for school districts to meet the needs of this population (the federal stimulus allowed districts to hire additional teachers for two years but these funds are no longer available). 

Looking more closely at the California Standards Test (CST) data, in 2nd grade, 42% of ELs scored proficient or above in Language Arts; however, by 5th grade, the number is almost halved (24%) and by middle school, the numbers take a deep slide ( 7th grade- 14%, 8th grade 11%, 11th grade 6%). The gap widens even more in other areas of the curriculum: in 8th grade science, only 25% of ELs are proficient (compared to 69% of native English speakers) and in social studies, only 12% (compared to 57%). There has been some improvement since 2003 (double the % of students are now performing at proficient or above in 4th grade Language Arts) but on a national test, National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 12% of Hispanic fourth-graders in California were proficient in reading in 2009, which places them behind every state in the nation except for Utah and Minnesota. In addition, a 2010 report by Californians Together, a nonprofit advocacy group, finds more than half of ELs in high school are “long-term English learners” meaning they have been in school for six years without learning English. 

The ability to read fluently by third grade is a key benchmark for future academic success: research by the Annie E Casey Foundation has shown students missing this benchmark are at high risk of dropping out of school.

In an interview with California Watch, Patricia Gandara, at left, an educational psychologist at UCLA, and co-director of The Civil Rights Project, said research shows Latino children as young as 18 months old have significant gaps in their preparation for learning, tied to poverty and disadvantage, and 85% of these students are U.S. citizens, not immigrants themselves, as is the common perception of ELs.

Another misconception is that students lack knowledge of academic content --so they may end up having to retake a chemistry class, when in fact they need help with the language, not the content. Bilingual programs are  on the decline since the passing of Proposition 227, a voter initiative to teach English only in schools.

Gandara said students in bilingual programs often go to schools with higher concentrations of poverty, which is linked to lower test scores; these programs have struggled because of a reduction in the number of qualified bilingual educators (in 2006, 556 teachers were certified to teach bilingual education, compared with 440 last year).

However, according to Linda Espinosa, at left, a CDE consultant, University of Missouri-Columbia researcher, and former bilingual school principal, there is no evidence that either bilingual or English-only programs improve the educational outcomes of ELs.

In the schools that have shown gains for its EL population (for example, Geddes Elementary & Baldwin Park Elementary in Baldwin Park Unified School District, and Think College Now in Oakland Unified School District), what works is whether schools gather data and track student performance on an ongoing basis, maintain a rigorous curriculum, and whether teachers are trained to help ELs connect their learning with what they already know in their own language.  Espinosa says learning to read in English is easier for children who come to school as good readers in their native language.  “For children who have low levels of early reading skills in their home language, we have to help them. It doesn’t just transfer automatically. It is the huge job of education.”

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

 

Infant death in day care results in felony arrest for provider

UPDATE, October 28: Sheila Caceres turned herself in to the Sacramento County Jail yesterday and was booked on charges of felony child neglect and released on $50,000 bail. She has also been charged with repeated violations of the state Health & Safety Code (for putting unattended infants upstairs while she was watching older children downstairs in the then-licensed day care home she operated in Mather). The felony charges carry a maximum sentence of 8 years in prison.

The Sacramento Bee reports this morning on the case of an infant to who died under confusing circumstances last February 23rd in the home of Sheila Carceres, a licensed day care operator who had been once named (2008) Sacramento County's "child care provider of the year." According to the story, broken by reporters Sam Stanton and Marjie Lundstrom, "[September 3]... in a deal struck with the ]state] Department of Social Services, [which licenses day care providers] Caceres agreed to a lifetime ban on operating, working in or being present in a day care home. She surrendered her license amid numerous allegations, including failure to all 911, lying o law enforcement, letting one child wander away from the home and having sex in front of at least one child in her care, according to records from the department's community care licensing division."

The  Sacramento County Sheriff's Department recently forwarded its investigation of the baby's death to the district attorney for possible criminal charges. DA's spokeswoman Shelly Orio would say only that the case is "still under review."

In late May 2011, a bill by freshman Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell, a former child care provider executive, to increase inspections by the Community Care Licensing Division of the Dept. of Social Services -- an agency that has experienced severe budget cutbacks over the last two years -- unexpectedly "died in committee." As reporter Emily Alpert ("Voices of San Diego") noted at the time, child care facilities -- again, because of budget constraints -- are checked "less than dog kennels."

Privatized foster homes: more costly, less oversight, state audit shows

The report released today from the State Auditor Elaine Howle, "Child Welfare Services: California Can and Must Provide Better Protection and Support for Abused and Neglected Children," is garnering top headlines for the correlation of 1,000 addresses of foster homes with the addresses of registered sex offenders, but an equally disturbing bit of information in the report concerns the effect of private foster home agencies on the foster care system.

From the Howle's audit [emphases ours]:

While the number of children in placement has dramatically decreased in the last 10 years, the percentage of children placed with foster family agencies, which recruit and certify foster homes and whose monthly compensation is significantly higher than state- or county-licensed foster homes, has continued to increase. The dramatic growth in the use of foster family agencies, which originally were meant to be a substitute for group homes for children with elevated treatment needs, has been accompanied by a matching drop in the percentage of children placed in state- and county-licensed foster homes and a fairly steady percentage of children in group home placements. These data indicate that, rather than significantly reducing expensive group home placements, growth in foster family agencies has reduced relatively inexpensive licensed foster home placements.

A potential explanation for this trend is that, in contrast to requirements related to group home placements, Social Services does not require county CWS agencies to document the treatment needs of children placed with foster family agencies. The counties we visited admitted that some placements with foster family agencies are a function of convenience and necessity—for example, the unavailability of state- or county-licensed foster homes—and not the elevated treatment needs of children. Additionally, until a recent lawsuit, foster homes certified under foster family agencies received significantly higher monthly payments than foster homes licensed by the State or a county. County officials indicated that this pay differential contributed to their difficulty in recruiting licensed foster homes. We estimate that the growth in the percentage of placements with foster family agencies has resulted in spending an additional $327 million in foster care payments between 2001 and 2010-costing an additional $61 million in 2010 alone.

 

Drop in $, drop in students: Oakland USD votes to close up to 30 schools

In an interview with Oakland North, Oakland Unified School District board member Gary Yee (Ed.D), at left, a 30 year veteran educator and Stanford alum, detailed the context behind the contentious vote last night (5-2) to close 5 elementary schools and a further 20-30 schools in the next 3 years. 

“The small schools movement occurred more or less with the movement for more charter schools,” There were multiple educational experiments underway at the same time, Yee said—changes in how individual school campuses were managed, for example; as well as the increased popularity of publicly-funded but privately-run charter schools (Oakland has 35). ( The "Small schools" movement was popular in early 2000--the idea was to have no more than 400 students per school)

In 2000, the OUSD board approved its New Small Autonomous Schools policy: “There was a lot of interest in all this as a solution,” Yee said. “For some, the small schools movement was an effort to keep people interested in different kinds of strategies in the school system, as opposed to the charters.”

As a result, OUSD created 45 new schools, partnering with The Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (now the The National Equity Project), with an initial $15.7 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (who invested a total of $40 million before withdrawing funding). Large schools were closed or divided into smaller schools within a single building or campus. In particular, OUSD hoped to improve the educational outcomes for students living in the racially segregated and impoverished areas of Oakland called "the Flatlands".

Ten years on, OUSD Is struggling with low enrollment numbers and huge cuts in state funding ($150 million in two years); neither of these factors were anticipated or planned for a decade ago.

According to an OUSD’s budget report this year, the district’s major money problems include “low levels of funding…probably the last in the nation now;” and the volatility of existing funding, which the report called “totally unpredictable.” A decrease in number of students—in the last ten years, enrollment in the district has dropped 30 percent—has added to the district’s financial challenges.

Currently, the district operates 101 schools for 38,000 students, a much higher ratio than those of nearby comparably-sized districts.  In March this year, MK Think, a facilities firm hired by OUSD school superintendent Tony Smith, released a report showing the district had so much excess capacity, given no growth in student numbers, that it could enroll another 10,900 students.

According to OUSD spokesman Troy Flint, the factors considered when recommending schools for closure were building capacity, enrollment percentages, school performance rank, and population density around school buildings,  “We used census data heavily,” Flint said.

The schools to be closed are Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park and Santa Fe elementary schools, affecting 900 students. The closures will save the district $2 million annually.

Board members Noel Gallo and Alice Spearman opposed the measure.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth Carlyle.

Angry, defiant K'gartners: it's mom's fault

Persistently aggressive and defiant children in kindergarten are not that way by nature: findings from a longitudinal study by the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota (UM) indicate that mothers are to blame for the bad behavior of their 5 year olds, reports Bonnie Rochman of TIME Magazine. Less affection and more hostility in the mother-child relationship in early development correlates with more aggression in the children 3-4 years later. These findings are important in informing the development of appropriate interventions for parenting babies as young as 3 months old in order to prevent later behavioral problems.

In a typical developmental trajectory, normal aggressive behavior peaks at 2.5 years old, but for those children who continue to show difficulty in controlling aggression, the findings point to the mother-child dyad (pairing) as a major contributor.

Lead researchers Michael F. Lorber, above, of the Family Translational Research Group at NYU; and Byron Egeland, Professor Emeritus at UM, tested infants for stress sensitivity or "neonatal difficulty" at 7-10 days old and then observed them feeding from their mothers a couple of months later. At 24 and 42 months, the mothers were observed playing with the children extracting objects from a tube and finally, mothers and teachers each rated the children's behavior in kindergarten or first grade.

"Nothing about the child's behavior in infancy predicted anything," says Lorber. "But we did find that negative parenting in infancy was really important." (Negative parenting is when parents express negative emotions such as rough handling). Researchers found a cyclical pattern starting with negative parenting in infancy that led to higher levels of aggression in toddlers, and in turn, more hostility from mothers; the aggressive behavior continued to get worse over time.

"The results of our study move beyond descriptive findings to explain the underlying process linking how mothers parent their children in infancy and the problems children have in early elementary school," Lorber adds.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and published October 25 in the journal Child Development.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.