Report: ELL Students Struggle With Math After Third Grade

By Laura Tillman, The Brownsville Herald, Texas

Jul. 6–A report released last week indicated test scores have dropped sharply for Texas English Language Learner students in third through eighth grades.

“The Role of Schools in the English Language Learner Achievement Gap” report relied upon data from the National Longitudinal School-Level State Assessment Score Database and was compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center, a leader in nonpartisan research on the nation’s Hispanic population.

The test scores from Texas, California, Florida, New York and Arizona were analyzed. These five states encompass more than 70 percent of the nation’s ELL students.

The report found that ELL students are likely to attend a subset of public schools with otherwise low levels of achievement.

In Texas, more than 90 percent of elementary and middle school ELL students attended schools with five or more ELL students per grade.

The report’s most significant finding in Texas was a significant drop in ELL scores between middle school and high school. Seventy-two percent of ELL students were proficient or higher in math in the third grade, but by eighth grade the proficiency plummeted to 22 percent.

Of the five states analyzed, the Texas ELL math proficiency achievement gap was the slimmest in elementary school but jumped to the highest by eighth grade.

“That is a notable finding,” said Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center. “Overall that gap widens, but it’s especially noticeable in Texas.”

According to Fry, this trend is partially due to the mainstreaming of successful ELL students during middle school, as well as an influx of foreign born students.

The report indicated an overall dip of student achievement between elementary and middle school, for both ELL students and native English speakers, known as the “middle school slump.”

Locally, schools have been instrumental in the broader effort to close this gap for nearly a decade.

“Brownsville has been the nexus of national research on the ELL achievement gap,” said Elsa Hagen, a researcher with University of Houston’s Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics.

Hagen says the widening of the gap from elementary to middle school is partially a result of the change from concrete to abstract academic concepts. Elementary school topics lend themselves to basic, “tier one” vocabulary.

“By the time the students get to middle school, the concepts require ELL students to do twice the cognitive work — both to understand the material and the academic terms,” she said.

In Brownsville, bilingual teachers are better prepared to explain the concepts in both English and Spanish.

“Fortunately, we live in an area with teachers who can understand the culture (of ELL students),” she said. “It is a tremendous advantage for a community to be bi-literate.”

Nationally, just 2.5 percent of public school teachers are trained to work with ELL students, Hagen said.

Brownsville has benefited from Success Academic Independence + Lifelong Learning (SAILL), Project Quality English and Science Teaching (Project QuEST), and Development of English Language and Literacy Skills in Spanish-Speaking Children projects, each of which seek alternative strategies in eliminating the ELL achievement gap.

Hagen says such research has debunked misconceptions about ELL methods, including the idea that the local prevalence of Spanish in schools prevents students from practicing English.

“We know that English is gold, but often when a teacher explains a concept in the native language it can help second language content,” she said.

Some research findings are counter-intuitive. For example, learning second tier English vocabulary words with Spanish cognates benefits ELL students because many of these words are first tier vocabulary in Spanish.

Hagen hopes that by utilizing the local bilingual advantage, teachers and researchers will create strategies that can be used in other parts of the state and country to close the achievement gap.

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