BALDWIN PARK, CA -- Students in older grades spend large amounts of class time talking and arguing with one another in small groups. One third-grade teacher, Pamela Ochoa, encourages the children in her group of struggling readers to get out of their chairs and dance. Kindergartners in another room interrupt stories to predict what will happen next and ask about words they don't understand.
Often at this majority-Hispanic school, the arguments and singing that spill out of classrooms are in a mix of Spanish and English.
“I don’t like quiet classrooms,” says Virginia Castro, the school’s principal. “Learning is noisy.” During her four-year tenure at Geddes, Castro has led the school from struggling to highly successful. In 2008, less than a third of students scored at or above proficient on the state English language arts test. In the last school year, the percentage passing more than doubled to 62 percent. The gains are even more impressive when compared to students in the rest of the state.
That same year, 97 percent of Geddes students qualified for federally subsidized lunches and 42 percent were English Language Learners. But, while 59 percent of elementary-age students in California were proficient or above on state tests for English language arts, 62 percent of Geddes students were.
In math, 67 percent of California elementary-age students were proficient or above on math tests. In the same year, the figure at Geddes was 77 percent.
Getting children talking to one another is one of the several strategies Castro and her teachers have used to close the achievement gap between their children and those in more affluent schools. The special sauce at Geddes may be its dual-language program. Classes at Geddes are taught in Spanish for 90 percent of the day until third grade, when they transition to more time spent in English.
The research is mixed on whether bilingual programs in general make a difference for student achievement. When bilingual programs were prevalent in California in the 1990s, the gap between English learners and other students was wide. But research has also documented that bilingualism can benefit the brain. And done well, dual-language programs can be a key element in a school’s success, some educators and researchers say.
"It's just absolutely incontrovertible that teaching children either by building on their primary language to get to English, or by continuing to teach them in their language that they already know while they're learning English … has better long-term outcomes for the students," says Patricia Gándara, an education professor at UCLA.
"There's a lot of research now that shows that dual-immersion programs/bilingual programs are teaching kids to read better," she added.
One reason the dual-language program works at Geddes is because it's one part of a strong academic structure, school officials say. Castro is obsessed with data: Teachers give assessments every two weeks in math and reading to see how their students are progressing and where they might need help.
She also gives her teachers lots of time to plan their lessons and work together so they can learn from one another. Once a year, teachers can ask for a “wild-card day,” in which they spend the whole day planning lessons collaboratively while Castro hires substitutes to cover their classes. Classes are also kept relatively small, with an average of fewer than 20 students. California has had a class-size reduction program in grades kindergarten through third grade since 1996; Baldwin Park received $5.2 million from the state in 2008 to reduce the size of 550 elementary classes.
But money for the program has since been reduced, and there is a debate about whether class size reduction programs improve student achievement.
And then there is Castro's strong leadership. "Ms. Castro is obviously awesome and she's the catalyst," said Arturo Ortega, an assistant superintendent in the Baldwin Park Unified School District, which encompasses about two dozen schools in a city 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. "She's been able to bring out leadership in her teachers, her staff and her parents."
Dual-language programs are now relatively rare in California after voters passed Proposition 227, limiting the use of bilingual education, in 1998. Since then, the number of English learners taught in their primary language has dropped by half.
A handful of districts have kept bilingual programs intact, however, including Baldwin Park.
Administrators say parents there clamor to enroll their children at Geddes, one of the district's several rapidly improving schools, in part because of the opportunity for their children to learn in both Spanish and English.
"It's important for me, because my children are from here. I'm from Mexico, and I want them to know their origins," said Ana Lepe, speaking in Spanish.
The 40-year-old mother of three has sent all of her children to Geddes because she also believes being bilingual will help them get better jobs in the future.
Her youngest child, Cesar, 7, says juggling both languages can be difficult, but, he added, "I feel proud of myself, because I'm learning a lot of things."
Teachers also see benefits for their students. "When you know two languages, that's powerful," said Cara Wilson, a transitional kindergarten teacher.
The program also helps parents, many of them monolingual Spanish speakers, feel more welcome, which in turn helps Castro foster another key element to her success: Dozens of Geddes parents—more than a third of whom never graduated from high school — are now actively involved in their children's education, helping with homework and volunteering at the school, she says.
"Parents are the core," Castro said. "They're the first teachers that a child is going to have."
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Superintendent Mark Skvarna has said that he lets individual schools and principals work in relative autonomy, but tries to provide them support as needed.
Arturo Ortega, an assistant superintendent, holds meetings with principals before school starts each year to help them dissect state testing data and design a plan for the upcoming school year. "We break it down," he says. "And we say, 'Don't stress.' Already, for example, here at the school, you have 150 students who are proficient. You need 300, but already have half of them are at proficiency." He tells principals to focus on three strategies: maintain, duplicate and target. That is, they should maintain achievement levels for students who are already hitting benchmarks. They should look for examples of success—a group of second-grade teachers who have helped the majority of their students reach proficiency, for instance—that could be duplicated. And they should target the students who have fallen behind with special interventions.
The director of student achievement, Madalena Arellano, oversees dual language, English learners and special education for the district. Her responsibility for the dual-language program includes holding meetings with parents and principals, and training teachers across the district to make sure they're all on the same page. She also runs the application process for the dual-language program. In addition, she monitors English learners, ensuring they receive appropriate instruction and support.
Principal Virginia Castro delegates authority to her teachers and staff at Geddes Elementary so they can feel empowered to come up with strategies to help one another and in order to foster a sense of shared responsibility for student achievement. “I believe in distributive leadership, so it’s not just me,” Castro says.
Principal Virginia Castro delegates authority to her teachers and staff at Geddes Elementary so they can feel empowered to come up with strategies to help one another and in order to foster a sense of shared responsibility for student achievement. "I believe in distributive leadership, so it's not just me," Castro says. "We've created a structure here where the teachers are holding each other accountable." On one occasion, she says, fifth-grade students were struggling to meet achievement targets, so teachers asked for an extra "wild-card" day to look at their data and discuss where they needed to put an emphasis.
Parents “are huge” in the school’s improvement strategy, Castro says. When she took over the school, only three or four parents showed up regularly to help at the school or talk with teachers and administrators. She launched “Coffee with Castro” on the first Thursday of every month. At one of the first meetings, Castro told her own story of being the translator for her immigrant parents while growing up.
These interviews were conducted by MSNBC's Alex Witt. They have been edited and condensed.
Virginia Castro |
AW: As the leader of this school, how do you integrate both these languages into the classrooms?
VC: Well, the idea is to celebrate culture. So, teaching children about their own culture and creating that culture-rich environment so that they become bicultural, biliterate and bilingual. There's so much richness in our culture as Latinos. We build on their parents' experiences as immigrants, we build on the music and the art, and we integrate that into our curriculum. So the idea behind dual language is that you're celebrating two cultures. Yes, we are part of this American culture, this big umbrella. But we also have all these wonderful colors to bring in too.
AW: But English is still the predominant language here, right? So how will this dual language environment help them excel in the future?
VC: Our motto for our dual language program is "El que habla dos idiomas, vale por dos." He who speaks two languages is worth two people. And that's evident because being in California I use Spanish probably more on a daily basis than I use English. So I think it's important that we are conscientious of the fact that we are in a very predominantly Latino community. There are communities surrounding us that have Armenian dual immersion programs or Mandarin dual immersion programs, depending on the culture that's highly predominant in each of those areas. Ours happens to be Spanish, but we have had students in the program that are Vietnamese, African-American, and those are English-only students who come in speaking only English. I can think of one little girl who just left us last year: She came in speaking Vietnamese in her home, learned English at school, and also learned Spanish at the same time. So now we have this trilingual child who's going out into the workforce and she's worth three people.
AW: There was legislation passed in 1998 against dual-language classes being taught in schools. What does that say to you?
VC: I think it's ignorant of us to assume that we only have to teach in one language. I lived in Europe when I was in college, and everybody in Europe starting in primary are learning more than one language. And to be that egocentric, thinking that we should only be teaching our students in English, it is backwards thinking. In Canada, in Europe, in Asia they've tapped into the fact that students should be learning more than one language. If you create this academic-rich environment for students in a multitude of languages, they are going to excel.
AW: You've really reached out and used parents as an extension of what the kids are getting in school. What's their responsibility?
VC: The same accountability that I have for the students and the teachers I have for the parents. And they know that. So coming in, my first parent meeting I have four parents. And they were just there to gripe about traffic and about the parking lot. And they knew very little about what was happening at our school. I always tell the parents, "You're the first teacher.You are the first role model that our kids know. So if we don't create a partnership, our kids aren't gonna make it." So we have all kinds of opportunities for the parents to come on campus. We opened up the classrooms and we posed a question for them: What evidence do you see that students are learning at our school? And they became a lens for us to see what was happening from their perspective, which is very different than our perspective as educators. So we invite our parents to be part of the educational process. And if we become transparent to our community, it's not a secret what's happening within our walls, the parents become partners in that.
AW: Can you do it without the parents' support?
VC: We sometimes have to. Not all parents are involved. You know, every parent has their own universe that they're dealing with. We have single-parent families. We have a lot of parents that are in prison. We have children that are being raised by grandparents or foster parents. But when the parents become part of the education, you do see a lot more student success. If we can partner with the parents, then you're seeing the results that you're seeing. But a lot of it is happening in the classroom.If you have high expectations and you're not underestimating what these kids are able to do, they're gonna rise to the occasion. When you set your standards low and you start making excuses like, "Oh, you know, these kids don't speak English, the parents are poor, parents don't know how to read, we can't educate these kids," then you're lowering your expectations. And the kids are gonna perform to that low bar that you're setting. But when you take away all those factors, and you don't allow room for any excuses, then the kids are gonna flourish.
Jackie Arias now teaches fourth grade at a different school in the district.
Jackie Arias
|
Q: Your experience in the classroom is an incredibly unique one, because you're teaching kids in two languages every day. You have to go back and forth between English and Spanish. What is that like and how difficult is it?
A: We usually start off in the morning all Spanish - 90 percent of our day is in Spanish. And we have a part of the day in English. It is very difficult on my part, because I have to keep myself on check to make sure that I don't mix both languages, because that will definitely confuse them. The kids are normally really good about putting me on check, like saying, "Today is the English time. It's English time, Mrs. Arias." So, the challenge is not so much keeping Spanish in line, it's the transition. That's when the kids have to change their mindset to the English language.
Q: How much benefit do you see in this? Do you watch these little minds like sponges at the beginning of the year? And do you see the end? Is there a palpable difference that you can tell from start to finish?
A: Definitely. That's why I love First grade, because you start off with these little kids, they're in your class, and they turn into these second graders that are [LAUGHS] so ready to move on. Some of these kids are actually reading in Spanish at a second or third grade level, and they're also reading at a second grade level in English. It's amazing. They're definitely little sponges. It just comes naturally. It's an amazing program. I see the benefits of it and I see how these kids adapt to the Spanish. Whatever they take into Spanish, they just turn around and apply it to the English language, even though they're not being taught in the language. Whatever they take into Spanish, they just turn around and apply it to the English language, even though they're not being taught in the language. Whatever they take into Spanish, they just turn around and apply it to the English language, even though they're not being taught in the language.
Q: Your experience in the classroom is an incredibly unique one, because you're teaching kids in two languages every day. You have to go back and forth between English and Spanish. What is that like and how difficult is it?
A: We usually start off in the morning all Spanish - 90 percent of our day is in Spanish. And we have a part of the day in English. It is very difficult on my part, because I have to keep myself on check to make sure that I don't mix both languages, because that will definitely confuse them. The kids are normally really good about putting me on check, like saying, "Today is the English time. It's English time, Mrs. Arias." So, the challenge is not so much keeping Spanish in line, it's the transition. That's when the kids have to change their mindset to the English language.
Q: Your experience in the classroom is an incredibly unique one, because you're teaching kids in two languages every day. You have to go back and forth between English and Spanish. What is that like and how difficult is it?
A: We usually start off in the morning all Spanish - 90 percent of our day is in Spanish. And we have a part of the day in English. It is very difficult on my part, because I have to keep myself on check to make sure that I don't mix both languages, because that will definitely confuse them. The kids are normally really good about putting me on check, like saying, "Today is the English time. It's English time, Mrs. Arias." So, the challenge is not so much keeping Spanish in line, it's the transition. That's when the kids have to change their mindset to the English language.
Q: Your experience in the classroom is an incredibly unique one, because you're teaching kids in two languages every day. You have to go back and forth between English and Spanish. What is that like and how difficult is it?
A: We usually start off in the morning all Spanish - 90 percent of our day is in Spanish. And we have a part of the day in English. It is very difficult on my part, because I have to keep myself on check to make sure that I don't mix both languages, because that will definitely confuse them. The kids are normally really good about putting me on check, like saying, "Today is the English time. It's English time, Mrs. Arias." So, the challenge is not so much keeping Spanish in line, it's the transition. That's when the kids have to change their mindset to the English language.
The amount the district spent per student rose sharply between 2005-06 and 2008-09, from about $6,600 to nearly $8,400. It has declined since then as a result of the state’s budget problems. In 2010-11, the Baldwin Park school district spent $8,109 per pupil, less than the state average of $8,323, according to Ed-Data.
California’s fiscal problems have reduced school budgets across the state. California ranked 34th in the nation in per-pupil expenditures for the 2008-09 school year, spending $9,500 per student, compared to a national average of $10,591, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In 2010-11, Baldwin Park received $3.3 million in Economic Impact Aid, a state fund for districts with low-income students. In previous years, it received as much as $3.78 million, but the Economic Impact Aid fund was reduced statewide in 2010 by 5 percent.
In 2008-09, Baldwin Park also received more than $224,000 for the state's English Language Acquisition Program, which is directed at low-income English learners. The amount was reduced the following year, when state funds for the program were cut by nearly 10 percent. In 2011-2012, the program was eliminated.
The school district spent about $616,000 on its bilingual program in 2010, according to Ed-Data, an increase from previous years. Most of the money went toward teachers certified in bilingual education. Books and supplies cost $80,000. School-level fundraising, like bake sales, pays for additional expenses of the dual-language program, including field trips and leadership retreats for students.
While administrators say the district has not received significant amounts of private funding, State Farm Insurance did give the district $30,000 to continue its work with the UCLA School Management Program for one year when state funding ran out.
Baldwin Park's administrators say the funding cuts are frustrating and sad. In the 2012-13 school year, the district will lose 21 elementary-school teachers. Seven of those teachers taught at Geddes, including two in the dual-language program. But administrators also say they are determined to maintain their gains.
"It's tough, don't get me wrong," said Castro, the principal. "I believe the system we have in place now at Geddes is such that we're going to continue, we have a culture now. Our passion and dedication is for the kids, and we're not going to allow the state economy to prevent us from realizing that."
