ESL Program Analysis Essay: Springfield R-12 School District

ESL Program Analysis Essay
Jennifer L Givens
Grand Canyon University: EED 544
May 8, 2013

ESL Program Analysis Essay The Springfield R-12 School District, located in Springfield, Missouri, is the largest, fully accredited school district in the state with a student population of over 24,000. The majority of their students attend one of their thirty-six elementary schools which house grades K-5, one of their nine middle schools which are grades 6-8 or one of their five high schools. Students also have the opportunity to attend the Phelps Center for Gifted Education and an Early Childhood Center. Springfield Public Schools (SPS) caters to the diversity of its many students by including such programs as the International Baccalaureate
(IB) program at the elementary, middle and high school levels, Wonder of the Ozarks Learning Facility (WOLF) and the Middle College Program. All five of their high schools are designated Missouri A+ schools, which allows a high school student to graduate and have their first two years of college paid for by an A+ scholarship. (www.springfieldpublicschoolsmo.org). The Springfield Public Schools English Language Learner (ELL) program has been a part of their district since the 1980s, per Rhonda Hittenberger-Ortiz, ELL Liaison. At the program’s inception all students were serviced either at Central High School or through itinerant teachers who traveled around the district seeing students once or more per week. In the last five year their ELL population has grown quickly and a full-time coordinator was hired in 2011. Currently, they have eight ELL “site schools” where ELL students are clustered to receive regular language support from an on-site ELL teacher. These schools include four elementaries, one intermediate, two middle schools and one high school. Parents are given the choice to transfer their children to these schools or to leave them at their home school. For students who are not at the site schools, the district has an instructional coach who works with the mainstream teachers of the ELL students. Currently the district has 850 students in the ELL program.
Program Details
Springfield Public Schools uses different methods in their program. The Elementary sites mostly implement the push-in or collaborative teaching method in which ELL and mainstream teachers work together within the classroom, sharing content and language goals for each lesson. The pull-out method is used for the lowest English proficient students. Secondary sites schedule students into English-instruction classes and the teachers also go into content classrooms to work with ELLs individually or in small groups.
Assessments
Students take the same assessments that all other students in the district take but with certain accommodations such as interpreters, extra time, etc.
Springfield R-12 uses the following assessments: DRA2 (grades K-2), Scantron Performance Series Assessment for Reading, Language Arts and Math (grades 3-12), the Missouri Assessment Program (grades 3-8) and End-of-Course exams (grades 9-12). In addition, ELL students take a yearly progress test to provide data to the state of Missouri.
The yearly exams shows progress in English proficiency and how many students are achieving English proficiency. Springfield Public Schools regularly meets the state-established goals. The expectation for reaching English proficiency varies widely and depends on many factors.
State
Guidelines
The State of Missouri’s English Language Proficiency Standards and Grade Level Expectations are based on World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA). WIDA establishes, for educators, high quality standards, assessments, research and professional development. These help teachers with language development and to help increase academic achievement for their English Language Learners (http://wida.us/index.aspx). English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) is the teaching approach of choice in Missouri. Typically ESOL programs are established because a qualified teacher who is fluent in English and the student’s native language is not available. In other situations there just may be too many languages represented in a district that makes having bilingual teachers not practical. Missouri uses three ESOL approaches: Structured ESOL Immersion, Content-based ESOL and Pull-Out ESOL. They only use the Pull-Out ESOL approach in their lowest learners.
The state of Missouri strives to develop instructional objectives that lead students to high achievement by relying on both state and national standards that can be found at www.tesol.edu.
The Show-Me Standards represent Missouri’s educational expectations for all students. Local schools are responsible for ensuring that LEP (Limited English Proficient) students not only develop Communication Arts skills but that they achieve high levels in all of the Knowledge and Performance standards. All school districts in Missouri must develop a plan that incorporates LEP student needs into the entire school’s educational program
(http://dese.mo.gov/qs/me/documents/definstructmodel.pdf).
Instructional Practices for ELL Students
Researchers continually battle as to whether the ELL student’s native language should be part of their teaching. Most school districts tend to not have a sufficient amount of teachers that speak the native languages of their students and therefore implement ESL programs which are taught only in English. Federal policies continue to restrict the amount of time that can be spent teaching children in their native language. Policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and the continued diminishment of funding makes it impractical for local educational agencies and school districts to support native language instruction (Calderón, M., Slavin, R., & Sánchez, M. 2011).
A case study performed by the Alliance for Excellent Education in December 2005 promotes six key strategies that teachers of English language learners can use. They promote: 1. Vocabulary and Language Development 2. Guided Interaction 3. Metacognition and Authentic Assessment 4. Explicit Instruction 5. Meaning-Based Context and Universal Themes 6. Modeling, Graphic Organizers and Visuals
The concept behind these six strategies is that they not only help students develop English as their second language it helps them learn words that are not part of the everyday English language such as algorithm, allegory, hypothesis, and filibuster (http://uteach.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/files/SixKeyStrategiesELL.pdf). These strategies not only work in an ELL environment but are also good strategies for all learners in all subject areas. A look inside the door of any classroom in the United States would show these strategies at work with ELL and non-ELL students. Other arguments that surface in the ELL world are that as the number of ELL students grows in our country, educators and educational agencies will have to be look at “Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE). Authors Zulmara Cline and Juan Necochea of the College of Education, California State University San Marcos explored the eight key components of SDAIE that can enhance the instructional program of schools and provide access to core curriculum to ELLs. The eight components of SDAIE are: 1. Primary Language Support 2. Connect to Previous Learning 3. Visuals and Manipulatives 4. Low Risk and Safe Environment 5. Multiple Access Points 6. Cooperative and Interactive 7. Chunking and Webbing 8. Respectful Learning
These components have to continuously be working with each other and not on an independent basis. Teachers should be making connections to previous learning, use visuals and manipulatives whenever possible, create a safe, low risk environment for their students, etc. Continually using these components with an English Language Learner in a main-streamed classroom will help them grow in the English language and as students in all academic areas (Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. 2003).
These theories regarding ELL/ESL instruction all have strong points as to how they can benefit the English Language Learner by creating environments that allow non-English speaking students the benefits of English instruction even with teachers who may not be fluent in their native language. Springfield Public Schools has a fully immersed ESL program that puts their ELL students in classrooms with English speaking teachers that work hand-in-hand with ESOL instructors. I feel that Springfield Public Schools is providing the appropriate instruction for their ELL students, which makes up approximately 3% of their total student population, as they continually meet state requirements and standards. Although one may argue that one weakness we have might be that they don’t require their ELL students to attend one of their ELL site schools but can only recommend it to the parents. This might make learning English for a student that chooses to stay at their home school, even though it isn’t an ELL site, more difficult since their interaction with a certified ESOL instructor may be more limited. Springfield R-12 predicts that they will see an increase of 115 students district-wide per year for the next 10 years. It will be interesting to see if their ELL population grows proportionately and if that will alter their methods. Over-all I would still contend that the Springfield R-12 School District located in Springfield, Missouri is providing an excellent education to not only their ELL students but all students and that they take full advantage of the resources available to them.

Resources
Calderón, M., Slavin, R., & Sánchez, M. (2011). Effective Instruction for English Learners. Future Of Children, 21(1), 103-127

Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. (2003). Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE): More Than Just Good Instruction. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(1), 18

http://dese.mo.gov/qs/me/documents/definstructmodel.pdf http://uteach.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/files/SixKeyStrategiesELL.pdf http://wida.us/index.aspx www.springfieldpublicschoolsmo.org www.tesol.edu