Is 180 Days Enough?

Children who are English learners shall be educated through sheltered English immersion during a temporary transition period not normally intended to exceed one year.... "Sheltered English immersion" or "structured English immersion" means an English language acquisition process for young children in which nearly all classroom instruction is in English but with the curriculum and presentation designed for children who are learning the language. ... "English language classroom" means a classroom in which the language of instruction used by the teaching personnel is overwhelmingly the English language.

It is irresponsible to handcuff every school in the state to a single approach, especially one that is not based on any significant body of research or evidence, one that the author admits is based only on his "Intuitive belief" that it works.

The proposal thus sets 180 school days as the standard length of time for special English instruction. After one year, it is expected that students will know enough English to be able to participate in mainstream classes. This means the acquisition of academic, or school English, not simply conversational English. It means being able to solve story problems, being able to learn about history and science, and being able to write with an acceptable control of spelling, punctuation and grammar.

One year of what?
Proposition 227 specifies that the special English instruction be either "sheltered English immersion" or "structured immersion." "Sheltered English immersion" is not a term in current use in the language education profession but is a confusing combination of terms. "Sheltered subject matter teaching" is a method in which second language acquirers are taught subject matter in comprehensible way. It is used with intermediate, not beginning, second language students. It is a valuable part of programs for LEP children and is used as a transition between the first language component and the mainstream. 

I will assume, however, that structured English immersion means a program that is "overwhelmingly" in English in which teachers attempt to make subject matter comprehensible in English to limited English proficient children.

What the research says
The one-year time period is wildly optimistic. It is contrary to the results of every study done in the field in which programs very similar or identical to sheltered English immersion were used. (Before reviewing these studies, it should be noted that Ron Unz, the author of 227, was asked how he arrived at the one year figure. He said that he had not consulted the research, but based it on "common sense." Mr. Unz has no experience in the field of language education, other than taking four years of French in high school. He has not visited classes, and is unfamiliar with the professional literature.)

Prof. David Ramírez of California State University at Long Beach conducted a massive study of different ways of educating non-English speaking children (Ramírez, 1992). One of the conditions was "immersion," which looked very much like what Proposition 227 calls for. In immersion programs, English was used 94 to 99% of the time, it was used to teach content, and children were mainstreamed as soon as possible. In addition, in the immersion programs Ramírez studied, most of the children (70%) knew some English when they entered school. After one year the children were nowhere near ready for the mainstream, nor were they ready after two, three or even four years. The following table presents the percentage of children "redesignated" after each year, that is, considered "fluent English proficient," and the percentage of children actually placed in the mainstream:
 

In a recent evaluation of LEP children in the Santa Ana school district done by scholars at the University of California at Riverside (Mitchell, Destino, and Karan, 1997) students with low intermediate proficiency in English on entering school (2.18 on a 1 to 5 scale, where 4 = sufficient proficiency to survive in the mainstream) were placed in an "immersion" program, similar to what Unz and Tuchman recommend. After one year, they showed some growth in English but were nowhere near what was required to do academic work in the mainstream: They moved from 2.18 to 2.84 in English, on a five point scale. Even after a second year of immersion, their mean English rating was only 3.24.

In an article published in The Reading Teacher, a journal that usually has little to say one way or the other about bilingual education, Kreuger and Townsend (1997) describe a program for limited English proficient first graders in Quebec who were given a great deal of help in English literacy: Small group work (three to four students per group) for two hours daily devoted exclusively to literacy development. Nineteen of the 23 went on to grade 2, but the students were still well behind native speakers of English, scoring at the middle of grade 1 in reading at the end of the year, "still well below the class average" (p. 127). These students, in addition, had already had a full year of kindergarten entirely in English, in a semi-sheltered situation: 75% of the class consisted of second language acquirers. Thus, two years of the equivalent of "sheltered immersion" did not do the job.

Even those who are opposed to or who are highly critical of bilingual education note that it takes more than one year to acquire academic language, the kind of English language competence children need to succeed in school.

An important example of this is a paper published in 1997 in READ Perspectives, a journal that represents an anti-bilingual education position and that is partially funded by US English. The results of the study are intended to show how well children can do without bilingual education. In the study, Ann Goldberg, the coordinator of the English Acquisition Program in the Bethlehem School District in Pennsylvania, described an all-English program for limited English proficient students in which children "receive a language-rich curriculum (in English) based on thematic units" (p. 64) in kindergarten. While 90% of the students showed some growth in English in one year, most still scored in the "beginner" range on a test of oral proficiency in English, clearly nowhere near ready for a full academic program in English. Goldberg presents the following case "to illustrate typical student growth":

Jesennia was evaluated initially before kindergarten entrance in April 1993 and, under the guidelines of the old program, would have been placed into a Spanish-speaking kindergarten. After a year in the English-speaking kindergarten (May, 1994), the tester wrote that Jesennia could now understand simple directions, identify simple nouns, and distinguish correct adjectives. Her expressive skills were still quite limited. (p. 72)

One year will not be enough for older students either. In a letter published on Ron Unz's website, ESL teacher Johanna Haver, a supporter of 227, noted that her High School ESL students "claimed that it had taken them about six months to understand English and another six months to be able to respond in English. Of course, mastery of reading and writing was taking much longer ...." This is considerably longer than the 180-day limit imposed by Proposition 227.

What about "structured immersion"?
Proposition 227 also mentions "structured English immersion," a method that provides comprehensible subject matter instruction in English, along with direct instruction in English grammar. It allows some use of the first language for explanation. The results of structured immersion research are not at all convincing: Gersten and Woodward (1985) report that children in structured immersion in Uvalde, Texas reached the 30th percentile of the reading comprehension subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test at the end of grade three. This is below the criteria used by most districts for reclassification. After leaving the program, they dropped to the 15th and 16 percentiles in grades five and six (Becker and Gersten, 1982).

In a second study of structured immersion, Gersten (1985) claimed that 75% of LEP children in a California school district in structured immersion performed at or above grade level at the end of grade two. We have no idea, however, how well they did at the end of one year, and the entire group studied consisted only of 28 children.

(Although structured immersion is mentioned in Proposition 227, it is not clear if it will even be legal if Prop 227 passes. As noted earlier, structured immersion allows some first language use, which can be considerable during the first few months and may be well in excess of that allowed by Proposition 227. Gersten (1985) describes the use of the first language in structured immersion as follows: " ... there are always bilingual instructors in the class who understand the children's native language and translate problematic words into the native language, answer questions phrased in the native language, help the children understand classroom routines, show them the bathrooms, lunchrooms, and playground and so forth" (p. 189). In addition, bilingual aides occasionally serve "as translators during a child's first few months" (p. 189) and also are trained to give lessons to small groups of children "in all academic areas." Proposition 227 insists that special ESL be done "overwhelmingly" in English.)

This review of the professional literature is, I believe, exhaustive: I know of no other studies done that shed light on the issue of whether limited English proficient children can acquire enough English in one year to do grade level work in mainstream classrooms. 

I discussed some of these studies in a debate with Mr. Unz on April 14 in San Francisco. He did not comment on the studies, but only said that the one year period is not rigid and can be extended: "If it takes longer, that's fine." The fact is, however, that Proposition 227 states that sheltered English immersion will be done "during a temporary transition period not normally intended to exceed one year." Those wishing to avoid litigation will certainly stick to this: Districts will make policy and courts will make rulings based on what is written in the proposal, not on Mr. Unz's interpretation. And the one year period is not just a little short of the mark – it is very very far off the mark. 

Once it is adopted, it can't be changed
The tragedy of 227 is not only that it imposes restrictions based on speculations that have no supporting evidence, it is also the fact that if it is passed, there is no turning back. If passed it will be official state policy and will be nearly impossible to change if it fails. Proposition 227 could only be amended by another initiative or by a two-thirds vote of each house of the State Legislature with approval by the Governor.

As John D'Amelio (1997) has noted: "If the 1.3 million children required to be taught through the Unz instructional program do not show improvement – or even worse – if they perform poorly on state assessment, local communities will be prohibited by law from changing the instructional program to assist them – the Unz initiative is rigid and unforgiving." 

References
Becker, W. and Gersten, R. 1982. A follow-up of follow through: The later effects of the direct instruction model on children in the fifth and sixth grades. American Educational Research Journal 19: 75-92.

D'Amelio, J. 1998. Why the Unz initiative is flawed. California Education 3(3): 19,21.

Gersten, R. and Woodward, J. 1985. A case for structured immersion. Educational Leadership 43: 75-79.

Gersten, R. 1985. Structured immersion for language minority students: Results of a longitudinal evaluation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 7: 187-196.

Goldberg, A. 1997. Follow-up study on the Bethlehem, Pa. school district's English Acquisition Program. READ Journal 4: 59-94.

Kreuger, E. and Townsend, N. 1997. Reading clubs boost second-language first graders' reading achievement. The Reading Teacher 51: 122-127.

Little Hoover Commission. 1993. A Chance to Succeed: Providing English Learners with Supportive Education. Sacramento, CA.

Mitchell, D., Destino, T. and Karan, R. 1997. Evaluation of English Language Development Programs in the Santa Ana Unified School District. Riverside, CA: California Educational Research Cooperative, University of California, Riverside.

Ramírez, D. 1992. Executive summary: Longitudinal study of structured English immersion strategy, early-exit and late-exit transitional bilingual education programs for language-minority children. Bilingual Research Journal 16,1-2: 1-62.